Happy to do the same for you if you want.
The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fake site, here's the real one." You'd be surprised how many will actually swap the link. That alone could flip things.
Beyond that there's some technical SEO stuff on nanoclaw.dev that would help - structured data, schema, signals for search engines and LLMs. Happy to walk you through it.
update: ok this is getting more traction than I expected so let me give some practical stuff.
1. Google Search Console - did you add and verify nanoclaw.dev there? If not, do it now and submit your sitemap. Basic but critical.
2. I checked the fake site and it actually doesn't have that many backlinks, so the situation is more winnable than it looks.
3. Your GitHub repo has tons of high quality backlinks which is great. Outreach to those places, tell the story. I'm sure a few will add a link to your actual site. That alone makes you way more resilient to fakers going forward. This is only happening because everything is so new. Here's a list with all the backlinks pointing to your repo:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBrYsppQuVrktL1lPfNm...
4. Open social profiles for the project - Twitter/X, LinkedIn page if you want. This helps search engines build a knowledge graph around NanoClaw. Then add Organization and sameAs schema markup to nanoclaw.dev connecting all the dots (your site, the GitHub repo, the social profiles). This is how you tell Google "these all belong to the same entity."
5. One more thing - you had a chance to link to nanoclaw.dev from this HN thread but you linked to your tweet instead. Totally get it, but a strong link from a front page HN post with all this traffic and engagement would do real work for your site's authority. If it's not crossing any rule (specific use case here so maybe check with the mods haha) drop a comment here with a link to nanoclaw.dev. I don't think anyone here would mind if it will get you few steps closer towards winning that fake site
If I was the author, however, I'd still feel like I've been put in a predicament where I need to spend personal agency to fix something that Google has broken.
While that may just be a fact of life, my internal injustice-o-meter would be raging. Like, Google is going to take hours of my life because they, with all their billions of capital, can't figure out the canonically-true website when it's RIGHT THERE in the GitHub repository?
Ugh. I guess that's just the day we live in. But it makes me rage against the machine on the author's behalf.
If Google didn't exist, how many Google search results would point to OP's site?
No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article. The author has invested time into proper SEO optimization, legit websites already link to it et cetera, it's all explained in the article.
From the perspective of a spammer: They need like 2 million MAU to earn below minimum wage. You're never getting those figures by doing something legit and actually useful to a tiny subset of people. You either need a vague site beyond any point of usefulness to anyone or you need a network of knockoff sites. The reason you can't compete with these shitty SEO spam version of your site is because they already have a network of "authoritative" (in Google's eyes) sites and all they have to do is to link from them to a new one to expand their shitty network.
From the perspective of SEO agencies: They can't guarantee results. They can tell you vague, easily-googleable best practices and give you an output of some SEO SaaS that's far too expensive for an individual to purchase. Ahrefs(.com) is the prime example of this, the cheapest paid version costs $129/month. Do you care about SEO that much? No, so you go to these agencies and give them money for them to give you the output of such a tool. But that SaaS also only contains vague and nebulous "things to fix" to follow "best practices" because they also cannot know what drives traffic to your competitor from the outside perspective.
My best suggestion would be to start a website from day one. Doesn't matter how good the website is at first, Google favours sites that exist for longer. If you're creating a website after the knock-off version already exist, you might as well give up immediately, it's gonna be near impossible to recover from that.
Sales pitch or not, someone offering their time to help me with a problem is feels generous to me. To each their own, I suppose.
But again, you reinforce my point in your last sentence. Now anytime I want to make any little toy project (because how can anyone know when their toy project will blow up overnight?) I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?
My point still stands. Google is the problem and while we likely can't effectively do anything about it, it's frustrating as hell.
> I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?
No, I said a crappy one on purpose. How good is it doesn't matter, the sooner the Google knows about the domain, the better. Might as well be a copy of your README file using one of the million SSGs GitHub supports that will turn that README file into a website. The only thing that matters is that the website exists and that Google knows about it before the other one.
That's why many people purchase the domain on day 1 before they even start building the thing and also why many have like a dozen domains in their account that is like a boulevard of broken dreams there to remind them once a year they haven't done anything with them.
Still cheaper than a SEO agency or in most cases even one month of ahrefs access.
What's maddening about this whole situation though is that Google already has every signal it needs. The GitHub repo links to nanoclaw.dev. The npm package links to it. The commit history proves authorship. But apparently domain age and raw backlink count still trump verified ownership signals. The system rewards whoever stakes out the domain first, not whoever actually built the thing.
If I were you, I would start with some documentation:
https://schema.org/docs/gs.html
https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication
https://schema.org/Organization
The first link will get you started - it will explain what the commenter was talking about in detail. The second and third links will give you more information on those specific types.
Good luck with your site!
1) the .net version has a couple of very high authority links, namely from theregister and thenewstack (both of which have had lots of engagement).
I highly doubt it would have ranked without those links.
2) its only been a week. Give Google time to understand which pages should rank higher.
3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than others.
I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.
Suggestions: give it time. Meanwhile I would recommend linking to your website rather than your github everywhere you mention it, to give it a boost
https://web.archive.org/web/20260301133636/https://www.there... https://web.archive.org/web/20260211162657/https://venturebe... https://web.archive.org/web/20260220201539/https://thenewsta...
With so many copycats on the internet, first to publish seems like a fairly good indication of the original source. But as we can see here, that's not always true.
Thousands of little weights driven by obscure attributes of the site that you're not really going to figure out by thrashing and changing stuff.
If you must just have a repo self host it. In fact, selfhost the repo in any case.
> I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.
Reason why I still always get the Java 8 docs for any search. Annoying.
Google and Brave linked to the official GitHub repo followed by the fake domain. DuckDuckGo and Bing linked to the fake domain first, followed by the official GitHub. Mojeek gave higher ranking to two third party articles, but linked to both the official GitHub and website without fakes. Qwant was the worst, as the official website was the second result amongst multiple fake websites and an unrelated GitHub repo.
Then there the AIs. ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and Brave Search "Ask" all linked to the official website, and some added the GitHub repo as well. DuckDuckGo Search Assist linked to just the official GitHub. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok also explicitly warned about the fake websites. Copilot got the official website and GitHub right, but linked to a presumably fake X account as well.
Conclusion: Google, Brave and Mojeek win in search. AI is very good and clearly beats search overall. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok stand out in quality.
For me Google shows the .net site first the github one as second.
Asking chatgpt 5.2 (Auto mode) to search for the nanoclaw site, it says the same, first links the .net site and shows the github as an optional page. When I try to give it a hint by asking "are you sure?" it still even hallucinates that it's linked from the github:
"Yes — nanoclaw.net is the official documentation/site for the NanoClaw project, in the sense that it’s the project’s published homepage and is directly linked from its canonical open-source repository. It describes the project, features, installation steps, and links to the source code on GitHub, which is the authoritative source for the project’s codebase."
Chatgpt 5.2 (Thinking mode) and Claude gets it right the first try, they asnwer with the official .dev page first and claude shows the .net second as "another site covering the project".
[1]: https://altpower.app [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://nanoclaw... [3]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds
I appreciate that you open source your projects for us to study. But TBH, please help yourself first.
There's writing code for charity, and then there's this. Charity wasn't meant to include hyper-corporations.
If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money.
Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know any better into believing that an actual sustainable development model that respects their work is evil and that we should all work for free and beg for donations.
We must travel in different circles. I've been around a while, and I've never seen _any individual_ bullied for keeping their code closed source.
That said, I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code, for practical reasons, and I'm open about that.
Silicon Valley hype monsters have done this, sure. And so have too many open source software advocates. But all the free software advocates I've read and listened to over the years have criticized MIT- and BSD-style permissive licenses for permitting exactly the freeloading you describe.
Because they can, they don't just think they do. Everything about the framework they operate in allows or even encourages them to do it.
> That's just not right.
As a matter of morality, you're right. This is something very few people or corporations concern themselves with just as soon as there's real money to be made by not concerning themselves with this.
because they can be. They do not think they can be leeches, they know they can be leeches.
> That's just not right
I somewhat agree with you, but they do actually have permission to do it.
Free software underpins all the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism.
Because on the other end of the argument is an audience of human beings, not a theorem solver. Pretending that delivery does NOT matter, or even shouldn't matter, is out of touch with reality.
Lots of people made similar claims. Most notably The National Council for Civil Liberties (now called Liberty), the UK's leading civil/human rights organisation made submissions to parliament claiming that sex with minors was not always harmful, had a pro-paedo organisation as an affiliate and give them a representative on the gay rights subcommittee: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/scotl... The people involved were unaffected, some reaching fairly high political permissions.
A lot of other people whose works are respected have actually had sex with minors. Eric Gill and Oscar Wilde for example.
None of that makes Stallman's opinions defensible in my opinion. On the other hand I am happy to ignore his opinions on that topic and still value his opinions on other things.
> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that.
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-sep-dec.html#14_September...
His opinions on software have been largely out of touch for the past 20 years. People might yearn for his ideals, but it's just not the world we live in.
Please quote Stallman's quote where he defends pedophilia.
Not a quote of someone else saying that Stallman defends pedofilhia, but a quote by Stallman himself.
thats why the gpl family of license exist.
MIT/BSD family licenses are do whatever you want with this,
if you want to make money off of you pet opensource project I recommend multi-license it with a copyleft with copyright assignment required for contributions and offer other licenses with a fee.
I find it strange that people use the MIT licence and then complain "big greedy corporation did not contribute back anything". Though I also agree that this leeching approach by corporations is a problem to the ecosystem. MIT just is not the right licence to fight that.
A market with little competition costs you too in the long term.
" With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. "
The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a malicious imitator repo instead.
One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their Google ranking. See if their hosts are willing to take them down. Is there anything you can assert copyright over to hang a DCMA request on? That's hard for an Open Source project, I guess. And the fake sites aren't (yet) doing any actual scamming.
Good luck, though!
Just do a bit of risk assessment if something like this were to be shipped to people that have come to blindly trust the source and you'll see why letting this slip is a very bad idea.
Then I tried opening up google.com. and this works too. I didn't know that websites resolve when you add another additional dot after TLD. This was a really fun coincidence type thing so I wanted to share it with you.
I read an interesting blog article on this a while back: https://lacot.org/blog/2024/10/29/the-trailing-dot-in-domain...
Have given a glance through it but I am also bookmarking to read it later once I get more free. Thanks for sharing it!
From the article:
> Wait, what? I can put a dot at the end of my domain names?
This was exactly how I felt at that moment :) The article has started pretty nicely.
com. example.com. subdomain.example.com.
Github only has authority because people put their shit there; if people want to point that back at the "right" website, Github should be helping facilitate that, instead of trying to help Google make their dogshit search index any better.
I mean, seriously, doesn't Bing own Github anyway?
Unfortunately, the fake website [.net] is also #3 on Kagi, and #1 on Duckduckgo. On Kagi, the Github is #1 and nanoclaw.dev is #4, but only if you count "Interesting Finds". On Duckduckgo, the Github is #2 and nanoclaw.dev is nowhere to be found.
Neither of these projects anything requiring payment anywhere, but tons of sites pop up trying to "sell" these projects. I wouldn't even know what that means and I'm kind of tempted to drop in a credit card to see what happens. Would they auto send you a link to the public repo?
Most of it is quite lazy and haven't quite kept up with modern AI capabilities. They mostly just scrape the text I wrote, and present it with some screenshots that I created. I can imagine a future where
- really nice landing pages are generated
- the product is entirely rebranded
- marketing is automated (linkedin, google ads, etc)
and someone can develop some autonomous system that basically finds high quality, yet unknown open source projects, and redeploys it and sells it online for actual money.
I've tested on a few of the big search engines, and nanoclaw.dev is never in the first page.
Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode." The only way I was able to get a direct link to nanoclaw.dev was with chatgpt, which found it by scraping the GitHub (it also spat out links to a couple of other copies it found from google.)
Seems this is a wider SEO issue, one which infiltrates even the technology supposed to replace it.
Unsurprisingly, right? Gemini just uses the same back end as Google itself, which - according to OP - doesn't list his site on page 1, not page 2 and not page 5.
Depending on the prompt, it should have gotten the link from the github, but that's like an indirect hint from a secondary source, it probably ranks the Google index quite highly when it does research.
By the sound of it, everything except reporting it? Winning SEO just means appear before them in search results, but the fake page shouldn't just lose the race, it should be taken down.
ICANN specifies how to deal with this kind of issue: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/submitting-dns-a...
The fake site:
- includes a copyright statement
- includes a bottom sitemap
- includes an "author" meta-tag
- includes a sameAs to discord "nanoclaw", where the real site references some random string discord server
- has a .net instead of a .dev
Given all that plus the PageRank feedback loop of the .net having been up longer and enough people having found what they're looking for from it to not trigger Google's low-quality signals, author is fighting an uphill battle here; the squatters know what they're doing.
Is Google supposed to have drastic updates to its index over 2 weeks?
Google doesn't care more about authoritative answers than the public does; the public is one of Google's signals for good-quality results.
Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or real homepage.
Mojeek was the exception, sort of. It had some random news sites up top, but the github repo in 2nd place and nanoclaw.dev (the real homepage) in the 4th place. The fake nanoclaw.net did not show.
Kagi is the only one I couldn't try because apparently I used up my free credits a year back. Can anyone see how they compare?
It gives two sponsored links to openclaw things, so no fake either (presumably, I don't know what they are).
Sadly, Google's generally better against all the new AI-generated content farms than other players, so maybe they're still running PageRank somewhere.
"If I search for "opencode GitHub" in Bing, a random fork is returned"
Get more traffic (make sure google analytics sees it, IDK but that probably matters because monopoly) and it might help.
Most of the other indices aren’t much better. Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.
Plus based on the results it’s not entirely clear that only the ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies that could profit from traffic
But for entities with a bit more time, you can prevent this scenario by taking acquiring the .com/.net variant domains before launching.
Sorry, I'll put it in hand-crafted ChatGPTese:
## The Slop Problem
Every post sounds the same. No intelligence. No individuality. Just pure, clean LLM slop. Let's dive in.
- Every post has LLM tells. This is key.
- Posts get upvoted anyway. Nobody seems to notice or indeed care.
- People acclimate to the slop. This isn't just a coincidence. This is a real shift in standards. When people read enough of this, they begin to think it sounds normal.
## The Replying Dilemma
Should you engage with the content, when there is a real person involved? On the one hand, they put their name on it, and probably the details are drawn from their prompt, so it can be said to fairly represent what they wanted to say. So maybe ragging on their ChatGPT prose is being mean. On the other hand, if nobody ever mentions this, the acclimatization will only get worse as the rising tide of slop overwhelms any other style of writing.
## The "Snobbery is good actually" Option
Relentlessly bully people for their half-baked LLM copy. Make it your whole personality. Go insane.
## The "Giving Up" Solution
Learn to stop worrying and love the LLM.
It's slop all the way down.
Instead it seems like there's a solid core of people who have always wanted to outsource their brains entirely to machines, and have finally got their wish.
I'm old enough to remember when we joked about normies who were dumb enough to let computers think for them.
Then just write code, build features, and fix bugs. Nobody is forcing you to fix search engines' problems. If you're not making money off of traffic, then why worry so much about SEO? Just do your thing. If it really bothers you, put a little note on your GitHub warning people about the fake site, and get on with your life.
We (as in the team that helped fork and migrate the PoE1 wiki) setup a new domain for the Path of Exile 2 wiki, which is being hosted by the folks at Grinding Gear Games and linked on the official website and in multiple places on the highly trafficked subreddit.
Despite this, Google has decided that the site is not relevant and shouldn't appear anywhere in search results, despite the wiki for the first game appearing everywhere.
The weird bit isn’t that a scraper site exists, it’s that Google can’t do the obvious graph join: query == project name, #1 result is the repo, repo declares Homepage = X, yet Google still boosts an imposter domain. That’s not “SEO”, that’s the ranking system refusing to treat maintainer-declared canonical as a strong signal. Early domain squatters get to “set the default” purely by being first, then they can flip the content later once trust is baked in.
People keep saying “tell users to bookmark the real URL” like that scales. Most people will click the second link and assume it’s official. If Google can’t solve this class of problem, their “AI answers” are going to be a bigger mess than blue links ever were.
I assume the "I" here refers to Claude, who seemingly wrote the entire project AND the linked post.
The crux of the matter is that there's nothing that protects an open project besides reputation, and nowadays in the digital space it can be cheaply farmed.
Laws could help, but they only work when you undertake purposeful actions to be covered by them, like register a trademark, and it's never cheap.
Imagine you're in a local band playing shows. It's 3 month old and you have no issued records. A second band tighter with venues takes your name and starts performing under your moniker. You have no money to take that to court and good luck making a case. You can't do anything besides screaming on the web or, don't know, kicking a few butts. You change your name.
You used to be able to buy yourname .com, .net, .org and that was a de facto trademark. Now there are gTLDs you can't.
- I hate that Google returns content farms instead of product web pages
- I hate that Google provides a page of 10 useful links, later links are just pure garbage. I think that something in Google engine is profoundly broken
- I maintain my own search index, but it requires a lot of effort, and attention. I do insert links if I find them worthy. I think more people should have their personal search indexes. Mine is below. I am quite happy that problems like these do not affect me that much
Optimizing for ad revenue is a good start.
Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. The fake site has probably been linked to by a number of high-SEO outlets. What you should do is contact them and tell them to fix the links (to point to your site), which they should be happy to do.
It was 100% a game of whack-a-mole. And while we were a reputation raiser, we were always combatting against reputation tarnishers. Car dealerships already have a bad reputation to begin with, but they hate eachother more than their customers hate them. They were our bread and butter. Same with tradespeople (plumbing, electrical, hvac, handy(wo)men).
Google linking to a fake website directly underneath the real project's repository that has a real link to the real website isn't a SEO problem, lol.
A lot of handwringing about hypotheticals. The page is up there because it links the official repo. Changing that will quickly tank its search rank.
These days I even find e. g. qwant sometimes having better results than google search. I see it as a positive thing though - I can soon stop using Google search. So one less Google product. One day I will be Google free. It will be a happy day. I really think Google must cease to exist.
(The only sad thing is how crap the other search engines are. So while Google search sucks nowadays, I consistently get even worse results with e. g. DuckDuckGo. And I think part of the reason is because the world wide web also sucks a LOT more compared to the old days. Google is also partially responsible for this by the way, which just reinforces the idea that Google must die.)
Curation in general is probably a skill that will become more and more in demand as the Internet fills up with AI slop.
Another point but DDG's AI feature actually references Nanoclaw.net as a source.
Damn I booted up Orion (Kagi) and even Kagi shows nanoclaw.net as the third result after the github page with qwibitai and another github page with your (previous?) github username ie gavrielc which when clicked on also results to the same github page.
There is an interesting find page in kagi which references the website but it still shows nanoclaw.net page earlier and the nanoclaw.dev interesting find shows the .dev domain barely that in first time I didn't even notice it.
I expected it better from DDG/Kagi to be honest. I also tried brave and it had the same issue. Brave even is its own independent index and even that struggles with.
Let's hope that this can quickly get patched though. Also a good reminder to people to prefer opening up github links than websites as I must admit that even as a tech-savvy person I could've fallen for nanoclaw.net link as well given its second in like all search engines.
I have also written a more detailed comparison comparing all search providers that I could find, perhaps it might be of interest to ya but only Mojeek/(yandex.ru with the nanoclaw.dev/ru) were able to reference it earlier than .net
I have been an happy user of DDG for many time. I trust DDG significantly more than Google and I am happy that you guys could read such feedback!
Have a nice day DDG team!
I am not the creator of nanoclaw or even related to it but I really appreciate how the DDG team took my feedback. Thanks to you as well!
> Thanks again!
Don't mind me if I use this comment (ie. Got thanked by Duckduckgo team for helping them) in anything like a resume haha. I am half joking but although small, I think that (resume?)/something similar could reflect why I love privacy services and if an employer can be right minded, it can give more talking points and maybe even a discussion starter. So I might be only half joking when I say this haha!
I am really happy too that I can be of help. I love the work done at Duckduckgo. Truly one of the few companies that I root for honestly. I use you guys everyday* and I love y'all.
It's truly a pleasure from my side as well that I could help Duckduckgo team, you guys have been quick in acting on the feedback!
Most Privacy conscious user really love and appreciates Duckduckgo imo, myself included.
I hope you guys have a nice day! Take care!
1. DDG 2. Kagi 3. Brave 4. Ecosia 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia 7. Mojeek 8. Yandex.ru
from 1-5 all referenced .net before .dev and DDG referenced .net before github , marinalia didn't give me either .net, .dev or gh link but rather docker.com or some other tech articles
Mojeek and Yandex.ru DID give me .dev links before .net at the time of writing.
I literally opened these two as a joke especially Mojeek not expecting too much But I just know names of lots of search engines so I tried.
Mojeek and Yandex.ru have surprised me although I think yandex.ru might have referenced the .dev because of https://nanoclaw.dev/ru/ as it points to this.
Mojeek seems interesting now from this observation
I also wanted to try swisscows but looks like they have become 100% premium as I do remember being able to search for free but now a popup comes.
I also tried baidu (chinese search engine) and it gave results in chinese and firefox translate sort of stuttered and didn't work when I tried to translate, I don't know chinese so pasted it in claude and it doesn't link to either .net or .dev but rather chinese links.
Now with all of this observation, I think that we do know one Provider (Mojeek) who won. A lot of these on these lists are actually not independent except Mojeek and brave and probably yandex.ru
SO I guess the main takeaway from this could be that Independent search engines can be interesting. They can still be hit or miss but the more independent search engines the merrier given that some might miss but some will also hit.
My comment definitely feels like a good reputation bonus for mojeek. Well anything for more independent search engines imo. I looked at their about me and it seems that they are a single person (Marc Smith). Fascinating stuff
I know marginalia_nu is on hn so maybe marginalia and mojeek can share some index together. Anyways this was a fun exciting experiment to do. I hope the community tries out other search engines if I may have missed any and share insights if a particular search engine gives interesting results.
I think this had just made me curious so yeah haha
I mean one thing I am not understanding is why they would write an article with AI tho. They still prompted AI, might as well give us what they prompted or just write under <300 words or less. I mean its literally twitter (refuse to call it X)
Or like make a 2 minute video with screenshare just talking to the camera about it like they might've with claude perhaps.
They also have discord, They could have literally given a free contributor to help write the article from such video or concerns and credit them properly. I mean, heck I could've written the article for free for just a credit at this point where I got so invested haha.
I genuinely don't understand why you would prompt an article/text out of all things with AI. I hope I never get persuaded with this dark side lol.
1) this style genuinely is preferred by lots of people on X/Twitter so you might as well lean into it
2) People who spend a lot of time with LLMs think this sort of writing is normal or even standard just through overexposure, a sort of pseudo social proof
2b) People who spend a lot of time with other people who use LLMs think this is how humans write (actual social proof)
3) People are insecure about their writing ability and find the non-judgmental non-human LLM editor soothing
4) people are lazy
5) people aren't lazy per se but they know writing has been so devalued that they aren't going to spend time on it that they don't need to
6) their first experience of writing was trying to hit word count requirements in grade school and that stuck
7) Visibly using LLMs is becoming a shibboleth for a social group on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's a marker that you are dogfooding the crappy AI tools you're developing and selling. Under this theory, being visibly LLM output is actually intentional: "look ma, no hands- all NanoClaw!"
My writing style gets criticized. a lot (I think its from people who have good hearts who just want to point out some flaws and I appreciate that). So I will admit that I understand this point because if someone questions your writing style, you do get insecure and sometimes I did have thoughts of leaving hackernews because of it, because I mean I always took pride in all of my comments, they are mine after all :)
I don't think you can ever fix that, All AI does is remove that critique from you to LLM but I'd say that the largest reason people might do it is because its hard to respond to such criticism (IMO).
If suppose someone says your writing is bad. To me, it takes a huge mental effort to not be angry at the decision and type something. It takes me time to reflect and try to respond to them peacefully.
I think I am only able to do that because I imagine this as a person who has business and I imagine how I would want an ideal business or a person who has business would want to reply and how it would look on the business. I have witnessed some businesses who are absolutely top notch but their responses/nature in forums sometimes is very off-putting. I'd rather try to do opposite.
And to me, its those particular comments that I write that I cherish the most. I had once written a comment which felt so good to me personally from a criticism that I seriously wondered how I wrote that. For a few days, I can't say for sure but I remember just looking up at that comment whenever I felt bad.
The one thing I agree is that it can be very time consuming tho to respond to such criticism.
I mean, I try to respond to these comments nicely but that doesn't mean I am not insecure about my writing. I do think that I may project that if I write a nice comment but yeah, I believe everyone can be insecure about writing to some degree. And chances are that most people are more likely to create a ruckus of the situation than handle it well.
So I think from all of this, if I had to summarize it, I'd like it if people could share their concerns but in a way which is agreeable. If you don't like someone's writing, try to point it out in a way of feedback/cooperation that the other person I can agree in.
If you do want to point out someone's writing, try to imagine yourself being in their situation and try to anticipate what message might be the most beneficial/(cooperative?) in that sense. Just imagine yourself in their shoes basically.
So I do agree with you on this point. Perhaps point 5) as well because this comment took me 40 mins to write and think.
It's also how time is invested, like people rather use their 40 mins to create a project which can reach x stars on github and that will have some definite measure. Whereas this comment got no measure in like, the value right now but I like to think that given enough long time, if I ever create anything. These comments could be meaningful in that regards to show what I think maybe.
Another part is that I can't stand obnoxious reddit/twitter. Those algorithms feel flawed to me and I'd rather not contribute to that machine and the funny thing is that the above line of thinking might be more beneficial in those platforms than here given that they are mainstream but yeah.
More than anything, I just write because I find these topics interesting to type about or that, I write for myself, I wish to read these comments I type in future to really see what I was thinking about stuff. Kinda like a journal and twitter/reddit platforms are less intended for such long comments than HN and tbh HN can have its limits too but I think the community overall is much more receptive of long comments.
(Imagine if I wrote you such a long post on a random subreddit or in twitter, those platforms are less likely to capture nuance imo)
Edit: were these the best 40 minutes I have spent, probably not, that was playing skribble with my friend yesterday but like I did get a comment permanently about a particular topic I can reference anywhere in a discussion and it was interesting to think about it. But if a person doesn't care about it or the community doesn't do backlash about AI writing and those were your points. So yeah I do agree with you more and more thinking about it honestly.
To some people, it could be an interesting tradeoff to spend less time thinking or writing but I mean, that doesn't feel right to me, especially if you are passionate about something I guess.
[1] https://zeroclaw.net/ [2] https://github.com/openagen/zeroclaw
It's literally not his problem that some people click a scam link, he still has 18,000 github stars, its just a bifurcated audience of undiscerning people
He's overly worried about a perfect unanimous impression when he shouldn't
Now he's wasting his money on SEO tweaks and domain names while saying he only wants to code, then focus on coding! not buying obscure TLD's and vibecoding sitemaps while wondering what he did wrong
yeesh, some people can't handle a little fame
Actually I don't trust Google and I don't expect it to surface reliable information. I expect it to surface information and I will dig through it and judge for myself whether it is reliable or not.
This is why open source projects like Firefox hold trademarks near and dear.
I would think a US trademark plus a nasty cease and desist letter would deter most. But maybe I’m naive.
Either that or just accept that someone else has a scam site. Report it to anyone you can report it to, put a message in your software stating that it shouldn’t have ads or payments and convey the official website.
bro.
Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free; across the board - not donating to open-source, maxing out every dollar of food stamps, refusing to pay a dollar for an app if it has a free tier, even companies like AWS ripping off open source without any qualms. If you got an offer for a free relationship no strings attached, would you take it seriously? If someone on a street corner has artwork for $5 or $500, it could be the same piece of art, but which one gets more attention on first glance?
If you want your work to be respected, do not make it open source. Your odds are slightly better at succeeding at acting. Remember that 97% of public GitHub repos have zero external users.
We live in the richest country on planet earth and we eliminated child hunger here during COVID only to roll it back.
It's not even 1.5% of the budget currently. Compare this to our military adventurism budget.
Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity, right now.
Children need food to grow up and be 'productive', even if you don't see value in human life and are captial-maxxing; This is an important program for creating excess productivity. The same is true of well funded public schools. A well-fed and educated populous is optimal by every public metric.
I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie, so I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?
Adults need food to be 'productive' as well. Adults that are not afraid that they are going to starve commit fewer crimes.
You want to 'save' some money? Eliminate means testing entirely and give every American have a baseline EBT card food budget per person in the household. No special virtuous food categories to make sure the poor know they are being watched. Just a monthly cash infusion spendable at all grocers.
This way, walmart and other mega-corps won't be able to scam the government by creating positions that force their workers onto these means tested programs and lock them there.
Your implication that people when not given free food will starve and that your parent commenter wants people to starve is clear manipulation.
People using food stamps in the US often work full-time jobs making insufficient living wages from highly profitable companies like Walmart
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
I imagine they probably have a better inherent understanding of real-world food production style work effort than the majority of those of us who post to sites like HN.
I wouldn't be so sure of that on HN. (Also noting you're using the Marxist definition rather than the default dictionary definition, which is "middle class".)
A well-paid tech employee with a non-trivial amount of company stock is, strictly speaking, an "owner of the means of production". Even if you want to quibble with that, their interests are certainly well-aligned with that group - to the point that you generally won't hear a peep out of them as things get more and more dystopian, because of what Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
> I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?
It's much simpler than that. It's pure, unadulterated "I got mine and you ain't touchin' it". There's no real thinking that goes beyond that purely selfish position. The consequences aren't seriously considered, they're just taken as part of the natural order. Any causal connection is denied, rationalized by accusations of laziness, inferiority, etc.
I was using Marx's definition, and I am a member of that class, so defined.
My existing wealth and ongoing income of seven figures is derived almost entirely from capital accumulation.
I am knowingly and actively betraying my immediate class interest, here and elsewhere, because I'd rather my wealth increase more modestly to ensure we all live in vibrant society.
I do think it is foolish for salaried white collar workers not to see what is coming and begin unionization efforts; Their interests are ever more misaligned with capital with every year that passes.
'welfare queens' etc...
If you didn't notice this sleight of hand in the original comment, that means he did his work correctly.
His conclusion is that things should not be free and open, as a rule, because they won't generate money, attention, or respect if they are free.
He included food stamps in the middle of his list. This choice is not neutral.
The comment invites you to reframe your understanding of food stamps so as to later justify its dissolution as a result 'human nature'.
Food stamps are not intended to function like the other products he listed. Food stamps are not intended to generate respect or direct revenue.
Yet, he said that someone using the 'max' monthly budget of $300 for food, when making less that $26000, is part of the 'natural disrespect' continuum. Tell me, would you consider $300 a month on food excessive and disrespectful where you live? $3.30 per meal, 3 times a day for 30.5 days?
The whole structure of his 'disrespect' argument is a lie to begin with. People on food stamps do respect the value of being able to feed their families.
Most Americans I've met see their need for food stamps as a moral stain. They want so badly to overcome their 'failure' by working even harder. Many will take second or third jobs with tenuous protections, and have their wages stolen ($2600 per person, on average, almost as much as food stamps pays).
Either way, productivity goes up, inflation marches on, wages stay the same, and I'm the only one getting richer.
Anywho that is why I replied in the manner I did, because the subtext was clearly hidden well enough for many people to need it pointed out.
You are not immune to propaganda, doubly so for the propaganda you don't notice.
Have you considered channeling that energy into advocacy or volunteerism? I feel you'd like that.
In any case, his reply didn't even address the main point and was very condescending. I respect the troll o7
I know a few people who had to make use of food banks and were grateful at the time for the donations of others. They now try to donate what they can as payback.
This extends into the world of work as well. Employers that don't pay well tend to treat their employees poorly.
The entitlement is truly real at times. I think that sometimes I can be part of that entitlement too but I think I try to be respectful usually and say my concerns if I have any.
This sort of becomes a circular because VPS at the very least do indicate support and good quality/atleast decent quality hardware. A server too cheap and too overprovisioned with steal factor (Like Contabo) is universally hated by people. But these are the same people who will take deals if they are the cheapest across the board (myself included at times, I have got an idle netcup vps for a few months for 10$ simply out of curiosity but I do think that's 10$ worth spent to get the idea of a public facing ipv4 but yea)
So a lot of summer hosts/ deadpools (Scam-type) take on this opportunity and what they do is rent hardware for a month or year from other providers with large specs and split it into small chunks and give yearly, triannually, lifetime deals which can be too good to be true.
Turns out that they are, as usually sme sort of scam type stuff happens after a year or two or three.
This also makes it hard for new providers to try to prove their worth at times too if they are legit all within a market which is very price competitive.
For Steve Jobs it was not about respect or value, that's the lie. It was about greed.
As for value extraction, have a look at this article and weep: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Harvard-study-Open-source-has-a...
OTOH this also shows the huge potential FOSS has, if it manages to only slightly shift that balance in their favor.
Its weird to be all evo psych about this either way IMO, free as in gratis has only been situationaly possible at all for very short time of human history. All armchair philosophy needs to take it into account! As soon as you recognize that, we're forced to question such pat appeals to nature or what not, and drawn necessarily to consider how systems make humans one way or another.
Put another way, this position is incredibly fatalistic, as well as kinda sad and lonely to my ears.
Citation needed. You're describing a particular tendency, not some absolute property of human psychology. It's also a behavior that's greatly affected by social construction. In the US, the attitude you're describing is much more prevalent than in some other countries, because of cultural biases.