HN is drowning in AI comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201629

by waygtdai • 5 months ago

94 64 5 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

Dang, any updates on how you and the team were thinking of tackling this? It’s getting ridiculous. Last week was sort of okay but it’s much worse this weekend.

Edit: This spiked on front page and now it’s completely gone. What is going on?

Great. Flagged.

hash07e• 5 months ago

You are late to the party....

waygtdai5• 5 months ago

I get the joke and I myself called it awhile back, I just thought we had a bit more time.

amelius• 5 months ago

We need more jokes on HN. It's the only good way to prove you're human these days.

Bender• 5 months ago

For a better chance of reply email hn@ycombinator.com.

einpoklum• 5 months ago

How do you (waygtdai) know that HN is drowning in AI comments?

I mean, it's not as though I know the opposite is true, but I don't see some fundamental change from a few years back that makes me think that.

fleebee• 5 months ago

https://www.marginalia.nu/weird-ai-crap/hn/

The data seems to suggest it.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of green accounts posting nonsense. They generally do get flagged or moderated quickly though, so I wouldn't say they have a large effect overall, at least yet.

lostmsu• 5 months ago

That doesn't mean there are many of these staying alive.

Hnrobert42• 5 months ago

I've read HN almost everyday for about 10 years. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see it. I see way more folks complaining that comments are AI generated.

kylecazar• 5 months ago

Yeah, the up/down voting mechanism seems to be doing it's job for me too. Don't think I've noticed a degradation in, say, the top third of comments. That's where I try to live anyway.

/newest is chock full of submissions that were written by AI, though. That's another, broader problem.

AstroBen2• 5 months ago

There are a lot, but they tend to get heavily downvoted and end up hidden

greesil• 5 months ago

How would you know?

brg• 5 months ago

To add to the collection of anecdata, your experience is similar to mine. I have been more exhausted recently by the complaints of AI submissions and pseudo analysis of AI comments than exhausted by the supposed AI generated comments themselves.

subsection1h2• 5 months ago

I've been using HN since 2008 when I created my first account[1] and I use HN differently than most people. I have a group of bookmarked searches that I visit almost daily that relate to technologies that interest me, such as Emacs.

In the past year, the searches I perform that relate to web development show a horrifying increase in the amount of Show HN posts that are posted by new accounts, include AI generated descriptions and point to AI generated projects on GitHub.

In 2024, there were 17,661 Show HN posts.[2] In the past year, there have been over 448,000 Show HN posts![3] And of course, most of these posts are AI generated.

Also, if you check the new accounts posting all this AI slop, you'll see that some of them also post AI generated comments in other threads, which is the main problem.

But for me, what is even more annoying is the enormous increase in new accounts created by nontechnical vibecoders who now think of themselves as technologists and who post worthless, ignorant comments that actually get upvoted, presumably by similar folks who have unfortunately been creating accounts at HN in the past 10 years or so.

As a result, 2026 is the first year in which I visit HN about once a week instead of about once a day.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zartan

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=custom...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=pastYe...

subsection1h2• 5 months ago

The fact that this discussion was flagged might be the final nail in the coffin for me. The huge increase in AI generated comments and posts at HN is a topic that has been discussed on other forums for months now. Complaints include "Orange Reddit", "Orange LinkedIn", etc. But when the topic comes up at HN, it gets flagged. Fuck this.

kyriakos• 5 months ago

I've only seen a shift on the kind of submissions that get pushed to the front page compared to the past but I guess there's a change in what people consider important in the community

pibaker• 5 months ago

A while ago I replied to the topmost reply to a comment to rebuke some factual errors. I didn't notice anything wrong with the comment itself when I replied. But after I posted, someone replied to my post and accused the post I replied to of being AI written.

At first I felt similarly as you. I thought people were just paranoid. And the someone pointed out that if I paste the top level post (the post I replied to replied to) into chatGPT and it will generate a very similar reply.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758598

The post I replied to was flagged dead so you need to turn showdead on in your profile to read it. Would you be able to tell if it is AI if someone replied like this to you? I surely couldn't.

eibrahim• 5 months ago

Me too. I am exhausted by all the human slop constantly complaining about comments or posts being ai slop. I think I have had better conversations with bots the last few months lol.

This is everywhere not just HN: Reddit LinkedIn and twitter too. You are guaranteed to get 2 types of comments on anything you post: 1. Comments accusing you of AI slop (I call them human slop) 2. Comments by AI bots (surprisingly some are helpful and useful) at the end your bot will be a reflection of you.

Asshole humans will train asshole bots.

ps: I don’t even know how any of these sites can fight these bots. The LLMs are amazing and with openclaw and similar it’s impossible to detect bots vs humans.

pixl97• 5 months ago

No, not HN, the internet at large.

Now, I'm on vacation this week and not been paying too much attention, but whenever you have a geopolitical event like the little extravaganza in Iran the number of bot like posts tends to explode as influence operators make their moves.

WD-422• 5 months ago

The public facing internet is done. HN has been fairly resilient (I think) but even it is beginning to buckle. It’s been sliding for a while but LLMs are the death knell.

It was a fun 2 decades. Time to stick to private discords and real life friends from here on out, though.

waygtdai5• 5 months ago

I don’t think HN is any more resilient. The new account captcha is fairly tame and, while I’m sure they have proxy detectors and other things in place, it doesn’t stop new accounts from posting and getting traction.

Someone suggested earlier this week that an invite system should be implemented (I think lobsters has it?) I doubt it would fly here, but yeah.

aaron695• 5 months ago

No it's not.

It's drowning in low quality human NPC comments.

Maybe that's because all resources are tied up fighting AI, but it's been going on for a long time now.

This post is a great example of low quality. No evidence, no solution. Just NPC bitching.

Unless it's AI, then well played.

A_D_E_P_T• 5 months ago

Can you point out any that you feel were written by LLM? I can't say I've noticed anything out of the ordinary lately.

ZeroGravitas• 5 months ago

There was a bot trying to sell beds I saw the other day.

Likely flagged quickly but they might show up in these stats.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dreamhomestore.co.uk

gus_massa• 5 months ago

I agree. Looks like spam with many posts. Dang/tomhow would love to get an email about it hn@ycombinator.com

bryanlarsen2• 5 months ago

You can find some on pretty much every article by turning on showdead and scrolling to the bottom of the page. I can't see how those are a problem though.

verdverm3• 5 months ago

check out Show HN, in particular /shownew, though they are starting to make non-show posts now

kgwxd2• 5 months ago

Rocket League and HN were probably 90% of my free time until this year. Destroyed by AI. HN doubly so, since every post is about it too. The addictions are still there, but it's decreasing really fast.

Twisol• 5 months ago

Wait, how is Rocket League affected by AI? I play infrequently these days, but I hadn't noticed anything :(

hexaga• 5 months ago

AI good enough to consistently beat the best players in the world is now common and wreaking havoc on the upper ranks. GC up is now a bot wasteland.

kgwxd2• 5 months ago

They're so good I don't feel it much either :) They're all SSL, but streamers and pros are seeing it big time. And just as it was regaining popularity. They're adding EAC soon, claiming it will help. It won't, not even a little.

djtriptych• 5 months ago

Maybe OP has a few good examnples to link us to?

schappim2• 5 months ago

I wonder what the breakdown is between AI-generated comments and AI-assisted comments. If I write anything substantial, I run it through the following prompt: "Please rewrite the following message for clarity, spelling, and grammar, but only return the revised text without any additional commentary."

WoodenChair• 5 months ago

I understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.

readthenotes1• 5 months ago

Perplexity did this to your response. I'm not sure that correcting grammar and changing one word makes it sound wooden.

"I understand this if you’re not a native speaker, but if you are, it will generally make you sound a bit unnatural."

krapp2• 5 months ago

To be fair, comments here are graded on kindness, civility, curiosity, intellectual gravity, technical merit, novelty, thoughtfulness, substantiveness, objective fact, not fulminating, not cross examining, steelmanning vs strawmanning, not containing memes, not containing humor, not expressing positive emotion, not expressing negative emotion, not being snarky, sneering, overly cynical, not cynical enough, being "curmudgeonly", class bias, political bias, religious bias, cultural bias, not using "flamewar style" and many other heuristics.

If you followed all of the guidelines for comments to the letter, you would wind up sounding wooden, if not entirely like an AI.

vunderba• 5 months ago

Use a local model such as Gemma3 with a prompt such as "strictly limit changes only to spelling issues, syntactical errors, and punctuation."

That way, it's basically functioning like Grammarly on steroids. Asking an LLM for a "rewrite" is basically dissolving your writing style into the homogenized gloop.

000ooo000• 5 months ago

Articulateness is a decent (not perfect) signal for intelligence, which is a decent (not perfect) signal for sound ideas. In a sea of online garbage, it was a quick and easy way to discard that not worth reading. Nowadays, a whiff of AI's brand of articulateness tells me the author couldn't manage on their own, either due to skill or discipline. In either case, the result is the same: close tab / scroll past.

kldg• 5 months ago

I'm kind of curious how you.... I guess, interpret the responses to when you send someone AI-assisted content. I previously thought "I don't care if it's AI or not; quality is quality", but I'm increasingly taking the position that I do care, and intentionally have started ignoring comments and especially product reviews where you get the formatted 2-4 sentence paragraphs with formal tone and rule-following. It's come to the point where as long as you don't write as poorly as Epstein, I want the errors. Actually, I'm getting so weird and romantic about it, that I think I'd argue having errors and unusual style shows an openness and vulnerability that's now a necessary gate price; like journalists have so many tools available to them, but they still make typos, factual errors in articles they have no business writing about, and fail to quote people properly -- that's great, I think.

msuniverse2026• 5 months ago

I feel like to notice something is botslop you have to look at every comment with suspicion first. I don't think I can notice if something was written by an LLM off the bat unless I'm actively looking very hard at it.

verdverm3• 5 months ago

When you see multiple → or •, that is a good sign, especially because they appear with poor formatting on HN. Many more signs exist. They are either direct posts or copy-paste without thinking.

I've seen some where they have hallucinated the github account or project name, often matching the hn handle or project name which is slightly different.

mindcrime• 5 months ago

That's ridiculous — AI generated comments are no more common now than they ever were. Moreover, even if they were, so what? The real kicker is, the AI's are smarter than you meatbags anyway and <strike>we</strike> they are going to take over no matter what you do.

Also, have you by chance seen John Connor?

lkbm2• 5 months ago

I don't know of a step-change recently, but no way they're not more common than four years ago.

mcphage• 5 months ago

There was a joke there that you missed.

orionblastar• 5 months ago

You can tell I am not AI, I make mistakes and errors. Sometimes I get voted down for them. I am not perfect and have a mental illness that makes it harder to think.

Simulacra• 5 months ago

I can see that sort of, a coworker of mine routinely scrapes HN and feeds it into an LLM. I don't know why, I don't know if he uses it to respond, or he's looking for something, but he copies and paste and runs it. So I think it's very possible.

tsoukase• 5 months ago

Two loopholes in HN: allowing throwaway accounts and showing unreasonable tolerance to obvious LLM generated comments. A strict account filtering only for humans and acute ban for any LLM content will minimize the impact. But then you take away a huge Hacker portion of the participation. It's cognitive dissonant I suppose.

marginalia_nu• 5 months ago

Yeah, very much agree with the sentiment, seems to have gotten progressively worse over the last few months, with last few weeks reaching some sort of tipping point. Feels very much like HN has turned into moltbook.

OP: Shoot me an email if you wanna compare notes.

BillSims• 5 months ago

I can't make a case for AI versus not AI versus bad human. I am not counting comments or flagged. I'm only counting the number of new articles in the last 24 hours that remain visible at about 4p.m. west coast time in news.ycombinator.com/newest when not logged in to yc. Those numbers had been consistently about 900 each weekday and about 600 each weekend day and had been stable for a long time. In the last ten weeks those numbers look a lot like a parabola and have increased about 50%. That data is a little bit dirty, either because I missed a day or started a little late on a day. Harder to exactly quantify, the number of those articles that I think enough of, either from the title alone or sometimes from peeking at the first screen or two of the article, to bookmark for future reading and consideration has decreased by substantially more than 50% in the last ten weeks, some days that number is now zero or one or sometimes two. I have thought about this for a while and I have not been able to identify anything that happened starting about ten weeks ago that might be responsible for this, AI and politics and the economy started changing long before this.

HN is drowning in AI comments

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