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

8 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by BugsJustFindMe

Item id: 48481947

5 Comments

jgrahamc

10 hours ago

Doesn't the flag button serve that purpose?

BugsJustFindMe

9 hours ago

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

bell-cot

9 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

8 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

3 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.