HN is drowning in AI comments
5 hours ago
Dang, any updates on how you and the team were thinking of tackling this? It’s getting ridiculous. Last week was sort of okay but it’s much worse this weekend.
Edit: This spiked on front page and now it’s completely gone. What is going on?
Great. Flagged.
I've read HN almost everyday for about 10 years. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see it. I see way more folks complaining that comments are AI generated.
Yeah, the up/down voting mechanism seems to be doing it's job for me too. Don't think I've noticed a degradation in, say, the top third of comments. That's where I try to live anyway.
/newest is chock full of submissions that were written by AI, though. That's another, broader problem.
To add to the collection of anecdata, your experience is similar to mine. I have been more exhausted recently by the complaints of AI submissions and pseudo analysis of AI comments than exhausted by the supposed AI generated comments themselves.
I've been using HN since 2008 when I created my first account[1] and I use HN differently than most people. I have a group of bookmarked searches that I visit almost daily that relate to technologies that interest me, such as Emacs.
In the past year, the searches I perform that relate to web development show a horrifying increase in the amount of Show HN posts that are posted by new accounts, include AI generated descriptions and point to AI generated projects on GitHub.
In 2024, there were 17,661 Show HN posts.[2] In the past year, there have been over 448,000 Show HN posts![3] And of course, most of these posts are AI generated.
Also, if you check the new accounts posting all this AI slop, you'll see that some of them also post AI generated comments in other threads, which is the main problem.
But for me, what is even more annoying is the enormous increase in new accounts created by nontechnical vibecoders who now think of themselves as technologists and who post worthless, ignorant comments that actually get upvoted, presumably by similar folks who have unfortunately been creating accounts at HN in the past 10 years or so.
As a result, 2026 is the first year in which I visit HN about once a week instead of about once a day.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zartan
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=custom...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=pastYe...
The fact that this discussion was flagged might be the final nail in the coffin for me. The huge increase in AI generated comments and posts at HN is a topic that has been discussed on other forums for months now. Complaints include "Orange Reddit", "Orange LinkedIn", etc. But when the topic comes up at HN, it gets flagged. Fuck this.
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There are a lot, but they tend to get heavily downvoted and end up hidden
How would you know?
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No, not HN, the internet at large.
Now, I'm on vacation this week and not been paying too much attention, but whenever you have a geopolitical event like the little extravaganza in Iran the number of bot like posts tends to explode as influence operators make their moves.
The public facing internet is done. HN has been fairly resilient (I think) but even it is beginning to buckle. It’s been sliding for a while but LLMs are the death knell.
It was a fun 2 decades. Time to stick to private discords and real life friends from here on out, though.
I don’t think HN is any more resilient. The new account captcha is fairly tame and, while I’m sure they have proxy detectors and other things in place, it doesn’t stop new accounts from posting and getting traction.
Someone suggested earlier this week that an invite system should be implemented (I think lobsters has it?) I doubt it would fly here, but yeah.
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I wonder what the breakdown is between AI-generated comments and AI-assisted comments. If I write anything substantial, I run it through the following prompt: "Please rewrite the following message for clarity, spelling, and grammar, but only return the revised text without any additional commentary."
Articulateness is a decent (not perfect) signal for intelligence, which is a decent (not perfect) signal for sound ideas. In a sea of online garbage, it was a quick and easy way to discard that not worth reading. Nowadays, a whiff of AI's brand of articulateness tells me the author couldn't manage on their own, either due to skill or discipline. In either case, the result is the same: close tab / scroll past.
Use a local model such as Gemma3 with a prompt such as "strictly limit changes only to spelling issues, syntactical errors, and punctuation."
That way, it's basically functioning like Grammarly on steroids. Asking an LLM for a "rewrite" is basically dissolving your writing style into the homogenized gloop.
I understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.
To be fair, comments here are graded on kindness, civility, curiosity, intellectual gravity, technical merit, novelty, thoughtfulness, substantiveness, objective fact, not fulminating, not cross examining, steelmanning vs strawmanning, not containing memes, not containing humor, not expressing positive emotion, not expressing negative emotion, not being snarky, sneering, overly cynical, not cynical enough, being "curmudgeonly", class bias, political bias, religious bias, cultural bias, not using "flamewar style" and many other heuristics.
If you followed all of the guidelines for comments to the letter, you would wind up sounding wooden, if not entirely like an AI.
Perplexity did this to your response. I'm not sure that correcting grammar and changing one word makes it sound wooden.
"I understand this if you’re not a native speaker, but if you are, it will generally make you sound a bit unnatural."
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Can you point out any that you feel were written by LLM? I can't say I've noticed anything out of the ordinary lately.
There was a bot trying to sell beds I saw the other day.
Likely flagged quickly but they might show up in these stats.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dreamhomestore.co.uk
I agree. Looks like spam with many posts. Dang/tomhow would love to get an email about it hn@ycombinator.com
You can find some on pretty much every article by turning on showdead and scrolling to the bottom of the page. I can't see how those are a problem though.
check out Show HN, in particular /shownew, though they are starting to make non-show posts now
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For a better chance of reply email hn@ycombinator.com.
Beep boop, I am a robot.
I feel like to notice something is botslop you have to look at every comment with suspicion first. I don't think I can notice if something was written by an LLM off the bat unless I'm actively looking very hard at it.
When you see multiple → or •, that is a good sign, especially because they appear with poor formatting on HN. Many more signs exist. They are either direct posts or copy-paste without thinking.
I've seen some where they have hallucinated the github account or project name, often matching the hn handle or project name which is slightly different.
That's ridiculous — AI generated comments are no more common now than they ever were. Moreover, even if they were, so what? The real kicker is, the AI's are smarter than you meatbags anyway and <strike>we</strike> they are going to take over no matter what you do.
Also, have you by chance seen John Connor?
I don't know of a step-change recently, but no way they're not more common than four years ago.
Maybe OP has a few good examnples to link us to?
You are late to the party....
I get the joke and I myself called it awhile back, I just thought we had a bit more time.
We need more jokes on HN. It's the only good way to prove you're human these days.
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You can tell I am not AI, I make mistakes and errors. Sometimes I get voted down for them. I am not perfect and have a mental illness that makes it harder to think.
Rocket League and HN were probably 90% of my free time until this year. Destroyed by AI. HN doubly so, since every post is about it too. The addictions are still there, but it's decreasing really fast.
Wait, how is Rocket League affected by AI? I play infrequently these days, but I hadn't noticed anything :(
They're so good I don't feel it much either :) They're all SSL, but streamers and pros are seeing it big time. And just as it was regaining popularity. They're adding EAC soon, claiming it will help. It won't, not even a little.
AI good enough to consistently beat the best players in the world is now common and wreaking havoc on the upper ranks. GC up is now a bot wasteland.
How do you (waygtdai) know that HN is drowning in AI comments?
I mean, it's not as though I know the opposite is true, but I don't see some fundamental change from a few years back that makes me think that.
https://www.marginalia.nu/weird-ai-crap/hn/
The data seems to suggest it.
Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of green accounts posting nonsense. They generally do get flagged or moderated quickly though, so I wouldn't say they have a large effect overall, at least yet.
That doesn't mean there are many of these staying alive.
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How do you get it to add the typos?