A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful <emojis>”
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
What makes it noise is less the actual comment itself. If I showed someone a piece of art in person and they said this to me, it would be a genuine response. What makes this particular instance noise is it reeks of mass automated messaging with no thought behind it. These comments are generic because they aren't people commenting on the thing they saw, they are just templates being spammed out on mass so they make them generic to fit any context.
To me, this present-day noise is indistinguishable from the pre-bot noise. It's the same noise, in that both things are just noise of that shape. "How beautiful!" "I really feel this one!" "I love this song!"
Sometimes, the signal-to-noise ratio is better. Sometimes it's pretty bad. It always has been this way in online discourse -- especially with things that appeal to old folks.
In a track where the protagonist primarily complains about feeling old, it makes sense that most of the comments are that of what old folks have always written online.
(Are these particular comments primarily bot spam? Maybe. I peered into the depths a bit, and accounts for the top comments I looked at had been around for years. That isn't evidence for or against a well-orchestrated long con, but orchestration is hard and people who write insipid comments are plentiful.)
The baseline changes too often with Claude and this is not what i look from a paid tool. Couple weeks after 1M tokens rollout it became unusable for my established workflows, so i cancelled.
Anthropic folks move too fast for my liking and mental wellbeing.
If you're referring to comments on the website, I plan to keep it minimal (the text version is a static site).
If you're referring to comments on blogs in general, I have many thoughts. Back in the day, comments used to be how you connected with people and let other people find you. It also came with spam (spam plugins could only do so much).
With the rise of static site generators, most people don't have comments on their blogs now. It is something I miss though.
I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media.
I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.
I've had comments (open, anonymous, no screening) on my blog since it started in 2004. Back in the day when it was very popular, most of my blog posts were the result of reader tips/advice/heads-up/etc. I have to work MUCH harder now that comments have pretty much dried up.
Yes, unfortunately spam and rude replies come with comments. I also don't have comments on my blog. I instead have one of those email masking services that allows to people to email me (and I have found this effective).
I can totally feel the shift, the rot or whatever when it happens, with opus 1M it seems to happen more often in my recent experience, while my approach didn't change a bit.
So i teach myself to not have an emotional response while working with LLMs. The actual response would be starting a new session, or dive into code myself.
reply