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 only seen a shift on the kind of submissions that get pushed to the front page compared to the past but I guess there's a change in what people consider important in the community
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.
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.
I would like to encourage you to step back a little and try to get a broader view on this issue.
I don't want to discuss whether there is more LLM-generated content or not. There clearly is, and there is no feasible way to get rid of it , because there is simply no reliable way to distinguish what was made by humans and what wasn't. Regardless of what is claimed, it is just not possible, if only because hybrid forms exist as well. This text was written by me, but reviewed and stylistically adjusted by an LLM.
It is therefore completely pointless to get upset about LLM content and demand anything from the moderators.
All we are left with are our votes and the "reputation" of our user handles - and the awareness that we need to learn to consume content with a great deal of skepticism. We should have been doing this all along, but it seems to be something we struggle with.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
And yes, this may mean that we stop using anonymous online platforms altogether, because nothing on them can be relied upon anymore. That is a shame, but it cannot be stopped — Pandora's LLM box has been open for at least five years.
I therefore consider any discussion about banning LLM content to be futile. We are witnessing another Eternal September here: it couldn't be stopped back then, and it won't be stopped today either.
Two loopholes in HN: allowing throwaway accounts and showing unreasonable tolerance to obvious LLM generated comments. A strict account filtering only for humans and acute ban for any LLM content will minimize the impact. But then you take away a huge Hacker portion of the participation. It's cognitive dissonant I suppose.
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.
That fell apart quickly due to sheer scale that AI operates at. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter mentioned a significant increase in Show HN. It is impossible to keep up. I wonder when HN will go down due to scaling issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The flood of humorous GPT-generated reviews on Amazon made me stop reading reviews altogether.
I can understand someone using a LLM to extrapolate one sentence into two paragraphs. I don't like it, but I understand that on Amazon the button is right there and it helps people feel smarter about their literary skills, in the way that filters help people feel prettier on instagram.
But the added snark or humoristic tone? Why instruct the LLM to do that? To get more likes? On a review?
I can see that sort of, a coworker of mine routinely scrapes HN and feeds it into an LLM. I don't know why, I don't know if he uses it to respond, or he's looking for something, but he copies and paste and runs it. So I think it's very possible.
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.
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 only seen a shift on the kind of submissions that get pushed to the front page compared to the past but I guess there's a change in what people consider important in the community
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.
I don’t care for the karma, but I wish dang would intentionally unflag this and have it on front page so people can voice their concerns.
I would like to encourage you to step back a little and try to get a broader view on this issue.
I don't want to discuss whether there is more LLM-generated content or not. There clearly is, and there is no feasible way to get rid of it , because there is simply no reliable way to distinguish what was made by humans and what wasn't. Regardless of what is claimed, it is just not possible, if only because hybrid forms exist as well. This text was written by me, but reviewed and stylistically adjusted by an LLM.
It is therefore completely pointless to get upset about LLM content and demand anything from the moderators. All we are left with are our votes and the "reputation" of our user handles - and the awareness that we need to learn to consume content with a great deal of skepticism. We should have been doing this all along, but it seems to be something we struggle with.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
And yes, this may mean that we stop using anonymous online platforms altogether, because nothing on them can be relied upon anymore. That is a shame, but it cannot be stopped — Pandora's LLM box has been open for at least five years.
I therefore consider any discussion about banning LLM content to be futile. We are witnessing another Eternal September here: it couldn't be stopped back then, and it won't be stopped today either.
So what is there left to discuss?
[dead]
There are a lot, but they tend to get heavily downvoted and end up hidden
How would you know?
There's a showdead option in settings
Two loopholes in HN: allowing throwaway accounts and showing unreasonable tolerance to obvious LLM generated comments. A strict account filtering only for humans and acute ban for any LLM content will minimize the impact. But then you take away a huge Hacker portion of the participation. It's cognitive dissonant I suppose.
[dead]
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.
It's the community moderation that keeps HN resilient, i.e. many-humans-in-the-loop
That fell apart quickly due to sheer scale that AI operates at. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter mentioned a significant increase in Show HN. It is impossible to keep up. I wonder when HN will go down due to scaling issues.
You do see a lot more comments with AI tells in show-hn, I guess because not many view those so they aren't moderated out as quickly.
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."
"I think" is explicitly disclaiming authority. Omitting it changes the social signaling of the response significantly.
Switching "wooden" for "a bit unnatural" also does a disservice: "wooden" describes a specific quality of deviance.
Over-all, I would definitely consider the revision stiffer and more reserved than the original.
“Wooden” is much richer and unique than “a bit unnatural” so yes the ai version does sound more like a robot.
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
[dead]
For a better chance of reply email hn@ycombinator.com.
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.
There was a joke there that you missed.
Maybe OP has a few good examnples to link us to?
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
The flood of humorous GPT-generated reviews on Amazon made me stop reading reviews altogether.
I can understand someone using a LLM to extrapolate one sentence into two paragraphs. I don't like it, but I understand that on Amazon the button is right there and it helps people feel smarter about their literary skills, in the way that filters help people feel prettier on instagram.
But the added snark or humoristic tone? Why instruct the LLM to do that? To get more likes? On a review?
The dumb jokes we've been flooded with June 2023 are some of the easiest content for AI to produce.
This is seriously a good point. Maybe that and typos or bad phrasing
AI is a master at bad phrasing. Typos are just an extra bullet point in your prompt to add
Depends on the context ;-)
I don't know. Most of my attempts at humor here seem to attract the moderation PETN.
>We need more jokes on HN.
I see... Hacker News needs to get a sense of humor or else get drowned in AI slop.
So we're doomed is what you're saying.
I can see that sort of, a coworker of mine routinely scrapes HN and feeds it into an LLM. I don't know why, I don't know if he uses it to respond, or he's looking for something, but he copies and paste and runs it. So I think it's very possible.
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.
No it's not.
It's drowning in low quality human NPC comments.
Maybe that's because all resources are tied up fighting AI, but it's been going on for a long time now.
This post is a great example of low quality. No evidence, no solution. Just NPC bitching.
Unless it's AI, then well played.
[flagged]
How do you get it to add the typos?
[flagged]