Comment by tokioyoyo

6 days ago

It would be cool to see HN internal stats over the last 5 years. New users, posts from different accounts and etc.

32 comments

tokioyoyo

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woozyolliew  6 days ago

Yeah. Could be astroturfing. Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.

Your analysis by account age might be telling

  • OccamsMirror  6 days ago

    I want to push back on this. Hacker News was way more interesting before 75% of the submissions were about AI.

  • bossyTeacher  6 days ago

    > Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.

    No. I distinctly remember HN being fairly skeptical of LLMs the way they were sold back in 2023. Then, the astroturfing began happening gradually. First in the comments and then in the posts.

    • tokioyoyo  6 days ago

      To be very fair, I was also very skeptical about LLMs in 2023. Not so much anymore.

      Edit: ok, i guess this account is from 2024, but been around a while. I guess can’t defend myself like this :)

      3 replies →

    • Barbing  6 days ago

      Check Ars. Commenters hated it. Commenters are still 15-20 y/o accounts, but less blind hate.

      Obviously, in my opinion, based on reporting of truthfulness someone like Sam Altman would not be entirely opposed to astroturfing here.

      But people should probably appreciate at the least running free local software that has a few tricks up its sleeve.

    • doix  6 days ago

      Yeah, I was very skeptical and now I've drank the kool-aid. Got multiple parallel cloud agents with independent loops making PRs and me reviewing them. AI is also reviewing PRs and sometimes even catches useful things.

      LLMs in 2023, from what I remember, were slightly better auto complete. It's pretty different now.

      10 replies →