How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Open text box, no moderation, anonymous. Yahoo Answers was the predictable outcome. Somebody has to clean that up every single day, and it's never the person who built it.
I got excited by the title, thinking that questions were going to be answered by human monastics. But it's not really "ask a monk," is it? It's "ask a random stranger on the Internet."
FWIW you don't need an Internet service to ask questions of a real monk. You just need to find a monk in whatever religion or monastic order you want, and ask your question. Some even have email addresses.
Maybe the system itself is not using AI to create answers, but most lazy users probably will ask a LLM and post the result as their answers. So we get AI slop anyway.
Probably just a bug, not a data grab. We shipped something like this once: the answer endpoint looked up a user row that only got created on first question, and nobody tested a fresh visitor.
Somewhat misleadingly, not answered by monks. (also somewhat misleadingly, I am not a monk)
I tried to answer a few carefully, I got several in a row all on the topic of loneliness. Then I took a look at some of the answers people have given... and while some are beautifully crafted, others are not.
While there are obvious idiots everywhere, I think a greater risk might be that many well-intentioned people (myself included) are attempting to answer questions we are not qualified to answer, especially given the lack of context in the questions.
There was an app that did this, early in the pandemic I believe. I can’t remember the name. You would send anonymous letters into the void and someone else would respond anonymously. Very well-designed app, where I had several surprisingly meaningful and heartwarming exchanges. I think it shut down after a few weeks due to moderation difficulties though.
Wonderful! Reminds me of a site I once had, like before Twitter, which was dead simple. One input box and two buttons; one to post and one to search - no filter :D It got so full of spam, I closed it and lost the domain after a while.
Reminds me of ELIZA, 1966. Ask it something with a right answer and the mask slips. Wilderness-for-thoughts branding only works if nobody types arithmetic into it. Same trick, bigger lookup table.
First thought, we vote for the better answers, something like StackOverflow. Interesting questions get a myriad of answers from different perspectives, sorted by popularity, perhaps weighted by an authoritative score
Second thought, nah, cruxman would win all the time, atheists would get buried by hallelujos and the site would become a cesspool of bigotry, intolerance and hate
Sorry for off-topic, but: Is the SSL certificate actually bad, or is Spectrum screwing with me somehow? And if so, how? I'm using Cloudflare DNS, so how can Spectrum even do anything about it? Unless they are MITM-ing my DNS queries, which I suppose is possible but it's a level of chicanery I've not seen yet.
What happens to a question after a week? If asking is the point, who goes back and reads old answers? Has anyone seen whether askers return, or is it mostly people answering strangers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle