Comment by Lerc
7 days ago
I have seen this question asked on subreddits, Not about AI, but for other topics that some people dislike.
They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy"
Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group A and will not be a participant in group B.
To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"
Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community. Directing a community to divide to remove an element you dislike is an attempt to appropriate the established community.
Hacker news, like everything in tech, is susceptible to hype. Today it's AI, a few years ago it was Bitcoin.
I do think it's worthwhile to occasionally have a discussion about what content we want to see, and if a particular topic is getting too much attention.
It's also totally reasonable for a group of people to not want their agenda hijacked.
So, IMO, let the discussion continue. Let's see what comes out of it.
I should add: Many years ago I used to read a news site that was modeled after slashdot. One day the person running it decided to switch it to be community-moderated.
Every day it was the same discussion over again, from someone who didn't bother to do a Google search or look at what was posted the day prior. After a week or so of seeing the same discussion over and over again, I stopped reading the news site.
Needless to say, it's important to occasionally have discussions like this. I also think we under-appreciate the amount of moderation that goes on here. Sometimes I look at the "new" feed and it is just loaded with lots and lots of nonsense, so I get that someone has to put their finger on the scale to keep the quality up.
Out of curiosity, what was the site?
The only clone I'm familiar with is (defunct) christdot.org.
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Kuro5hin?
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To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced something like user provided tags and users can vote for/against (to circumvent abuse)
Then the people wanting to filter "x" could just do it via simple grease monkey scripts or if HN natively supported it.
Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but neither does it have to be.
No. HN is good as it is and I find it disrespectful when newcomers are demanding changes like this. There's a good reason the forum has stayed the same for almost 20 years.
The UI might be the same but there's clearly been a lot of work done on the backend of the site in that time
edit to add: Don't gatekeep by using the pejorative "newcomers". Unless you're PG there will always be someone who has been around here longer than you
1. I joined in 2016. I guess it all depends on what the cutoff is for "newcomers." I suppose you could call anyone who signed on after 2007 a newcomer.
2. "demanding?" I wrote:
>Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across. The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.
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I would like to be able to filter topics I don't care about. My acocunt is older than yours so I guess my opinion holds more weight according to your metric.
> There's a good reason the forum has stayed the same for almost 20 years.
You mean like when vote changing was added?
Topic tags wouldn't kill HN.
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Most platforms don't grow this feature because they can benefit from redirecting user energy into places that the platform is choosing. Or some vocal minority of the user base benefits from redirecting the platform to a place of their choosing.
Similar to nest usurpation with eusocial insects, this is by definition parasitism when the energy-redirection is unwanted or unavoidable.
In the specific case of AI it's way worse than the usual suspects where everyone is effected and so everyone has to have some opinion (looking at you politics). Because even some rant about how much you hate AI is directly feeding it at least 3 ways: first there's the raw data, then there's the free-QA aspect, then there's the free-advertisement aspect when others speak up to disagree with your rant. So yeah, even people who like some of the content sometimes quickly start to feel hijacked.
>>To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced something like user provided tags and users can vote for/against (to circumvent abuse)
HN's power is its simplicity. We don't need any of those features.
This is one of those rare old internet places that still has no feature clutter, ads and other distracting and irritating UI elements.
Sometimes something works fine and it doesn't need to be changed.
> To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"
It could just as easily be "I don't feel like there is a place here for me anymore and I wish I had another place to go"
In my experience that is not what people mean.
People with that sentiment ask about what alternative places exist, some of them make their own places.
My post above mentioned something I notice on Reddit. I hardly ever visit Reddit these days. It doesn't really feel like the place for me now. I am not posting this comment on Reddit.
> People with that sentiment ask about what alternative places exist, some of them make their own places
I don't think that's overall very true
Most of those people are just lonely and isolated, and that's a big part of why we are living in what people are calling a "loneliness epidemic"
It's easier than ever to make a new niche area. It's more difficult than ever to get your niche area discovered by others, because you are drowned out by the noise
It feels quite hopeless for many people in my experience
> I have seen this question asked on subreddits, "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy" To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here"
I don't disagree with this observation about Reddit. However, I feel HN readers are more topic-oriented. Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a discussion.
I grant there are some topics here that tend to be more engagement driven but on balance I think the above holds.
> Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a discussion.
based on the number of comments i see that are oblivious to the actual content of the articles, i'm pretty sure the user flow is "Folks come to HN to read headlines and have a conversation, and then maybe get drawn into reading an article"
Those comments can't reflect people who are drawn in by the article but don't engage. Upvotes hint it is a significant number.
Past that, I don't see non-reading commenters being a dominant presence. Some topics draw a few more than normal but that's the worst of it.
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It is also possible to appropriate an established community by bringing in new members over time with views opposing the founding principles. This is much easier if the leadership preaches tolerance.
This is one of those things that is kind of hard to say without people getting triggered because of negative stereotypes but sometimes you have to stand up for principles and kick people out of social groups to keep a good thing going.
I’ll never cease being amazed at how much people whine about scrolling past a post they don’t want to click on. It’s the tech equivalent of “my kid shouldn’t have to see ‘those’ types of books on the shelf in a library”. At the time of writing this, 16 of the top 20 stories on my feed are not AI related in any way.
> To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"
I am truly tired of AI being rammed down my throat, not just via the tech news, but in article content (slop), in un-asked-for tech product features, and at my own tech job. The solution is not to divide the community and make people unwelcome, but to provide at least some minimal set of filters and ways to opt out of the hype frenzy. I don't want people to feel unwelcome, but I do wish there was a way to turn the AI firehose off.
Who’s forcing you to read the AI articles?
Some people come to HN for interesting articles, many lists exists if you want to know what I mean.
If, say, a third to two third of articles in any given frontpage, for multiple months to years, do not fit this description - can you see how one's ability to find what they are looking for gets hampered?
Like yes, you can grow nice flowers on the beautiful fertile soil there, it just sucks we need to get rid of these protected grasslands harboring endangered species on top of it.
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I don't think the poster has the power to split HN in twain.
I don't think the poster believes some kind of democracy could bring about this.
I do believe that by entertaining the idea, the subsequent discussion will be useful for moderators to get a feel of what their userbase thinks of the current state of things.
From my understanding, the soul of HN and what makes it what it is is the moderation - having discussions on issues is an efficient way to signal to them.
It must have been somewhat the same when chess engines started to beat human players. The chess community should be fairly divided about the usefulness of such a tool. After a while things settled down, and all players use the tool in some way or another.
Some chess players benefited more from the tool than others. I always analyze my games carefully with an engine after the game. After less than 10 years I managed to get from zero to almost master level. I attribute that to extensive engine analysis I put on my games afterwards.
The user needs to know how to use the engine, LLM or chess engine, when it makes sense to use it, what are the shortcomings of the tool and so on.
LLMs are game changers, and AI's ability to distinguish the signal from noise is marvelous. Will it be a game changer like it is now for chess, a very narrow game compared to everything else, remains to be seen.
This honestly reminds me of the crypto days from 2017-2021ish.
Literally 80% of the posts were about crypto and how we were going to experience some ground shattering revolution. There were so many posts about how all the topics are about crypto and how it is annoying.
Ultimately, all that noise and the billions of dollars poured into that turned into a meme if we're honest. Most people just buy/flip crypto or hold BTC that they'll sell when they double it after a year.
AI in LLM form is at least useful in many ways and in front of millions of people without any rugpulls and other shit, but due to their inherent limitations (doesn't matter how much python it writes and executes, half the time or more its wrong for any actual/meaningful work) I think the hype will settle in the next couple of years.
Apparently, it's not even close.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44484996)
Awesome! That's interesting to know.
I guess the barrier to entry being soooo low when it comes to AI definitely plays a role.
For myself, i often want to be able to just "shift views" on an existing community, rather than wholesale move to somewhere else that fits better.
I find I can do that with granular enough subreddits, or the (maybe old) feature in Twitter where you could group people you follow into lists and see multiple "homepages".
This for me has solved the issue of dividing community, which at the least from a practical level can be tricky.
Ive been exploring how to achieve this effect "on top" of HN lately, rather than by controlling followers, by popping a very simple AI filter on top that re-ranks it for me, and found it quite satisfying, but not sure what the ultimate value/usecase might be.
I would like the Rust evangs to have their own group. Thankfully AI came and saved us all from their terror
But I don’t see anyone saying group B isn’t welcome in both groups. It’s not as though you can only be in a finite amount of them.
At the same time, I never saw HN do this with any other trend so why with AI?
I highly doubt this is going to happen anyway.
HN has many VCs and startups and HN itself is backed by a VC firm, so I highly doubt AI news is going anywhere as it benefits many YC Startups currently levering this hype as well as VCs and other investors shoving cash into this.
Additionally, that there are also ton of vibe coders, OpenAI / Meta / Google folks here interested in this topic.
I'm afraid the only solution is for people to ride the cycle until it either fizzles out or morphs into something else.
> Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community.
This is very hard to do. But hey, I'll give it a try.
Starting now a new community for AI-assisted coding: https://kraa.io/vibecoding
> product building
> vibecoding
These should not be deemed equivalent.
It's about a topic not the people.
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So say the "bigots" who, for example, want sports news separated from regular news because they don't find football so interesting.
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