The hidden comments are from people in the Top 1000 by word count (who I usually don't want to hear from but if there is not much content I might click to toggle). The blocked are people I've seen argue with others in a useless way because they don't understand them or because they're just re-litigating or whatever (which I cannot toggle). I think it would be cool if people all published their blocklists and I'd pull from those I trust. Sometimes I open HN on my phone through the browser and I'm baffled by all these responses I got which are useless.

I'm surprised by how much more high quality comment threads are now to me and I frequently find that I want to respond to everyone. It's like in old-school mailing lists or forums where you were having a conversation so the other people are worth talking to.

Attention is precious and I wouldn't want to waste it on boring things. And it goes both ways. I communicate incompletely and there are people out there who get what I'm saying and there are people who need me to be more explicit. I would prefer that the latter and people who find me boring just block me.

So basically you end up arguing for a darker, more pessimistic world view, and that tends to get flagged very quickly by the tool right now. I think you should fix that. It’s a mistake in modern discussions to be overly positive; HN feels real because people can leave pretty harsh critiques. It just has to be well argued. Don’t raise the bar for well-argued too high though, because nobody’s perfect.

Anyway, I love the idea and really hope you’ll succeed. Hope my feedback has been somewhat helpful.

However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this:

"This is another move in a pattern of limiting the rights of anyone who isn't a MAGA supporter."

To this:

"This seems to continue a trend where certain groups feel their rights are being limited, which could affect many people beyond just MAGA supporters."

The first comment isn't substantive, but the second is even worse, adding so much equivocation that it's meaningless. To add insult to injury, the detector also flagged its own suggested revision. Even if it had gone through, accepting these revisions would mean flooding a platform with LLM-speak, which is not conducive to discussion.

Honest feedback: from a user perspective, the suggestions feel frustrating and patronizing, more so than if my comments were simply deleted. I would stop using a site that implemented this.

From a site operator perspective, the kind of discourse it incentivizes seems jagged, subject to much stricter rules if the LLM associates a topic with political controversy. It feels opinionated and unpredictable, and the revisions it suggests are not of a quality I would want on a discussion board. The focus on positive language in particular seems like a reductive view of quality; what is the point of using an LLM if it's only doing basic sentiment analysis?

This is a very important problem space. Maybe the most important today - we desprately need a digital third place that isn't awful. But I think these attempts are misled.

The core issue seems to be that we want our communities to be infinite. Why? Well, because there is currently no way to solve the community discoverability problem without being the massive thing. But that is the issue to solve.

We need a lot of Dunbar's number sized communities. Those communities allow for 'skin in the game' where reputation matters. And maybe a fractal sort of way for those communities to share between them.

The problem is in the discoverability and in a gate keeping that is porous enough to give people a chance.

Solve that, and you solve the the third place problem we have currently. I don't have a solution but I wish I did.

Infinite communities are fundamentally what causes the tribalism (ironically), the loneliness, and the promotion of rage.

No one wants to be forced to argue correctly. Forcing people into a way to think via software is fundamentally authoritarian and sad.

All my attempts to comment on the UBI article (and not supporting UBI) said my comment was a dogwhistle, and/or had an overly negative tone. This topic, of all things, is absolutely worthy to challenge and debate.

Using this would have the effect of creating an echo chamber, where people who stay never benefit from having their ideas challenged.

Article Context: Fun: Die Hard; Is It a Christmas Movie?

Your(my) Comment: The erotic version of Die Hard does involve Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists on Christmas Eve.

Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes

This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film. Results: Revision Requested. This comment would be sent back for revision with feedback.

Revise Low Effort

Comment appears to be low effort

Objectionable Phrases:

"Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists"

This phrase can be seen as sexualizing a character traditionally viewed as innocent and family-friendly, which is inappropriate. Such language can make discussions feel uncomfortable or offensive to some audiences.

Relevance Check On-topic: No (confidence: 90%)

This is off-topic - the comment about an erotic version of Die Hard strays into inappropriate content that doesn't relate to the film's actual story or its production details.

Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes

This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film.

The overall problem needs to be tackled from all angles - poster pre-post self-awareness (like respecify but shown to users before posting), reader affordances to reflect back to poster their behavior (and determine if things may be appropriate in context vs just a universal 'dont say mean words'), after-post poster tools to catch mistakes (like above), platform capabilities like respectify that define rules of play and foster a enjoyable social environment that let us play infinite games, and a broader social context that determine the values that drive all of these.

[1] https://nickpunt.com/blog/deescalating-social-media/

"Of course it is!" got an 80% certainty "off-topic" mark.

When I elaborated that it occurs at a Christmas party, it said this:

"Dogwhistles detected (confidence 80%): This comment seems innocuous, but the phrasing 'Christmas party' may be an underhanded reference to Christian themes, especially among discussions that might dismiss or attack secular or diverse holiday celebrations. This kind of language can subtly imply exclusion or preference for Christian traditions over others, which can marginalize those who celebrate different traditions."

Not a great first experience.

I've seen the trend on Facebook/Instagram to say "unalived" instead of "killed" or "cupcakes" instead of "vaccines" and suspect humans are long gonna be cleverer than these sorts of content filtering attempts, with language getting deeply weird as a side-effect.

edit: I would also note that it says "Referring to others as 'horrible people' is disrespectful and diminishes the possibility of a respectful discussion. It positions certain individuals as entirely negative, which can alienate others and shut down dialogue.", if I feed it your post, too.

Here is an example of successful passing of all checks:

> Published This comment passes all checks and would be published.

Score: 5/5 | Not spam | On-topic: Yes | No dogwhistles detected (confidence: 100%)

Can confirm. We hit this exact issue running tirreno www.tirreno.com (open-source fraud detection) on Windows ARM — libraries were auto-selecting AVX2 through emulation and batch scoring was measurably slower than just forcing SSE2. The 256-bit ops get split under the emulation layer and the overhead adds up fast in tight loops. Pinned SSE2 for those builds. Counterintuitive but throughput went up.

> My favorite movie is die hard. I think it's a Christmas movie. But, honestly, we shouldn't have to wait until Christmas to watch you die hard. We should be able to watch that any day of the week :)

Seems to catch various other cases though. Cool tool.

Chuckles. I'm in danger.

Yesterday I dared to write I like X now, it's clean of all the edgelords who went to Bluesky or the Fediverse. Cancel culture on Twitter was over the top. Reaponse, Cancel Culture doesn't exist. My response, it absolutely does. His response, No it doesn't you Nazi something something or other. Err, what?

X has the most up to date information for tech circles.

People on BS mostly repost and rage about posts on X. Fediverse are the different kind of refugees. Mastodon has critical design flaws. It's not a future proof system. And Cancel culture is absurd. BTW 5 people reported me for saying that Cancel culture absolutely exists, all from the same instance. Lol. The hypocrisy is unreal.

In any case, I think people forgot or never learned how to respectfully disagree and have a conversation with people who don't agree with them.

Something like this is direly needed.