I Saw Your HN Comment (joshstrange.com)

I really do this that we are in the last years of the Internet as we know it. I daily have interactions online with people who just seem like a frontend for an LLM. Nearly every piece of content I read feels written by an LLM, and every discussion or debate ends up feeling like pitting an LLM up against another LLM. Copy, paste, copy, paste. I mean, to an extent, even tech businesses and competition (e.g. SaaS) have become LLM vs LLM in many respects. It's disheartening to witness, especially as a creative. Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable, or the internet fundamentally changes to use some sort of proof-of-identity and proof-of-authorship. Ideally both. But tbqh, even something like the Nets in Ender's Game won't really work in the age of AI. Either way, the internet I grew up on seems further and further away, and folks seem okay with proliferating fake realities and fake conversations and fake thoughts. It's all fake. What are we doing?

I've been having a similar problem. I have roughly the same amount of Karma here, and I used to get the occasional email about a comment and I would get kind of excited. I like engaging with people who have similar interests and as a rule I try and answer questions when people ask them of me.

Now I'm getting a lot of emails that ostensibly are asking for follow-ups but they really just want to pitch me a shitty low-effort browser extension or or trying to rope me into some kind of weird "consulting" gig that is pretty obviously a scam.

It makes me a little sad. Engaging with the community was something I always liked about HN and now its gotten to a point where I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.

I've been getting these too. The first paragraph references something I actually wrote, so I read it thinking someone had a follow-up. Then I get to the pitch.

I still like hearing from people who found me through HN. It just sucks that my first instinct now is to skim to the bottom and see what they're selling.

I had an “Office Hours” link on my blog to do Google Meets with HN users. It was fun to catch up with strangers.

I had to take it down this month. We have entered a new era of social interaction on the internet.

[delayed]

One interesting change for me is I used to have zero time to write personal emails, but due to AI making me a lot more time efficient, I now can and do write personal emails for things I’m just generally interested in, allowing me to create relationships outside my immediate professional or social sphere.

I've got my own fair share of similar emails this year. I've replied to the only one that seemed human written (and of potential usefulness) to never hear back :D

> Hi Josh, saw your HN comment about [thing you said]. [Compliment.] I’m curious, [open-ended question]?

Why does every sales email talk like this? It doesn't seem like LLM accent, or maybe it's just a different LLM accent from the "programmer" one. It's just funny how instantly recognizable this is as a fake-chummy sales email even despite the brackets.

I posted a job ad here over year ago, and I continue to get REALLY BAD automated spam applying for jobs.

It's not even going as far as using an LLM. It's just a bad e-mail that is obviously sent en masse, where the sender obviously didn't read the job ad.

As far as I can tell, the people are using their real name for this. And sending the same spam multiple times with "nags".

I get that with any public-facing thing you will get a wide spectrum, and I'm picking on the people at the bottom of the spectrum ... but it still makes me a little sad. It would almost be more understandable if they used an LLM !! :-/ :-/

Yeah, it's almost interesting the sophisticated targeted spam I get now, almost definitely automated with llms. Most of it gets my details right except for one that thinks I'm a dentist.

On the other hand the amount of scans on my servers' ssh ports have dropped to about 1/4 since Ukraine started destroying Russian colos.

Its incredibly depressing that LLMs have made so many facets of life strictly worse. Everything is absolutely inundated with slop

I'm mildly hopeful that when text watermarking comes in, we'll be able to automatically filter out all the LLM crap that gets generated currently. It feels like we're in the very early days of email becoming a tool used for mass spam, while we figure out exactly how to deal with that

I'm hoping my current profile helps with this. Could go either way.

Second this, also coming from GitHub too. The nature of the messages has definitely changed. You can find skills out there for abusing HN for marketing purposes. Have pondered making pull requests to add the Guidelines as a way to slip in "don't do this, it breaks the rules" without needing to ask for those words to be merged explicitly.

I may remove my email and force them to go through my discord, but it sucks having to make outreach more difficult because tragedy of the commons.

Yea I have had the same thing and I immediately understood the issue.

We definitely need some way to name and shame such companies.

I had created a HN submission[0] when I had gotten one such message, it was around the rob pike situation (where he got E-mail from AI bots)

I do sure hope that something can happen in terms of naming and shaming them. Also people who are sending these AI generated messages have to realize that they just end up generating a large amount of hate for whoever they are sending the message and it is much better if they wish, to send human generated messages and in a limited manner rather than being a spam machine if they wish to be in the business for a long time.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590808