It is meant to offend and it is offensive. It just isn’t socially unacceptable yet. In circles i’m in where humans roleplay as robots or AI, it has had a significant increase in usage and was banned.
Makes sense, I don't know why some people are OK with slurs in general, as long as it's against their favourite outgroup. Let's just all mature enough to realise that slurs are universally unacceptable.
There's a world where all the big platforms automatically flag AI images thanks to SnythID and other techniques. The more ubiquitous it is the easier it will be for them to make that a reality.
Is it weird? Pretty much everyone's writing and speech is influenced to some degree by what they've read and heard in conversation. For better or for worse, it's only getting harder to avoid exposure to LLM generated prose.
ARIN shows that 214.0.0.0/8 CIDR is still US Department of Defense (or Department of War as Trump and Hegseth aptly call it) but reverse DNS over 20 years later does not still point to the same CENTCOM IP.
Also to a point - US military propaganda arm was doing this over 20 years ago. After getting the gift of country articles to mostly come verbatim from CIA and US State department sheets.
> The moderation of this website is downright shameful.
It's more like a series of tradeoffs compared to other platforms when it comes to features and userbase tendencies, and none are perfect. Every platform sucks in some way.
Also, users (and user bots) do the flagging here, not moderators.
Yes, the fact that the paid moderators of the site let the users do the work for them so they don’t have to work themselves is one of the shames of the moderation of this site, but there’s much more.
You sure seem to have an axe to grind with this site in particular, when in reality it is not wholly better or worse than any other social media / discussion platform. In fact, in some ways it's somewhat innovative with some really simple ideas that help distinguish it from the rest.
I don't know why you think moderators should work for free. That's up to the platform to decide.
Also, I'd take the lenience found on HN any day over the ban hammer / shadow ban / user siloing approaches that others sites cave to. As we've seen, there is no perfect approach.
I'm glad we agree on the first point, and sorry if I misunderstood you on that.
As for shadow banning, yes it is employed here on occasion, but I'm speaking strictly from my own experience with the site. I regularly take large steaming shits on various capital interests in favor of the hacker ethos, and so far it has always been permitted (and is not hard to verify it isn't shadow banned). That this site is the child of SV monied interests says at least something positive about their tolerance for these things compared to other sites like X/reddit/bluesky who all have the groupthink/echo chamber concept polished quite well by now.
They shouldn’t allow users to moderate the site, even if it means longer response times to remove spam, since it very commonly leads to the users abusing that power to remove things that they do not like even if they do not break the rules. That happens very often and the moderators are okay with it because allowing users to remove other users’ content so it goes with the “editorial line” of the commenters of the site lowers dissent and therefore they have to work less.
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