I've seen anti-AI comments here disappear within minutes of posting. I'm honestly surprised to see one at the top of this thread.

What causes comments to disappear? Is that what flagging does?

You probably see that because many are low effort Reddit level comments. I’ve seen lots of long AI skeptic threads and people talking about the likely negatives of AI.

showdead=no in user settings hides flagged & moderator killed posts

I tried setting showdead=yes but two comments I remember seeing earlier today (as replies to one of my comments) are still gone. Does anyone what else might have happened to them?

Maybe the posters might have deleted the comments themselves?

I often post comments on HN, just to delete them 5 minutes later when I realize I don’t care to deal with the replies I’ll eventually get.

You have to be quick because if someone does reply, you can no longer delete your message.

One benefit of this forum is that they purposely passed over notifications precisely to save us from the temptation to "deal with" replies.

And I very much appreciate that feature, and hope it never changes.

However when I make comments here, I do it with the intention of reading what people have to say in response.

If I am making a comment with the intention to ignore the responses to it, then that’s a good signal for myself that what I am writing is likely not an appropriate comment for HN, and then delete it.

I didn't realise messages even had a delete button. I'm going to reply here so I can check.

edit: you're right, there's a delete button.

I see properly argued positions, even if very anti-AI, hang around, but cheap tribalist takes usually get downvoted pretty quickly.

Cheap pro-AI comments don't get flagged though. You can repeat the same talking points forever:

- "Artists have always been exploited" (patently false since at least 1950, it was a symbiosis with the industry).

- "Humans have always done $X".

- "You are a Luddite."

- "This is inevitable."

Personally I’d downvote these if not further substantiated. Flags are reserved for outright rage bait or personal insults for me.

At least I hope; can’t say I always perfectly follow “up/downvote doesn’t indicate (dis)agreement but rather contribution to the discussion” perfectly.

Maybe SWEs just can think better and see that there's nothing they can do, and to fight against this is useless. Artists still hope they can change this somehow, which is impossible, the people with money and datacenters want more money and don't really care about the people that are getting screwed over.

Just need to get AIs to purposely produce slop that has the trappings of quality to sabotage future AIs. Oh and write endless low quality PRs to all GitHub projects to build bad will.