Ask HN: Would it be useful to have a slop button in addition to flag?

18 points by BugsJustFindMe 1 day ago | 11 comments

In these modern harrowing times, more and more posts are proving to be AI slop, and many people are averse to that. Do you think it would it be useful to have a way to indicate that you believe a post is slop separate from the existing flag button? Maybe it's just me but I feel like having a dedicated [AI slop] flag on a post would be useful because I feel differently about posts that have been flagged for other reasons than that. (or something friendlier if value is seen in the general idea but not in that language)

hyperhello 2 hours ago |

This is only an idea, but how about a Summarize button that does use AI to write a very concise blurb of the comment. Then if it looks stupid enough at first glance, just read the summary and move on.

krapp 1 hour ago | |

We already have a problem with people refusing to engage with the content and only commenting on comments or the title. The last thing we need is to discourage people from reading the article even more than they already don't.

jgrahamc 1 day ago |

Doesn't the flag button serve that purpose?

BugsJustFindMe 23 hours ago | |

I don't think it does exactly. I edited to clarify.

leephillips 43 minutes ago | |

Of course it does. If it’s slop it should be flagged (I say this after reading the edited submission).

In the meantime you can avoid at least some of the slop by using https://hn-ai.org/ or one of the other anti-slop extensions or alternative sites.

kylehotchkiss 55 minutes ago |

Too Many Slops and you can't post for a week. Yes.

CM30 2 hours ago |

What if the submission said the most common reason an article was flagged next to the title?

That way if it's AI slop it'll say [AI slop], if it's spam it'll say [Spam], if it's dubiously legal/illegal content it'll say that, etc?

You could use that to decide if you want to give the submission a chance or not.

bell-cot 23 hours ago |

From HN's FAQ:

> What does [flagged] mean?

> Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.

I'd favor having a second type of tag, for submissions, which meant "the linked article is of low quality". Doesn't matter to me whether it's AI slop, or press release puffery, or tedious drivel, or by a painfully unqualified author, or something else.

Yahyaaa 21 hours ago | |

I wonder if the signal people actually want is "low information density" rather than "AI-generated."

A lot of the frustration seems to come from content that takes 2,000 words to say something that could have been said in 200, regardless of whether a human or a model wrote it.

If a post is original, useful, and teaches me something, I don't care much how it was produced. What I notice is when a lot of words are used to communicate very little.

bell-cot 17 hours ago | | |

Yes, but low information quality is even worse than low information density. If I happen to know the subject well, and the article contains glaring errors, obvious omissions, or miserable fudges - I'd like a quick way to tag it as dubious.