I used to love reading the HN comments. When there was a new tool or technology being discussed there would almost certainly be someone who directly worked on it, if not the founder themselves, giving further insight and welcoming discussion. And when there was back and forth discussion, it was people clarifying their questions and answers, and sharing their expertise. Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.
I disagree with _that_ being the turn of events. In my experience, the conversation has died because everything turns into either: "That article was written by LLM" or "how this relates to LLM"
Yeah? You reckon they are on the same level? I wasn't there but I find it hard to believe people were as worried about PHP as they are blindly prompting an LLM for 10 hours a day.
For a period it was endless NoSQL submissions. Then endless Anti-NoSQL submissions. Then there was the Ruby period where every Ruby release yielded endless submissions and murmurations. Then that turned to Go. Then, as you said, how we all needed to become blockchain experts and everything was going to be built on blockchains, also did you see some random retailer uses a payment processor that through a long and convoluted process will let you pay with BTC?
At every juncture there have been people reminiscing about the good old days that never actually existed at all. About how great it used to be compared to today.
I think the funniest are the constant "man, remember when the BIGS used to engage with us proles?" Ignoring that there are still many founders and the like hanging out here, present, future and past, what a weird thing to reminisce about. It's like "I used to be in the presence of people who mattered". I mean, matter yourself, because pretending you're in a club with them is foolhardy.
My perception is that HN got pickier, more hostile, less listening and more "broadcast-only mode" writing, progressively, over several years. It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.
And then LLM happened. And HN got more LLM writing, more LLM articles, more complaints about LLM-written material, plus AI became a dominant subject of conversation. LLM is in addition to the other negative changes.
This is what my analysis [1] so far supports. It's not really a topic distribution. The temperature in comments here is rising. I suspect that's changing a lot of the site culture.
While HN is part of the set, I think we need to look larger. Is it just HN, or is it everywhere? If it's not everywhere, what percentage of sites is it? What are the sites that don't have this issue like or do different.
I think part of it is that HN has grown a lot because of a lot of other sites getting worse. The problem is that growing makes it worse. Then add on top of that there are a lot of high value targets here on HN that bots try to target, financially or politically.
Internet is a messy place now. I remember years and years ago, like early 2000s people thought that things like astro-turfing weren't real, and governments were not targeting individuals/groups on forums. How nieve their were.
I don't think accepting that the rest of the Internet became more hostile is a good defense IMO. I understand it's probably a "top of funnel" problem but the fact that it's leaking out here shows that HN needs to evolve with the new norms.
I would argue that LLM is not an addiction, it’s a negativity multiplier, as it lowered the barrier of entry for low quality content and promotional material
just a side note: HN is just a well laid out site thats easy to read and easy to comment on. i find reddit hard to use, making me click to see more comments and then taking me to a new page and disrupting my flow, yuk.
> It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.
While it has always been a thing on here to some degree, the one growing trend I will note is that people are increasingly more forceful in demanding that everyone know about the things they aren't interested in, and more demanding that other people don't talk about things that don't interest them.
It's like people can't just skip a submission on the front page. They absolutely must go in to every discussion to tell everyone how much they don't want to read about or talk about that subject, and how much they want everyone to stop talking about it.
It's tilting at windmills. Right now this can mostly be seen in AI discussions where just about every AI-related submission will have a number of people declaring that it's all so boring and they wish there was an HN ban on such submissions. Cue someone foolishly believing them making yet another "HN without the AI" variant that sits unloved.
But the same thing could previously be seen against things that people don't want to be a thing. When WWDC happens people will announce that they're sick of all of the Apple news. The same for Google during I/O. Etc. People are against some thing and they really, truly think they can shame or scold others into falling in line.
> In my experience, the conversation has died because everything turns into either: "That article was written by LLM" or "how this relates to LLM"
Which is why every few days, I have to post a comment along the lines of:
"At some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder."
I get downvoted every time, but it's refreshing to know others share my gripe that it is tiring to virtually every day see this discussion play out in some HN thread or other. Those threads rarely add anything to the discussion.
> Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.
More specifically: comments with an opinion and no justification are modded up. "PHP is garbage" or "Person X is a terrible person" used to be considered noise. Not because they were right or wrong, but because "PHP is a language that can't keep a consistent function names and argument poisitoning in it's own standard library" or "Person X is a terrible person because their engineering milestones are frequently delayed".
Dan or whoever will throw out "everyone one every site always thinks the site's going downhill" but it is, really.
It is my feeling that there has been an uptick of negativity for the last few years. Well before AI.
I understand people have their reasons to be negative about tech but they could go somewhere else to post their comments. Going to a Star Wars forum to tell everyone how much Star Wars sucks would be nonsensical. Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks. That’s how I HN has felt for years now.
I’ve taken breaks from this site from time to time because eventually it just makes you feel bad. It wears you down.
> I understand people have their reasons to be negative about tech but they could go somewhere else to post their comments.
Are they complaining about the tech or are they complaining that bad people are doing bad things with it?
The current hot topic with me is LLMs. Someone could be doing nice things with it, but the only ones I see are making "educational" videos with hallucinated information. By the time I figure out that the channel is slop, I now have to purge several videos worth of fake facts from my knowledge base. And all this so someone can make a quick buck off of youtube ads.
During my teens I used to hang out on a Naruto fan forum, and it eventually became a Naruto hate forum. Understandable though, because the serie really sucked after a while. The memes and essays were fun.
>Going to a Star Wars forum to tell everyone how much Star Wars sucks would be nonsensical. Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks. That’s how I HN has felt for years now.
Have you ever interacted with a fandom?
No one complains about Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans.
I agree with you about HN sucking all the joy out of everything, but that's been part of the culture for as long as I can remember. And when Show HN is almost nothing but AI slop and landing pages and half the threads are people shitting on programming and anyone who cares about it as an art or a science, or as anything but a means to generate monetary value, the frustration is understandable. HN seems to be undergoing a cultural schism and a lot of people just don't belong to it anymore.
Note that it may actually be true. One way to look at it is all successful organizations and communities are continually dying. In order for an organization to get critical mass and start attracting people, it has to be far above the mean in quality; the mean idea, after all, never gets realized. After that, everything is regression to the mean, i.e. downwards, until it ceases to exist.
I can, sadly, relate to this. Is there a name for this phenomenon or is it simply a trick of the mind, a calcification of temporal perception that gradually boils the frog until one day you realize that referencing Van Halen or Max Headroom results in blank stares?
The brain is very good at compressing information, so if your days are fairly similar to each other they'll all blur together. And I don't mean the things you think about, but the places you go to. Real places, I might add.
If you rarely discover real places you've never been to, the memory will just be compressed and it seems like last year that you moved from your last place, when it was actually forty years ago.
Now, this can be alleviated by instead of visiting new places learning new things, but those things have to be actually new to your brain and not just more of something you are already familiar with. Otherwise it gets compressed all the same.
New places, new things, new people, new routines all reset the clock.
Subjectively it felt like I lived about 5 years in the first 2 months after my first kid was born - certainly they were more memorable than the previous 5 years. We were basically confined to the apartment except for doctor's visits during that time period, but the experience of caring for a little person was dramatically different from everything that came before. And then the newborn periods of our 2nd and 3rd kids flew by, because we had all the routines down.
2020 also felt like I lived a lifetime in a year, even though we were shut-in, because of all the events and changes of routine that year.
It goes in cycles has been my observation. I think some of it is that as new generations rise in tech, young guys coming up always seem to think they have to take it out of others hide how wrong they are. Very weird cultural phenomenon in tech. Then folks chill out, get older, gain some wisdom, dial back the vitriol.
Then their children show up and the cycle repeats again.
Time flows like a river, and history repeats itself...
I would agree with and extend your remarks with bot percentage only increases over time, there's a repellant mechanism that pushes away humans and no mechanism at all to lure them back once they've been pushed out of a site.
Eventually you end up with stackexchange or Reddit or 4chan where 95%+ of posts are bots or at least LLM generated, and the remaining 5% is crazy people who refuse to leave. HN is behind in that cycle but will inevitably and unavoidably catch up because as I stated there's no repair mechanism. All successful online orgs and communities attract bots and LLMs that kill the organization. There is no immune system other than unplugging and touching grass IRL.
My guess about "large scale socioeconomic effects" is we can't talk about Dead Internet Theory in public in polite company, but we can talk about "too much LLMs" or whatever in a vague sense while describing all the symptoms of Dead Internet Theory. Like those people who complain about poop on the sidewalks but can't be permitted socially to declare any sort of dislike of homeless people, so the talk is focused solely on the symptoms as if the symptoms appeared magically, an uncaused causation. The advertising fraud bubble will pop, eventually, and it'll all be blamed on LLM bots on social media, it totally wasn't planned and aided and abetted by the companies themselves, no, LOL. Their profits off advertising fraud were totally accidental and unintentional, you see, so they should get away with it. The people to blame are those vague AI bot things that magically appeared and totally had no legally prosecutable humans behind them.
Another large scale effect to talk about is massively pulled forward demand. A decade or two of Facebook and that pulls a lifetime of demand forward. What happens when the bill's due and nobody left but a tiny fraction of hopeless addicts? If the population as a whole does a lifetime of doomscrolling in 20 years, the next generation at least will be a total drought. Internet access will never go away because its too useful to pay your bills online, but social media will almost certainly go the way of the late 1970s CB Radio crash. I assure you CB radios are still being made, people still making money off them, and people are still using them, however only a microscopic fraction of the population uses CB Radios. So it will be soon, for "socializing online".
People also frequently complained about new users upvoting the wrong content. So they made /classic, which only counts votes from accounts of a certain age. It used to look quite different from the front page. Now it’s basically the same.
There isn't a forum in the world without superiority, snark, self-importance, and toxicity; some of that is simply an artifact of communicating about contentious topics in the context-stripped medium of text messaging.
But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.
Oh, man. My rate of trying to insert a non-obscure joke into a comment and a half-dozen commenters taking the exact words at face value and then pointing out their factual incorrectness is too damn high. I don't know if it's a symptom of, let's say, neurodiversity, or ESL, but humor on HN is almost universally punished. I don't think they are bots because once in a while I crack jokes in AI prompts (to amuse myself when exceptionally bored) and the LLMs always recognize them, even if they don't respond right away with a sensible chuckle GIF.
In my experience, those HNers actually think that they are the ones being funny when they point out your factual incorrectness or when they want to be pedantic about something.
Context matters; a comment comparing HN to Reddit in the middle of huge thread specifically about the character of the community and how it may (or may not) have changed is different than a comment on a random thread. Especially as quite a few seem to think that, no, something really has changed the last few years and it's not merely a "a semi-noob illusion"?
Those ~20 year old comments compared HN to Reddit of that time, which was insulting to HN. In the 20 years that passed probably HN at some point crossed the threshold of old Reddit. But now the insult is to compare it to current Reddit.
On the other hand putting it in the rules that you’re not allowed to say X and then quoting the rule as evidence against X is at the very least not an intellectually interesting way of making a point. Imagine if everyone put in their profile that they’re never wrong and kept pointing at that when challenged.
Lobste.rs is quite different from HN, though, so I think it's fair to warn people in advance:
HN allows anything that "hackers" might find interesting. On lobste.rs, anything that's not directly programming-related is generally off-topic.
HN encourages self-promotion, lobste.rs discourages it.
Until recently lobste.rs was very actively anti-AI. Newer rules have rolled that back somewhat, but there is still a rather vocal anti-AI contingent that is not afraid to pick fights with people who openly admit to being interested in machine learning as a technology.
Lobste.rs is alright.. I've taken some dips as a reader and turned down invites.
Ignoring the actual submissions, which are usually mirrored on HN, I find the small user base often doesn't offer much in interesting comments. Many are short with little value, and I don't recall seeing many submission authors piping in, or luminaries with the deep knowledge that you sometimes see drop in on HN.
Friends tell me there is a definite political bias that leaks out.
I think Hackaday is a good alternative for hardware oriented HNers.
Absolutely not. Just look at the fiasco when it came to Bun's rust migration. So many threads about how it was a marketing stunt, how it will never work, how when it's working it's still not on main, when it was on main how it took a whole couple months and X $. And now that the articles about it's completion have come, practically radio silence and no admission of being completely repeatedly wrong. HN was bad, lobste.rs was awful. That saga showed how inaccurate and motivated reasoning both of these forums are.
I'd like one if you have any, as well. I like Hacker News but I really need to go "outside" more on the web, I realized the other day that HN has become my hobbit hole over the last decade plus, but when I look for other places I'm mostly only finding value in small, semi-private communities.
Interesting. I felt like after the election HN "tech bros" were just more "tech bro", and those of us who think most of these technocrats are repugnant stopped censoring ourselves.
- Canada payment system
- folding paper airplanes
- Solar panels
- Raspberry pi price increases
- a bunch of show hns
- how does malloc work
There are more AI posts that's for sure, but it's also not that bad? It's also heavily affecting the livelihood of many people here (for better and often worse), so it's reasonable that it would be prevalent.
There's always been grumpy engineers here, on stackoverflow, reddit, everywhere. Lots of grumpy engineers are also amazing engineers. There's newbies proud to show something, even though it's not really always that great, some people dunk, some people encourage etc.
Same, I still think this is one of the last places to get mostly bot-free high-level discourse. Thankfully other than certain threads, I don't think the incentive is there for botfarms to game this place.
Currently every top reply on X, and most top replies on Facebook and IG, are some contrarian engagement-bait bot nonsense.
Almost everything in the new submissions is about AI and has been for a while now. Same with the links you see. It's getting to the point where non-AI tech news and information is completely drowned out. Stepping back month by month you can see how the AI content increases exponentially. Soon it'll be all you can read about it unless something is done. Perhaps a yc.ai site for AI-related news and discussion?
I have a browser extension that auto-clicks the Hide button for entries with AI-related terms in the title. Helps surface the interesting stories. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
AI is still the new big thing. Remains to be seen whether it will eventually just become a relatively stable part of the substrate, like the internet, or if the curve will keep bending upward - in which case it will likely remain top of mind as long as human minds are relevant. My bet's on the former, but we'll see.
I suppose that demonstrates a third possibility, that the bubble will burst and the hype train will end. I'm personally more bullish on its usefulness than that, but again, I guess we'll see.
I too doubt it will pop the way crypto did. The difference being, if you ignore the weird financing and ya know, societal collapse from AI, it's doing something useful!
But it sure felt like every HN story for a bit was crypto/blockchain/NFT related.
I think AI is only part of the story. No one is investing in anything else. Even all the AI news is navel gazing and not really a lot of "this start-up used AI to 10x whatever."
It's the natural progression of websites like this. Reddit went through the same progression: it was very positive and felt like a community when the migration from Digg first happened. 10 years ago, Hacker News felt like an insider website for professionals. It still does, but there's definitely an uptick in negativity.
Hacker News didn’t turn into Reddit because of AI, but it’s certainly turning into Harvard Business Review. The primary benefit of the HN-saturating component of modern AI is about allowing untrained managers to delegate some or all their work to cheap labor. Without that benefit of delegating to one’s contracted agents, the majority of HN’s AI interests over the past two years evaporate. So, yes, we’re still an insider community for professionals, but a lot of those professionals have revealed their preference for management rather than individual contribution, and in a very short period of time. It’s no wonder the community is tearing itself apart: I can think of no greater insult to our ICs that aren’t interested in delegating their work to others, than turning this community into an HBR forum. “Ten ways to get more work out of your workers” is just as offensive a submission to ICs as it always has been whether they’re employers, contractors, or generative AI — but now that anyone can be a manager, with HNs mods choosing to remain powerless against submissions of managerial content, here we are. The only recourse left is for users to start flagging managerial content as unsuitable for the site, since the mods will be forced by their own adopted principles to accept that popular opinion as well. Sadly, I don’t think there’s enough ICs left here to outweigh the managers’ upvotes.
yeah HN really reminds me of reddit before the Digg exodus. I wonder if it will have the same fate eventually as it gets more popular and moderation can't keep up
Reddit started showing signs of terminal illness in 2011 and spez since ran it into the ground along with CondeNast. 2015 was the death knell after the CEO, Ellen Pao, was featured at the top of /r/PunchableFaces, which then temporarily went private. Staff shakeup ensued.
At the time it was a massive conversation around whether reddit should have to host content its advertisers didn't agree with, except they had heavily contributed to killing off old forums whose free speech was not compromised by advertisers. This was part of a larger conversation about free speech protection online and right-to-platform which still ensues. Corporations frequently cite their own free speech interests while suppressing speech of individuals and organizations. The current organization of the web is just perverse and tenuous.
Hacker News is quite unique in that while it is an aggregator, I have never felt that staff moderation crossed over into censorship, even when I've been on the receiving side of it. The moment dang leaves and pg retires, it's over. Tom Howard might do OK for a while, but the reason HN, despite eternal September and growing amounts of negativity, spam and astroturfing, continues to be a fun place on the web is because Dan is the man and fully embodied Paul Graham's established foundational principles.
We all need to be thinking about what kind of internet we want our grandchildren and future society to inherit and start building today.
Traditionally Tumblr was blamed for that in the late 2010s, although Digg is plausible. I think the sheer volume of Tumblr had more impact on Reddit than Digg ever could have, its a size thing.
A lot of Reddit problems were own-goals. Lets have a civil war over being a free speech or being a brutally censored speech site, I'm sure the civilians trapped in the middle will love the experience. Spoiler -> They did NOT.
But humans can always be replaced by bots if you're selling advertising views, LOL. HN doesn't sell ads (or at least none have ever gotten past my ad blocker) so there's fewer bots here so the decline due to bots is slower here.
Guess I’ve been on this site for… 14 years? Dang. The trends seem to have always come and gone, along with the snarky picking apart of individuals framed as intellectual discussion. Yet, it remains a high value discussion board, where in passing, I learn about great tools and approaches to problem solving that I work into my own arsenal of thing doing.
The AI dust will settle, we’re just exactly in the middle of it right now.
Every time I see a post like this about any topic, all I think is that the poster has matured but the content is still aimed at the previous self, since newcomers are in their position now
Nothing has changed except the poster - they were previously part of the snarky individuals, or at least tolerated it, and now have moved on
I was definitely part of the snark in my earlier days, swept up by it all. It contributed to making me a worse person, so I stepped back for a long time, decided that I needed my opinions to not only be my own, but constructive. Tearing people and ideas down is exactly against the spirit of hacking about.
In some ways, I think that's true, especially with AI. But, as another commenter pointed out, before that it was crypto stuff. So, popular things are discussed a lot. I personally think that's ok.
And, regarding AI, it's profoundly changed our lives especially for software devs. And we are in the infancy stages so there is a lot new and trying to be figured out still. So while it is somewhat fatiguing to see so much AI stuff, I actually welcome it. I've learned a lot here because of it.
Finally, while there is some tension in the comments, and a decent amount of negativity and pessimism in the comments, there are usually high quality comments that get voted up and people who are violating the guidelines often get voted down. Which makes me feel like the community as a majority still cares a lot about keeping HN reasonable.
I spend a lot of time here because I like it here. There is a lot of good and the bad is reasonable/manageable for me. I especially appreciated all the love for TNG and Patrick Stewart when he passed. My family doesn't share my affinity but it was clear a lot of the HN community did. I was comforted.
The people who have barreled into tech over the last 10 years have been increasingly more concerned with money than a lot of the stuff that made this an interesting spot to discuss technical stuff. In addition, I think a fair number of the interesting people have retired from tech altogether and no longer spend any time here.
I don't see material differences between HN from 5 years ago and now.
Maybe 15 years ago HN was a truly different forum. The "tech" world was much smaller then, making this little corner of web rather esoteric and only of interest to an educated audience.
Additionally, there was still techno-optimism in the late 2000's and early 2010's so you'd have more positive comments and less American politics. 2016 always struck me as the turning point, not just for HN but for most of the web.
From most people I talk to, there is an understanding that the overwhelm of AI content, bot comments, etc. has degraded the quality of community spaces (especially HN but also including Reddit, X/Twitter, etc.). I hope we can figure out a way to get more human-curated content soon and make the economics of amplifying it make sense (obviously it does not in this current transition chapter).
I'd guess more and more valuable discussion will just shift to gated invite only groups. Private discord servers, signal, telegram etc etc
I don't see another feasible way of protecting against the spam.
What's more strange to me is why these content places like Twitter and Reddit don't see this as a danger to themselves? Why would someone want to advertise in a place that's 90% bots? Reddit for example made it harder to check astroturf bots by blocking viewing comment and post history and giving every user default AdjectiveNounNumber style names. I get why it works short term but I've completely stopped using it because I just found myself facing fake botted engagement everywhere.
> I'd guess more and more valuable discussion will just shift to gated invite only groups. Private discord servers, signal, telegram etc etc I don't see another feasible way of protecting against the spam.
This is sadly the direction I think we are heading towards. I will lament the loss of the open internet.
> Reddit for example made it harder to check astroturf bots by blocking viewing comment and post history and giving every user default AdjectiveNounNumber style names
They did this just weeks before their IPO in what I assume was an effort to decieve shareholders from discovering just how did the platform really is. The amount of "people" with that setting on is shocking to me. On a site where people didn't even set a profile picture 9/10 times, I cannot believe that like 7/10 users are choosing to hide their history.
Reddit is playing an illusion game fueled by bots to convince users and shareholders the platform is alive when it has began dying years ago.
This has also perplexed me (advertising-to-bot-relationship), but I'm guessing the cost of combating these bots is going up (as complexity goes up and token cost goes down - whether subsidized or not).
I hate the idea that the future is only gated invite-only groups though. At the very least, some tag of "BOT" and then the ability to hide all bot content (unless it's highly upvoted by humans) would be great.
Any attempt to seriously combat bots would most likely impact real user engagement numbers so it is indeed a tricky business problem to solve.
But I can't see the Reddit comment change as anything other than a cynical "astroturfing as a service" to advertisers. Doesn't seem to be working out for them though given their stock performance this year.
I propose we sign each other's PGP keys as a honor code system of writing of one's own words. Idk how this will turn out... Complete distrust or tribalism or actually useful?
The problem is that it's too easy to copy/paste a rebuttal written by an LLM as if you wrote it, without actually understanding it. Simply signing such a faux thought does nothing.
Maybe an online meetup on Zoom is just about still viable, but we need to hurry up before the AI face filters learn how to deal with fingers being waved in front of your face.
I imagine the result would be a mixture of elitism, community fragmentation, and a witch hunt that never stops. Like Stack Overflow meets The Crucible.
It'd be great if there was an axe taken to the negativity around HN.
The mods are proactive though, and it's a high quality place to get insights into the "content behind the content". It's a great source of a lot of realizations about tech and life.
Relentless negativity drives away people who aren't relentlessly negative. I am dropping in this week after a while being away and my impression is that people got more distant and cynical while I was gone. I'm working on a solo project right now but I can't imagine posting about it here where people seem to want to only find reasons to tear builders down for not doing things their way.
I'm not a technical guy like most here, but this place has helped me think about making more productive comments. Appreciate the guidance, hope you can keep making this website the way you want.
Maybe someone could "fork" the website and leave the negativity behind? Like a "Hacker News - Politics" to quarantine those sorts of discussions?
I'm a (vocal) proponent of AI (as applied to software development) and even I think, and have been saying all year, that the amount of AI stuff on the front page is unfortunate. It's not a mystery why anyone would think 2-years-ago HN was more fun than today's!
But it's not an easy thing to intervene on. AI is neck and neck with "the Internet" for impact on technology.
Now that we can build (with Claude's help) sites like Karpathy's HackerTube, Hacker<add your focus here>, etc., what would be another interesting "Show HN:" type of analytics to build around the massive HN data, say focused on the zeitgeist of HN over time?
Agree that tech was more exciting when AI wasn't in the fold, but it's also true that the tech industry and SF in particular was facing headwinds economically. Without AI there even have been a recession.
So the question is: is it fine for SF to rebound and money to spent on a revolutionary tech, at the expense of human ingenuity and possibly our entire industry?
Also massive difference when visiting at different times of day from what I've seen.. When the US is asleep and most of this site is populated by Indians and Europeans, there seems to be much less AI boosting and VC/hustle culture. Maybe it's just my biases showing and real data would reject this, but it sure feels like it.
I find it funny that the linked date features a story about the FDA proposing to maybe halt sales of the completely useless "drug" phenylephrine (Sudafed PE, etc). Here we are 2 years later and still zero action.
MODS ITS HAPPENING AGAIN BANISH HIM TO THE NULL SPACE (this is obviously a joke, HN is still the best place I've found for information I care about if anyone has found another one I'd be happy to check it out.)
Eh? I think there was a brief timeframe of Too Much AI Related Crap, but the last few months, the front page feels better to me; HN is still one of my favorite news sources.
The comments - I don't really see any kind of "Reddit"ification (the complaint so common it's in the rules!), but there is an annoying tendency towards baseless conspiracy theories lately that annoys me as a professional RE, especially since with LLMs reverse engineering is easier than ever before. Every story about a product release, a cell phone, or anything related to cryptography is loaded with "XYZ entity did this for ZYX comically evil reason," with absolutely no research, facts, or evidence in that direction. Hell, I think the top-voted comment on the "Claude found the nothing-up-our-sleeve randoms from ECDSA" was "it's still an NSA conspiracy!!!"
HN has gone through several Genre Eras of "weird annoying" comments though (that I can remember, there was a suck-up-to-PG era, a "random NRX/Dark Enlightenment Crap" era, etc.), so I think the Everything Is A Corporate Conspiracy era is just our latest phase.
I think blockchain posts were more aggressively marked down from the front page, but I might be wrong. Maybe the AI is just too pervasive for that to work.
Yes. HN has slowly turned into the reasons I left reddit. Every topic turning into politics, pure hate and outrage. Massive number of negative sentiment posts. I was going to reddit and leaving angry. Increasingly I'm coming to HN and leaving angry. I don't want that and if it doesn't change soon I'll have to stop coming here to.
I think there was a lot of pressure building in our community because the ballot box has been no outlet for many years. We've had an increasingly burdensome and insane political environment worldwide and people dealing with unmitigated suffering. It leaks into HN and Reddit in different ways. People here are very plugged into policy and national circumstance and so they can't help but color their opinions.
Also, if the current administration and the tech oligarchs decided next to start burning poor people to power data centers, it would be a bit unreasonable to just expect the discussion to revolve around how cool the automation technology in the poor people furnace is.
I.e., sometimes you just can't separate politics from everything else.
Exactly. I can just imagine the HN commenters with flagging/modding ability back in 1939 Germany flagging all the unpleasant discussions and urging commenters to focus on recent automotive innovation and the exciting advances in television technology, and not bring "politics" into everything.
Honestly I'd have been ok with that back then, and I'd be more than ok with it now. There are so many places to have political discussions. Pretty much everywhere else. The problem is that people can't discuss politics without getting negative, judgmental, and emotional about it. Can we not have one place to discuss tech without all that?
I’ve also noticed a steady increase in what I call “empty sneering”, where they don’t really have a point to contribute but they just want to dunk on somebody. It’s especially noticeable for any hot button topics – yeah, we get that you don’t like Musk/Trump/AI/whatever but do you have an actual point to contribute or not?
I’ve been saying for years that spite should be viewed as a primary metric for social media. The higher the volume of spite, the more harmful it is and the less useful it is. Hacker News is heading in the wrong direction.
"Empty sneering" is a good term for it. Seems like the curse of conversation at scale: Reduction to polarized talking points. Often without engaging TFA at all.
I think there are still good conversations happening here, and I really appreciate the efforts of moderators to keep HN hacky.
I just want tech news and some discussion. Sure, tech has some downsides on society and the planet. I can, and do, hear about that in many other places. It’s not what I come here for.
I understand younger generations are feeling very disaffected and hopeless. I feel for them. I don’t really have a solution for them and don’t have the power to change it so I’d rather tune it out. Yeah, that makes me a selfish jerk. Ok, cool.
I've noticed very, very little politics on HN, even recently. Despite being in a very... tumultuous... political climate, I see close to zero politics. I mean, I haven't seen Trump, or ICE, or the GOP, or the midterms, etc mentioned on the front page at all in months. The only kind of politics we get is the intersection of technology and politics, like Flock. But even that is flagged to hell and back and generally suppressed.
What I see on HN is AI, AI, AI, and then some more AI. Basically nothing else gets any traction, which is frustrating.
I think, in general, the optimism towards tech has degraded a lot in the past couple decades. Which is to be expected, as everyone who sells technology is finding new ways to abuse it every day. Especially for things like AI, it doesn't help that the most optimistic people are basically saying "yeah this is world-ending". The culture-shift isn't unique to hackernews, it's top-down from the entire tech industry, as the tech industry shifts from "cool stuff for nerds" to "tools of mass oppression". That's just sort of what happens when you pump enough money into a sector in our type of economy.
I had great luck on there but I also quickly muted people who didn’t add value. Twitter kicked me off and wanted my biometrics though so I no longer use that site.
That’s because the Hacker News crowd has finally found a topic on which it is willing to engage with the same level of outrage that has long defined Reddit. That topic is AI.
Turns out the clienteles of the two platforms aren’t so different after all. The only difference is what triggers them.
It's always funny going through the recent comment history of people who complain about politics, as if such complaints aren't political in and of themselves:
> I truly hate what HN has become. It has all the expected comments about Musk, fascism, etc
> HN has turned into reddit. It's highly political with strong anti Israeli and anti USA views.
I could completely understand if you wanted to just read about technical topics rather than say more coverage/condemnation of Israel's genocide that's already covered in many other places. But when you start characterizing the existence of such discussion as "anti Israeli", or criticizing people for merely having the temerity to discuss contemporary fascism, you've gone solidly into politics yourself.
So it would seem you're being disingenuous with this comment - you do like politics, rather you just don't like people discussing glaring elephants in the room that clash with your own political views.
If you truly don't want "the constant 'anti-' noise everywhere", then why are you writing an anti- comment in defense of another anti- comment?
In general, something akin to this has been said at every political movement throughout history. Stop complaining, stop making waves, know your place, stop disrupting order. Such admonishments are not apolitical! Rather they are inherently political - in favor of preserving the status quo.
Our world and our societies are facing many problems. Technology has a part in most of them, which is why discussion of technology tends to surface criticisms. You may desire to live in a bubble where you don't have to see such criticisms, but this is an open public discussion forum and most people are not. Sorry.
> why are you writing an anti- comment in defense of another anti- comment?
Reminds me of "tolerance doesn't mean we have to tolerate things we deem intolerant or we personally don't agree with".
That's fine, you may desire to have political discussions everywhere. I get it, it feels good to believe you're fighting for a good cause. But some of us will scold you, downvote/flag you, and complain about all the noise. Like you said, it's open and public, so we'll just have to let the site's rules and process decide who wins.
The day I saw HN being linked on mainstream blogs, such as MacRumors - I knew this community was reaching its breaking point on having good conversations again. HN used to be a nice escape for me to have some technical brain teasers, now I see so many hate comments it just makes me upset and no longer feel engaged anymore.
I'm tired of political/social manifestos as part of the README.md files in github repositories for packages have no choice but to use. I'm tired of command line package manager tools asking for Ukraine support from my command line.
Banning links in signatures from public discussions was a mistake. Back when people had their own website it was easy to see what kind of person they are. It was also worth it to write lengthy well researched posts to promote your business. Work without compensation? Even if you want to it isn't actually worth the time.
It's literally with every single subject involving a computer. Writing, coding, designing, music, art, cad, io etc. every conversation is with the word AI. I think I hear the word at least 100 time per day.
Yep, the site is overwhelmingly either news about AI, or someone's "look what I made with AI" posts, neither of which is interesting. I miss when people in the computer business actually enjoyed doing cool stuff with computers instead of making everything revolve around the slop machine.
Having been on the receiving end from both dang and tomhow as to how this discussion is "off topic", the "guidelines have been consistent for many years", and "if you have any concerns email us at hn@ycombi..." my genuine answer is: migrate to lobste.rs and the handful of other places. The moderation here has not been good even in light of all the praise they have gotten. This is not a "the ball was dropped yesterday" situation. The ball has been dropping for a long time now, and whenever someone brings it up, it's looked down upon. That's okay, we'll go and play in another sandbox then.
I have a list of suggestions that would have a noticeable improvement on HN, and some of it has been implemented to success (and detriment) elsewhere. But that list is highly unlikely to even be attempted here, until it is too late and much like the Digg->Reddit situation, the barn doors have been left open for too long.
Basically the US line will keep trending down until widespread understanding of what Europe has already figured out: society needs more supportive mechanisms (healthcare, gun control, job security, low inequality, free higher education, walkable cities etc etc etc).
We are social animals. Individual happiness depends on your bank account, sure, but crucially also on your neighbor's happiness.
I used to love reading the HN comments. When there was a new tool or technology being discussed there would almost certainly be someone who directly worked on it, if not the founder themselves, giving further insight and welcoming discussion. And when there was back and forth discussion, it was people clarifying their questions and answers, and sharing their expertise. Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.
I disagree with _that_ being the turn of events. In my experience, the conversation has died because everything turns into either: "That article was written by LLM" or "how this relates to LLM"
A couple years ago it was all about blockchain or complaining about blockchain. I think hyped technology just gets tiring really fast.
The prevalence of blockchain-related tangents then is nowhere near the amount of LLM discussion injected into every topic today, it's not even close.
the amount of money invested into AI is far in excess of the blockchain
and LLMs are good for only a few things, one is shitposting
Long before that it was all about how PHP is corrupting brains, and Lisp will bring on an new age of enlightenment.
Yeah? You reckon they are on the same level? I wasn't there but I find it hard to believe people were as worried about PHP as they are blindly prompting an LLM for 10 hours a day.
For a period it was endless NoSQL submissions. Then endless Anti-NoSQL submissions. Then there was the Ruby period where every Ruby release yielded endless submissions and murmurations. Then that turned to Go. Then, as you said, how we all needed to become blockchain experts and everything was going to be built on blockchains, also did you see some random retailer uses a payment processor that through a long and convoluted process will let you pay with BTC?
At every juncture there have been people reminiscing about the good old days that never actually existed at all. About how great it used to be compared to today.
I think the funniest are the constant "man, remember when the BIGS used to engage with us proles?" Ignoring that there are still many founders and the like hanging out here, present, future and past, what a weird thing to reminisce about. It's like "I used to be in the presence of people who mattered". I mean, matter yourself, because pretending you're in a club with them is foolhardy.
My perception is that HN got pickier, more hostile, less listening and more "broadcast-only mode" writing, progressively, over several years. It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.
And then LLM happened. And HN got more LLM writing, more LLM articles, more complaints about LLM-written material, plus AI became a dominant subject of conversation. LLM is in addition to the other negative changes.
This is what my analysis [1] so far supports. It's not really a topic distribution. The temperature in comments here is rising. I suspect that's changing a lot of the site culture.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225117
>My perception is that HN got pickier,
While HN is part of the set, I think we need to look larger. Is it just HN, or is it everywhere? If it's not everywhere, what percentage of sites is it? What are the sites that don't have this issue like or do different.
I think part of it is that HN has grown a lot because of a lot of other sites getting worse. The problem is that growing makes it worse. Then add on top of that there are a lot of high value targets here on HN that bots try to target, financially or politically.
Internet is a messy place now. I remember years and years ago, like early 2000s people thought that things like astro-turfing weren't real, and governments were not targeting individuals/groups on forums. How nieve their were.
I don't think accepting that the rest of the Internet became more hostile is a good defense IMO. I understand it's probably a "top of funnel" problem but the fact that it's leaking out here shows that HN needs to evolve with the new norms.
I would argue that LLM is not an addiction, it’s a negativity multiplier, as it lowered the barrier of entry for low quality content and promotional material
I'm here because there's zero gate to signing up and ocmmenting.
I'd bet the closure of other walled gardens like reddit drives traffic more than anything of content.
These comment sections follow the same trajectory of all comment sections since the birth of the internet.
just a side note: HN is just a well laid out site thats easy to read and easy to comment on. i find reddit hard to use, making me click to see more comments and then taking me to a new page and disrupting my flow, yuk.
> It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.
While it has always been a thing on here to some degree, the one growing trend I will note is that people are increasingly more forceful in demanding that everyone know about the things they aren't interested in, and more demanding that other people don't talk about things that don't interest them.
It's like people can't just skip a submission on the front page. They absolutely must go in to every discussion to tell everyone how much they don't want to read about or talk about that subject, and how much they want everyone to stop talking about it.
It's tilting at windmills. Right now this can mostly be seen in AI discussions where just about every AI-related submission will have a number of people declaring that it's all so boring and they wish there was an HN ban on such submissions. Cue someone foolishly believing them making yet another "HN without the AI" variant that sits unloved.
But the same thing could previously be seen against things that people don't want to be a thing. When WWDC happens people will announce that they're sick of all of the Apple news. The same for Google during I/O. Etc. People are against some thing and they really, truly think they can shame or scold others into falling in line.
> In my experience, the conversation has died because everything turns into either: "That article was written by LLM" or "how this relates to LLM"
Which is why every few days, I have to post a comment along the lines of:
"At some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder."
I get downvoted every time, but it's refreshing to know others share my gripe that it is tiring to virtually every day see this discussion play out in some HN thread or other. Those threads rarely add anything to the discussion.
> Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.
More specifically: comments with an opinion and no justification are modded up. "PHP is garbage" or "Person X is a terrible person" used to be considered noise. Not because they were right or wrong, but because "PHP is a language that can't keep a consistent function names and argument poisitoning in it's own standard library" or "Person X is a terrible person because their engineering milestones are frequently delayed".
Dan or whoever will throw out "everyone one every site always thinks the site's going downhill" but it is, really.
It is my feeling that there has been an uptick of negativity for the last few years. Well before AI.
I understand people have their reasons to be negative about tech but they could go somewhere else to post their comments. Going to a Star Wars forum to tell everyone how much Star Wars sucks would be nonsensical. Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks. That’s how I HN has felt for years now.
I’ve taken breaks from this site from time to time because eventually it just makes you feel bad. It wears you down.
> I understand people have their reasons to be negative about tech but they could go somewhere else to post their comments.
Are they complaining about the tech or are they complaining that bad people are doing bad things with it?
The current hot topic with me is LLMs. Someone could be doing nice things with it, but the only ones I see are making "educational" videos with hallucinated information. By the time I figure out that the channel is slop, I now have to purge several videos worth of fake facts from my knowledge base. And all this so someone can make a quick buck off of youtube ads.
"Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks."
Then you might be surprised. I'm old enough to remember Episode I and the ... love for Jar-Jar shortly after the release of the movie.
During my teens I used to hang out on a Naruto fan forum, and it eventually became a Naruto hate forum. Understandable though, because the serie really sucked after a while. The memes and essays were fun.
>Going to a Star Wars forum to tell everyone how much Star Wars sucks would be nonsensical. Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks. That’s how I HN has felt for years now.
Have you ever interacted with a fandom?
No one complains about Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans.
I agree with you about HN sucking all the joy out of everything, but that's been part of the culture for as long as I can remember. And when Show HN is almost nothing but AI slop and landing pages and half the threads are people shitting on programming and anyone who cares about it as an art or a science, or as anything but a means to generate monetary value, the frustration is understandable. HN seems to be undergoing a cultural schism and a lot of people just don't belong to it anymore.
I wish I was special
But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here
Case in point. This isn't reddit, and song lyrics aren't funny or insightful.
People were saying the exact same things two years ago.
People were saying it 12 years ago too.
Note that it may actually be true. One way to look at it is all successful organizations and communities are continually dying. In order for an organization to get critical mass and start attracting people, it has to be far above the mean in quality; the mean idea, after all, never gets realized. After that, everything is regression to the mean, i.e. downwards, until it ceases to exist.
Erlang Day was 17 years ago.
That's scary. Someone might've viewed that front page with an infant on their lap and that infant can now vote.
I'm one of those infants...
Don't worry, 1980 is still only 20 years ago.
I can, sadly, relate to this. Is there a name for this phenomenon or is it simply a trick of the mind, a calcification of temporal perception that gradually boils the frog until one day you realize that referencing Van Halen or Max Headroom results in blank stares?
The brain is very good at compressing information, so if your days are fairly similar to each other they'll all blur together. And I don't mean the things you think about, but the places you go to. Real places, I might add.
If you rarely discover real places you've never been to, the memory will just be compressed and it seems like last year that you moved from your last place, when it was actually forty years ago.
Now, this can be alleviated by instead of visiting new places learning new things, but those things have to be actually new to your brain and not just more of something you are already familiar with. Otherwise it gets compressed all the same.
New places, new things, new people, new routines all reset the clock.
Subjectively it felt like I lived about 5 years in the first 2 months after my first kid was born - certainly they were more memorable than the previous 5 years. We were basically confined to the apartment except for doctor's visits during that time period, but the experience of caring for a little person was dramatically different from everything that came before. And then the newborn periods of our 2nd and 3rd kids flew by, because we had all the routines down.
2020 also felt like I lived a lifetime in a year, even though we were shut-in, because of all the events and changes of routine that year.
No, it's not! I was there! It was 46 years ago. How did that happen? I can't understand it.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, World War 2 was ancient history, but at the time, it was only 20 years ago. And now, 20 years ago is only yesterday.
It goes in cycles has been my observation. I think some of it is that as new generations rise in tech, young guys coming up always seem to think they have to take it out of others hide how wrong they are. Very weird cultural phenomenon in tech. Then folks chill out, get older, gain some wisdom, dial back the vitriol.
Then their children show up and the cycle repeats again.
Time flows like a river, and history repeats itself...
It’s like this in every industry and everything else (more or less with some nuance)
See several thousand year old commentary on how the youth is rotten
> Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
I would agree with and extend your remarks with bot percentage only increases over time, there's a repellant mechanism that pushes away humans and no mechanism at all to lure them back once they've been pushed out of a site.
Eventually you end up with stackexchange or Reddit or 4chan where 95%+ of posts are bots or at least LLM generated, and the remaining 5% is crazy people who refuse to leave. HN is behind in that cycle but will inevitably and unavoidably catch up because as I stated there's no repair mechanism. All successful online orgs and communities attract bots and LLMs that kill the organization. There is no immune system other than unplugging and touching grass IRL.
My guess about "large scale socioeconomic effects" is we can't talk about Dead Internet Theory in public in polite company, but we can talk about "too much LLMs" or whatever in a vague sense while describing all the symptoms of Dead Internet Theory. Like those people who complain about poop on the sidewalks but can't be permitted socially to declare any sort of dislike of homeless people, so the talk is focused solely on the symptoms as if the symptoms appeared magically, an uncaused causation. The advertising fraud bubble will pop, eventually, and it'll all be blamed on LLM bots on social media, it totally wasn't planned and aided and abetted by the companies themselves, no, LOL. Their profits off advertising fraud were totally accidental and unintentional, you see, so they should get away with it. The people to blame are those vague AI bot things that magically appeared and totally had no legally prosecutable humans behind them.
Another large scale effect to talk about is massively pulled forward demand. A decade or two of Facebook and that pulls a lifetime of demand forward. What happens when the bill's due and nobody left but a tiny fraction of hopeless addicts? If the population as a whole does a lifetime of doomscrolling in 20 years, the next generation at least will be a total drought. Internet access will never go away because its too useful to pay your bills online, but social media will almost certainly go the way of the late 1970s CB Radio crash. I assure you CB radios are still being made, people still making money off them, and people are still using them, however only a microscopic fraction of the population uses CB Radios. So it will be soon, for "socializing online".
We've been saying it since long before slashdot, even.
When you have a mirror, you can shine light wherever you want.
People also frequently complained about new users upvoting the wrong content. So they made /classic, which only counts votes from accounts of a certain age. It used to look quite different from the front page. Now it’s basically the same.
Yes. Those are the choicest comments; they still occur.
HN is extremely variable by submission:
The more general or mainstream or meta, the more reddit-like posts there are.
The more technical or mathematical or niche, the less.
I haven’t been on HN for a decade or anything, but I do see founders in the comments more often than not. Of course this is n=1.
HN comments are really nothing at all like Reddit comments.
We get closer every year.
All of the superiority, snark, self importance and toxicity.
None of the juvenile humor.
I mean if I'm gonna be preached at by jerks who think I'm stupid I'd rather they be funny jerks.
There isn't a forum in the world without superiority, snark, self-importance, and toxicity; some of that is simply an artifact of communicating about contentious topics in the context-stripped medium of text messaging.
But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.
Depends on the sub, really. All of the subs I read have the occasional abrasive blowhard but don't tolerate shitposting.
Oh, man. My rate of trying to insert a non-obscure joke into a comment and a half-dozen commenters taking the exact words at face value and then pointing out their factual incorrectness is too damn high. I don't know if it's a symptom of, let's say, neurodiversity, or ESL, but humor on HN is almost universally punished. I don't think they are bots because once in a while I crack jokes in AI prompts (to amuse myself when exceptionally bored) and the LLMs always recognize them, even if they don't respond right away with a sensible chuckle GIF.
In my experience, those HNers actually think that they are the ones being funny when they point out your factual incorrectness or when they want to be pedantic about something.
> Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.
Absolute nonsense.
> > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
The guidelines post above links to nine comments echoing yours, some almost 20 years old.
Context matters; a comment comparing HN to Reddit in the middle of huge thread specifically about the character of the community and how it may (or may not) have changed is different than a comment on a random thread. Especially as quite a few seem to think that, no, something really has changed the last few years and it's not merely a "a semi-noob illusion"?
We're not allowed to talk about that here.
Those ~20 year old comments compared HN to Reddit of that time, which was insulting to HN. In the 20 years that passed probably HN at some point crossed the threshold of old Reddit. But now the insult is to compare it to current Reddit.
On the other hand putting it in the rules that you’re not allowed to say X and then quoting the rule as evidence against X is at the very least not an intellectually interesting way of making a point. Imagine if everyone put in their profile that they’re never wrong and kept pointing at that when challenged.
The new HN is lobste.rs. You need an invite though, which is why it's the new HN and not the new Reddit.
Lobste.rs is quite different from HN, though, so I think it's fair to warn people in advance:
HN allows anything that "hackers" might find interesting. On lobste.rs, anything that's not directly programming-related is generally off-topic.
HN encourages self-promotion, lobste.rs discourages it.
Until recently lobste.rs was very actively anti-AI. Newer rules have rolled that back somewhat, but there is still a rather vocal anti-AI contingent that is not afraid to pick fights with people who openly admit to being interested in machine learning as a technology.
Been curious for years, never asked anyone for an invite. You wouldn't happen to have one do you? Email in my profile.
Lobste.rs is alright.. I've taken some dips as a reader and turned down invites.
Ignoring the actual submissions, which are usually mirrored on HN, I find the small user base often doesn't offer much in interesting comments. Many are short with little value, and I don't recall seeing many submission authors piping in, or luminaries with the deep knowledge that you sometimes see drop in on HN.
Friends tell me there is a definite political bias that leaks out.
I think Hackaday is a good alternative for hardware oriented HNers.
It is useful to go check out lobste.rs when a big story hits and you want more perspective. ..or for research.
Go and compare it with HN on any big recent story and judge for yourself.
lobste.rs was the new HN for a while but now it has two major issues:
1. They have abandoned their former policy of “everything non-programming related is off topic” to allow discussion about politics
2. They have lost most of their users. It’s like a ghost town.
HN have some flaws but is still the gathering place for many technical people.
Absolutely not. Just look at the fiasco when it came to Bun's rust migration. So many threads about how it was a marketing stunt, how it will never work, how when it's working it's still not on main, when it was on main how it took a whole couple months and X $. And now that the articles about it's completion have come, practically radio silence and no admission of being completely repeatedly wrong. HN was bad, lobste.rs was awful. That saga showed how inaccurate and motivated reasoning both of these forums are.
I'd like one if you have any, as well. I like Hacker News but I really need to go "outside" more on the web, I realized the other day that HN has become my hobbit hole over the last decade plus, but when I look for other places I'm mostly only finding value in small, semi-private communities.
HN comment threads have been blamed for becoming Reddified since at least 2009.
Interesting. I felt like after the election HN "tech bros" were just more "tech bro", and those of us who think most of these technocrats are repugnant stopped censoring ourselves.
I don't know, the frontpage looks fine today?
- Canada payment system - folding paper airplanes - Solar panels - Raspberry pi price increases - a bunch of show hns - how does malloc work
There are more AI posts that's for sure, but it's also not that bad? It's also heavily affecting the livelihood of many people here (for better and often worse), so it's reasonable that it would be prevalent.
There's always been grumpy engineers here, on stackoverflow, reddit, everywhere. Lots of grumpy engineers are also amazing engineers. There's newbies proud to show something, even though it's not really always that great, some people dunk, some people encourage etc.
I still like it here.
Same, I still think this is one of the last places to get mostly bot-free high-level discourse. Thankfully other than certain threads, I don't think the incentive is there for botfarms to game this place.
Currently every top reply on X, and most top replies on Facebook and IG, are some contrarian engagement-bait bot nonsense.
Almost everything in the new submissions is about AI and has been for a while now. Same with the links you see. It's getting to the point where non-AI tech news and information is completely drowned out. Stepping back month by month you can see how the AI content increases exponentially. Soon it'll be all you can read about it unless something is done. Perhaps a yc.ai site for AI-related news and discussion?
I have been using https://www.unslop.news for non AI related content.
Me too, but if you click on the comments you land on HackerNews, and there you are again..
I have a browser extension that auto-clicks the Hide button for entries with AI-related terms in the title. Helps surface the interesting stories. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
AI is still the new big thing. Remains to be seen whether it will eventually just become a relatively stable part of the substrate, like the internet, or if the curve will keep bending upward - in which case it will likely remain top of mind as long as human minds are relevant. My bet's on the former, but we'll see.
At least we moved past blockchain and crypto! But at what cost...
I suppose that demonstrates a third possibility, that the bubble will burst and the hype train will end. I'm personally more bullish on its usefulness than that, but again, I guess we'll see.
I too doubt it will pop the way crypto did. The difference being, if you ignore the weird financing and ya know, societal collapse from AI, it's doing something useful!
But it sure felt like every HN story for a bit was crypto/blockchain/NFT related.
I don’t typically read “new”. I use the default HN page. And there only 5 of the 25 stories are AI related. That seems very reasonable.
I think AI is only part of the story. No one is investing in anything else. Even all the AI news is navel gazing and not really a lot of "this start-up used AI to 10x whatever."
AI-related news could have special tag as “show HN” describes exactly what you can expect. “AI:”
You are reinventing the tags. And yes, tags for submissions would be nice, if users can add them. Especially if filtering on tags is made easy.
It's the natural progression of websites like this. Reddit went through the same progression: it was very positive and felt like a community when the migration from Digg first happened. 10 years ago, Hacker News felt like an insider website for professionals. It still does, but there's definitely an uptick in negativity.
Hacker News didn’t turn into Reddit because of AI, but it’s certainly turning into Harvard Business Review. The primary benefit of the HN-saturating component of modern AI is about allowing untrained managers to delegate some or all their work to cheap labor. Without that benefit of delegating to one’s contracted agents, the majority of HN’s AI interests over the past two years evaporate. So, yes, we’re still an insider community for professionals, but a lot of those professionals have revealed their preference for management rather than individual contribution, and in a very short period of time. It’s no wonder the community is tearing itself apart: I can think of no greater insult to our ICs that aren’t interested in delegating their work to others, than turning this community into an HBR forum. “Ten ways to get more work out of your workers” is just as offensive a submission to ICs as it always has been whether they’re employers, contractors, or generative AI — but now that anyone can be a manager, with HNs mods choosing to remain powerless against submissions of managerial content, here we are. The only recourse left is for users to start flagging managerial content as unsuitable for the site, since the mods will be forced by their own adopted principles to accept that popular opinion as well. Sadly, I don’t think there’s enough ICs left here to outweigh the managers’ upvotes.
Management incompetence in tech is a serious problem that predates the AI fiasco by leaps and bounds.
Community size and cohesion are definitely key factors. But there is still strong signal to noise ratio here (thank you dang et al for all the work).
yeah HN really reminds me of reddit before the Digg exodus. I wonder if it will have the same fate eventually as it gets more popular and moderation can't keep up
Its funny, because the Digg migration is probably when Reddit started going down hill.
I specifically remember one commenter saying, "Look, we're not happy about what happened either but we have no where else to go. Now scoot over."
Was the Digg exodus the start of Reddit’s Eternal September?
I think so. That was the first big shift from Programmers / IT / Nerds to rage comics if I remember right.
Reddit started showing signs of terminal illness in 2011 and spez since ran it into the ground along with CondeNast. 2015 was the death knell after the CEO, Ellen Pao, was featured at the top of /r/PunchableFaces, which then temporarily went private. Staff shakeup ensued.
At the time it was a massive conversation around whether reddit should have to host content its advertisers didn't agree with, except they had heavily contributed to killing off old forums whose free speech was not compromised by advertisers. This was part of a larger conversation about free speech protection online and right-to-platform which still ensues. Corporations frequently cite their own free speech interests while suppressing speech of individuals and organizations. The current organization of the web is just perverse and tenuous.
Hacker News is quite unique in that while it is an aggregator, I have never felt that staff moderation crossed over into censorship, even when I've been on the receiving side of it. The moment dang leaves and pg retires, it's over. Tom Howard might do OK for a while, but the reason HN, despite eternal September and growing amounts of negativity, spam and astroturfing, continues to be a fun place on the web is because Dan is the man and fully embodied Paul Graham's established foundational principles.
We all need to be thinking about what kind of internet we want our grandchildren and future society to inherit and start building today.
Traditionally Tumblr was blamed for that in the late 2010s, although Digg is plausible. I think the sheer volume of Tumblr had more impact on Reddit than Digg ever could have, its a size thing.
A lot of Reddit problems were own-goals. Lets have a civil war over being a free speech or being a brutally censored speech site, I'm sure the civilians trapped in the middle will love the experience. Spoiler -> They did NOT.
But humans can always be replaced by bots if you're selling advertising views, LOL. HN doesn't sell ads (or at least none have ever gotten past my ad blocker) so there's fewer bots here so the decline due to bots is slower here.
Is it really a different universe than going back one year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-11-08
or, for that matter, one month?
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-10-08
Similar perceptions have been around since before Hacker News was even named Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852).
Guess I’ve been on this site for… 14 years? Dang. The trends seem to have always come and gone, along with the snarky picking apart of individuals framed as intellectual discussion. Yet, it remains a high value discussion board, where in passing, I learn about great tools and approaches to problem solving that I work into my own arsenal of thing doing.
The AI dust will settle, we’re just exactly in the middle of it right now.
Every time I see a post like this about any topic, all I think is that the poster has matured but the content is still aimed at the previous self, since newcomers are in their position now
Nothing has changed except the poster - they were previously part of the snarky individuals, or at least tolerated it, and now have moved on
I was definitely part of the snark in my earlier days, swept up by it all. It contributed to making me a worse person, so I stepped back for a long time, decided that I needed my opinions to not only be my own, but constructive. Tearing people and ideas down is exactly against the spirit of hacking about.
In some ways, I think that's true, especially with AI. But, as another commenter pointed out, before that it was crypto stuff. So, popular things are discussed a lot. I personally think that's ok.
And, regarding AI, it's profoundly changed our lives especially for software devs. And we are in the infancy stages so there is a lot new and trying to be figured out still. So while it is somewhat fatiguing to see so much AI stuff, I actually welcome it. I've learned a lot here because of it.
Finally, while there is some tension in the comments, and a decent amount of negativity and pessimism in the comments, there are usually high quality comments that get voted up and people who are violating the guidelines often get voted down. Which makes me feel like the community as a majority still cares a lot about keeping HN reasonable.
I spend a lot of time here because I like it here. There is a lot of good and the bad is reasonable/manageable for me. I especially appreciated all the love for TNG and Patrick Stewart when he passed. My family doesn't share my affinity but it was clear a lot of the HN community did. I was comforted.
I don't like that flagging can be abused (IMO example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50366250) but it's also used for good so there, again, is balance.
Thanks HN for being "my peeps". I don't really have any other group that I'd say that about.
The people who have barreled into tech over the last 10 years have been increasingly more concerned with money than a lot of the stuff that made this an interesting spot to discuss technical stuff. In addition, I think a fair number of the interesting people have retired from tech altogether and no longer spend any time here.
I don't see material differences between HN from 5 years ago and now.
Maybe 15 years ago HN was a truly different forum. The "tech" world was much smaller then, making this little corner of web rather esoteric and only of interest to an educated audience.
Additionally, there was still techno-optimism in the late 2000's and early 2010's so you'd have more positive comments and less American politics. 2016 always struck me as the turning point, not just for HN but for most of the web.
Perhaps it's time to update the Reddit comparison blurb in the HN guidelines, because it seems unarguably true, to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From most people I talk to, there is an understanding that the overwhelm of AI content, bot comments, etc. has degraded the quality of community spaces (especially HN but also including Reddit, X/Twitter, etc.). I hope we can figure out a way to get more human-curated content soon and make the economics of amplifying it make sense (obviously it does not in this current transition chapter).
I'd guess more and more valuable discussion will just shift to gated invite only groups. Private discord servers, signal, telegram etc etc I don't see another feasible way of protecting against the spam.
What's more strange to me is why these content places like Twitter and Reddit don't see this as a danger to themselves? Why would someone want to advertise in a place that's 90% bots? Reddit for example made it harder to check astroturf bots by blocking viewing comment and post history and giving every user default AdjectiveNounNumber style names. I get why it works short term but I've completely stopped using it because I just found myself facing fake botted engagement everywhere.
> I'd guess more and more valuable discussion will just shift to gated invite only groups. Private discord servers, signal, telegram etc etc I don't see another feasible way of protecting against the spam.
This is sadly the direction I think we are heading towards. I will lament the loss of the open internet.
> Reddit for example made it harder to check astroturf bots by blocking viewing comment and post history and giving every user default AdjectiveNounNumber style names
They did this just weeks before their IPO in what I assume was an effort to decieve shareholders from discovering just how did the platform really is. The amount of "people" with that setting on is shocking to me. On a site where people didn't even set a profile picture 9/10 times, I cannot believe that like 7/10 users are choosing to hide their history. Reddit is playing an illusion game fueled by bots to convince users and shareholders the platform is alive when it has began dying years ago.
It's also quite shocking to me that they do this and then choose to make their tagline "Where Real People Talk": https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/reddit-where-real-people-talk/...
This has also perplexed me (advertising-to-bot-relationship), but I'm guessing the cost of combating these bots is going up (as complexity goes up and token cost goes down - whether subsidized or not).
I hate the idea that the future is only gated invite-only groups though. At the very least, some tag of "BOT" and then the ability to hide all bot content (unless it's highly upvoted by humans) would be great.
Any attempt to seriously combat bots would most likely impact real user engagement numbers so it is indeed a tricky business problem to solve.
But I can't see the Reddit comment change as anything other than a cynical "astroturfing as a service" to advertisers. Doesn't seem to be working out for them though given their stock performance this year.
I propose we sign each other's PGP keys as a honor code system of writing of one's own words. Idk how this will turn out... Complete distrust or tribalism or actually useful?
The problem is that it's too easy to copy/paste a rebuttal written by an LLM as if you wrote it, without actually understanding it. Simply signing such a faux thought does nothing.
Maybe we could have meetups to do this signing to make things more efficient
Organizing physical meetings with HN's global community is an efficient solution??
Maybe an online meetup on Zoom is just about still viable, but we need to hurry up before the AI face filters learn how to deal with fingers being waved in front of your face.
I imagine the result would be a mixture of elitism, community fragmentation, and a witch hunt that never stops. Like Stack Overflow meets The Crucible.
Github projects too. Any popular project drowns human voices out in an ocean of AI vomit.
Issues, comments, replies, PRs.. All from the slop firehose. Makes trying to interact with them miserable.
It'd be great if there was an axe taken to the negativity around HN.
The mods are proactive though, and it's a high quality place to get insights into the "content behind the content". It's a great source of a lot of realizations about tech and life.
Should write some of them down...
They aren't.
I've had to create my own filter and HN has finally become readable again. I'm blocking/hiding around 100-200 posts a day.
Relentless negativity drives away people who aren't relentlessly negative. I am dropping in this week after a while being away and my impression is that people got more distant and cynical while I was gone. I'm working on a solo project right now but I can't imagine posting about it here where people seem to want to only find reasons to tear builders down for not doing things their way.
I find HN to be extremely variable by submission:
The more general or mainstream or meta, the more reddit-like posts there are.
The more technical or mathematical or niche, the less.
I'm not a technical guy like most here, but this place has helped me think about making more productive comments. Appreciate the guidance, hope you can keep making this website the way you want.
Maybe someone could "fork" the website and leave the negativity behind? Like a "Hacker News - Politics" to quarantine those sorts of discussions?
HN reached it's Eternal September[1] a while back (probably ~2yrs ago).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I'm a (vocal) proponent of AI (as applied to software development) and even I think, and have been saying all year, that the amount of AI stuff on the front page is unfortunate. It's not a mystery why anyone would think 2-years-ago HN was more fun than today's!
But it's not an easy thing to intervene on. AI is neck and neck with "the Internet" for impact on technology.
Wow, no kidding. It's almost entirely AI free. A lot more interesting.
Now that we can build (with Claude's help) sites like Karpathy's HackerTube, Hacker<add your focus here>, etc., what would be another interesting "Show HN:" type of analytics to build around the massive HN data, say focused on the zeitgeist of HN over time?
Two years ago was another, better universe. It stands to reason this could be reflected in HN posts.
Agree that tech was more exciting when AI wasn't in the fold, but it's also true that the tech industry and SF in particular was facing headwinds economically. Without AI there even have been a recession.
So the question is: is it fine for SF to rebound and money to spent on a revolutionary tech, at the expense of human ingenuity and possibly our entire industry?
I feel it's noticeably better on weekends, when people aren't at work sending stories.
Also massive difference when visiting at different times of day from what I've seen.. When the US is asleep and most of this site is populated by Indians and Europeans, there seems to be much less AI boosting and VC/hustle culture. Maybe it's just my biases showing and real data would reject this, but it sure feels like it.
Possibly still bias, but I've seen the same pattern. The posts tend to be much more interesting before the US takes over for the day shift.
I find it funny that the linked date features a story about the FDA proposing to maybe halt sales of the completely useless "drug" phenylephrine (Sudafed PE, etc). Here we are 2 years later and still zero action.
MODS ITS HAPPENING AGAIN BANISH HIM TO THE NULL SPACE (this is obviously a joke, HN is still the best place I've found for information I care about if anyone has found another one I'd be happy to check it out.)
Feel like now is all AI generated contents.
I love that the comments are exchanging ways to avoid the most important thing that has ever happened in computing.
People have been making the same complaint as long as I've been here, which is now seventeen years.
Eh? I think there was a brief timeframe of Too Much AI Related Crap, but the last few months, the front page feels better to me; HN is still one of my favorite news sources.
The comments - I don't really see any kind of "Reddit"ification (the complaint so common it's in the rules!), but there is an annoying tendency towards baseless conspiracy theories lately that annoys me as a professional RE, especially since with LLMs reverse engineering is easier than ever before. Every story about a product release, a cell phone, or anything related to cryptography is loaded with "XYZ entity did this for ZYX comically evil reason," with absolutely no research, facts, or evidence in that direction. Hell, I think the top-voted comment on the "Claude found the nothing-up-our-sleeve randoms from ECDSA" was "it's still an NSA conspiracy!!!"
HN has gone through several Genre Eras of "weird annoying" comments though (that I can remember, there was a suck-up-to-PG era, a "random NRX/Dark Enlightenment Crap" era, etc.), so I think the Everything Is A Corporate Conspiracy era is just our latest phase.
It really was, wasn't it.
But then, there was a cryptocurrency frenzy here, too, at one point, and this can't be worse.
I think blockchain posts were more aggressively marked down from the front page, but I might be wrong. Maybe the AI is just too pervasive for that to work.
Yes. HN has slowly turned into the reasons I left reddit. Every topic turning into politics, pure hate and outrage. Massive number of negative sentiment posts. I was going to reddit and leaving angry. Increasingly I'm coming to HN and leaving angry. I don't want that and if it doesn't change soon I'll have to stop coming here to.
I think there was a lot of pressure building in our community because the ballot box has been no outlet for many years. We've had an increasingly burdensome and insane political environment worldwide and people dealing with unmitigated suffering. It leaks into HN and Reddit in different ways. People here are very plugged into policy and national circumstance and so they can't help but color their opinions.
Also, if the current administration and the tech oligarchs decided next to start burning poor people to power data centers, it would be a bit unreasonable to just expect the discussion to revolve around how cool the automation technology in the poor people furnace is.
I.e., sometimes you just can't separate politics from everything else.
Exactly. I can just imagine the HN commenters with flagging/modding ability back in 1939 Germany flagging all the unpleasant discussions and urging commenters to focus on recent automotive innovation and the exciting advances in television technology, and not bring "politics" into everything.
Honestly I'd have been ok with that back then, and I'd be more than ok with it now. There are so many places to have political discussions. Pretty much everywhere else. The problem is that people can't discuss politics without getting negative, judgmental, and emotional about it. Can we not have one place to discuss tech without all that?
I’ve also noticed a steady increase in what I call “empty sneering”, where they don’t really have a point to contribute but they just want to dunk on somebody. It’s especially noticeable for any hot button topics – yeah, we get that you don’t like Musk/Trump/AI/whatever but do you have an actual point to contribute or not?
I’ve been saying for years that spite should be viewed as a primary metric for social media. The higher the volume of spite, the more harmful it is and the less useful it is. Hacker News is heading in the wrong direction.
"Empty sneering" is a good term for it. Seems like the curse of conversation at scale: Reduction to polarized talking points. Often without engaging TFA at all.
I think there are still good conversations happening here, and I really appreciate the efforts of moderators to keep HN hacky.
I just want tech news and some discussion. Sure, tech has some downsides on society and the planet. I can, and do, hear about that in many other places. It’s not what I come here for.
I understand younger generations are feeling very disaffected and hopeless. I feel for them. I don’t really have a solution for them and don’t have the power to change it so I’d rather tune it out. Yeah, that makes me a selfish jerk. Ok, cool.
I've noticed very, very little politics on HN, even recently. Despite being in a very... tumultuous... political climate, I see close to zero politics. I mean, I haven't seen Trump, or ICE, or the GOP, or the midterms, etc mentioned on the front page at all in months. The only kind of politics we get is the intersection of technology and politics, like Flock. But even that is flagged to hell and back and generally suppressed.
What I see on HN is AI, AI, AI, and then some more AI. Basically nothing else gets any traction, which is frustrating.
I think, in general, the optimism towards tech has degraded a lot in the past couple decades. Which is to be expected, as everyone who sells technology is finding new ways to abuse it every day. Especially for things like AI, it doesn't help that the most optimistic people are basically saying "yeah this is world-ending". The culture-shift isn't unique to hackernews, it's top-down from the entire tech industry, as the tech industry shifts from "cool stuff for nerds" to "tools of mass oppression". That's just sort of what happens when you pump enough money into a sector in our type of economy.
Twitter is the one for me. Almost every popular thread immediately turns into arguing and slurs.
I had great luck on there but I also quickly muted people who didn’t add value. Twitter kicked me off and wanted my biometrics though so I no longer use that site.
That’s because the Hacker News crowd has finally found a topic on which it is willing to engage with the same level of outrage that has long defined Reddit. That topic is AI.
Turns out the clienteles of the two platforms aren’t so different after all. The only difference is what triggers them.
I've noticed the exact same thing, and I've cut back a lot on how much I contribute.
I'm hoping it's bots doing that, and not my fellow, because I don't like to think that my fellow humans are actually this full of hate.
But either way, contributing to HN has become rather unpleasant these days.
It's always funny going through the recent comment history of people who complain about politics, as if such complaints aren't political in and of themselves:
> I truly hate what HN has become. It has all the expected comments about Musk, fascism, etc
> HN has turned into reddit. It's highly political with strong anti Israeli and anti USA views.
I could completely understand if you wanted to just read about technical topics rather than say more coverage/condemnation of Israel's genocide that's already covered in many other places. But when you start characterizing the existence of such discussion as "anti Israeli", or criticizing people for merely having the temerity to discuss contemporary fascism, you've gone solidly into politics yourself.
So it would seem you're being disingenuous with this comment - you do like politics, rather you just don't like people discussing glaring elephants in the room that clash with your own political views.
It’s not that complicated or one-sided. We just don’t want the constant “anti-“ noise everywhere. Take the complaining elsewhere.
If you truly don't want "the constant 'anti-' noise everywhere", then why are you writing an anti- comment in defense of another anti- comment?
In general, something akin to this has been said at every political movement throughout history. Stop complaining, stop making waves, know your place, stop disrupting order. Such admonishments are not apolitical! Rather they are inherently political - in favor of preserving the status quo.
Our world and our societies are facing many problems. Technology has a part in most of them, which is why discussion of technology tends to surface criticisms. You may desire to live in a bubble where you don't have to see such criticisms, but this is an open public discussion forum and most people are not. Sorry.
> why are you writing an anti- comment in defense of another anti- comment?
Reminds me of "tolerance doesn't mean we have to tolerate things we deem intolerant or we personally don't agree with".
That's fine, you may desire to have political discussions everywhere. I get it, it feels good to believe you're fighting for a good cause. But some of us will scold you, downvote/flag you, and complain about all the noise. Like you said, it's open and public, so we'll just have to let the site's rules and process decide who wins.
The constant drone of AI psychosis and slop is a thousand times worse than politics.
The day I saw HN being linked on mainstream blogs, such as MacRumors - I knew this community was reaching its breaking point on having good conversations again. HN used to be a nice escape for me to have some technical brain teasers, now I see so many hate comments it just makes me upset and no longer feel engaged anymore.
I'm tired of political/social manifestos as part of the README.md files in github repositories for packages have no choice but to use. I'm tired of command line package manager tools asking for Ukraine support from my command line.
I agree, but then again this such a first world problem no?
Latest leak says 400 000 Russians killed in the war, that's a lot more worrying.
If things got worse I'd expect and accept support Ukraine banners thrown in my face while walking down the street.
We are so zombified in our comfort zone that this is what it takes to actually get some attention nowadays.
Not ideal but it is what it is.
Banning links in signatures from public discussions was a mistake. Back when people had their own website it was easy to see what kind of person they are. It was also worth it to write lengthy well researched posts to promote your business. Work without compensation? Even if you want to it isn't actually worth the time.
It's literally with every single subject involving a computer. Writing, coding, designing, music, art, cad, io etc. every conversation is with the word AI. I think I hear the word at least 100 time per day.
Yep, the site is overwhelmingly either news about AI, or someone's "look what I made with AI" posts, neither of which is interesting. I miss when people in the computer business actually enjoyed doing cool stuff with computers instead of making everything revolve around the slop machine.
Is there something like HN but with more of a practical engineering focus and less fomo hype-train business scam guy stuff?
Now try go back 10..
Perhaps Big Tech/Silicon Valley has turned the corner from being a positive force in the lives of people, to being a negative entity in their lives?
Having been on the receiving end from both dang and tomhow as to how this discussion is "off topic", the "guidelines have been consistent for many years", and "if you have any concerns email us at hn@ycombi..." my genuine answer is: migrate to lobste.rs and the handful of other places. The moderation here has not been good even in light of all the praise they have gotten. This is not a "the ball was dropped yesterday" situation. The ball has been dropping for a long time now, and whenever someone brings it up, it's looked down upon. That's okay, we'll go and play in another sandbox then.
I have a list of suggestions that would have a noticeable improvement on HN, and some of it has been implemented to success (and detriment) elsewhere. But that list is highly unlikely to even be attempted here, until it is too late and much like the Digg->Reddit situation, the barn doors have been left open for too long.
The negativity problem is society-wide.
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
Basically the US line will keep trending down until widespread understanding of what Europe has already figured out: society needs more supportive mechanisms (healthcare, gun control, job security, low inequality, free higher education, walkable cities etc etc etc).
We are social animals. Individual happiness depends on your bank account, sure, but crucially also on your neighbor's happiness.