alt Hacker News"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have."
And this is one half of why I think
"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."
isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.
Replies
No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing.
What negative experience do you think should instead be created for people breaking these rules?
Getting to live by the rules of decency is a privilege now denied us. I can accept that but I don't have to like it or like the people who would abuse my trust for their personal gain.
Tit for tat
> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior.
Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate norms, then society's higher levels of corrective behaviour can involve things like establishing laws and fining or imprisoning people, but you don't want to start with that level of response. Although putting these LLM spammers in jail does sound awfully enticing to me in a petty way, it's probably not the most constructive way to handle the problem.
The fact that shamelessness is taking over in some cultures is another problem altogether, and I don't know how you deal with that. Certain cultures have completely abdicated the ability to influence people's behaviour socially without resorting to heavy-handed intervention, and on the internet, this becomes everyone in the world's problem. I guess the answer is probably cultivation of spaces with strict moderation to bar shameless people from participating. The problem could be mitigated to some degree if a Github-like entity outright banned these people from their platform so they could not continue to harass open-source maintainers, but there is no platform like that. It unfortunately takes a lot of unrewarding work to maintain a curated social environment on the internet.