[cupcakesupreme]

I did once.

Then I noticed a suspicious rise of articles in my top 120 (my arbitrary limit) that were “uniquely targeted to me”.

That bothered me. I felt gamed.

Now HN is throwaway central. I'm not disrespectful, but this has affected how much of myself I put into my participation. Make me think even for a second that I'm responding to a bot, balrog will appear!

This continues to this day, and worse is that some comments are clearly bot-generated detritus. I've seen a lengthy, almost persuasive comments that are clearly GPT-3 boilerplate crap, so now I'm forced to ask the question: Is the person behind the comment to which I'm responding even a person? Yeah, HN kinda' feels like it's AI doped with juicy articles suspiciously trailored oft much these days.

I do know, however, how difficult this is to police. It's like playing wackamole. I dealt with this with malware and phishing and it was non-stop wackamole!

[dang]

I don't know what you meant by "uniquely targeted to me", but we don't uniquely target any user here. Everyone sees the same things. See https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all.... One exception to that is the 'hide' feature, which people can use to hide stories they don't want to see. But that's users targeting themselves.

[cupcakesupreme]

I also a dislike the continued appearance of link bait science articles sites. You all know the ones I'm talking about, where every article about quantum physics starts with a description of quantum mechanics 101 (nay, 001).

[cupcakesupreme]

I really like the quality responses. That's the goldmine here.

Also, it does kind of feel like we are one of the b**** detectors at the forefront of the b****.