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> submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with respect to the stable numbers of previous years This is showing up (no pun intended) on
by dang 9mo ago
> submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with respect to the stable numbers of previous years
This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been surprisingly stable—fluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10 years—has recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double, though...yet.
- hedgehog 9mo agoRobots coming for todsacerdoti's job.
- minimaxir 9mo agoAre the increasing # of distinct submitters from established accounts or new accounts?
- dang 9mo agoDon't know that yet either! at least that one isn't hard to answer, it just needs a bit of spare time.
- rzk 9mo agoHere is the data since the beginning of HN, where a new submitter is defined as a user whose account was created less than three months before the submission: Stories: https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4 https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4 Comments: https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ The number of new submitters has indeed increased significantly since the beginning of 2026.
- vunderba 9mo agoAnother very common tactic I’ve seen is accounts with 1 karma that’ve been aged a few months.
- vermilingua 9mo agoIs it feasible to differentiate increased agent-traffic from the organic growth in popularity HN has been seeing?
- dang 9mo agoWe don't know yet.
- oblio 9mo agoWe need the equivalent of Bayesian filtering for email spam and of Page Rank for search. Now that I think of this, whoever solves this well will have the next hyperscaler.
- gus_massa 9mo agoI agree, but then you get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222 It has a lot of red flags. Second (re)post of dormant account, vive coded, AI, the biological model is horrible. But it was a nice project, 5/5 would upvote again. Perhaps the important detail is "[I] spent about a month on it."
- readitalready 9mo agoIs it because there's a lot more AI related content as the industry quickly shifts? Or is it bots submitting content?
- cyanydeez 9mo agoIt's likely people with mediocre ideas but access to free LLM tools are able to get over the care-risk-reward activation energy and consequently submit their ideas with the help of LLMs.
- marginalia_nu 9mo agoI've noticed a pretty significant uptick in new accounts posting complete garbage. I don't mean the comments are bad, they're not even words in many cases. I collected a few of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130684 But it also seems some topics (in particular AI) attract a lot of accounts that post incredibly low quality comments, far below the quality you'd expect from HN. Ofte it's in reasonable English, but it's just inane reddit-level drivel. Unclear if these topics attract low quality posters, or if these are bot accounts. Also looking at the three first pages of /noobcomments, we find 28 comments with EM-dashes in them. That's not proof of AI, but if you compare with /newcomments, you find exactly one EM-dash going back as far. That's a bit of a statistical aberration.
- krapp 9mo agoI would wager the vast majority are alt accounts of existing users. People who don't want to risk their karma or reputation but who do want to go mask off for certain subjects. After that it's bound to be bots run by HN users. I just don't think HN is so popular that the rush of green accounts popping up actually represents new users. Maybe I'm wrong , though.
- agoodusername63 9mo agoReddit has been shedding its techy enthusiast crowd for the past few years with the combination of policy changes and insufficient moderation against LLM bots. I wonder if that’s contributing.
- rob 9mo agoI would imagine tons of them are bots. They're getting hard to distinguish, they don't do the normal tropes any longer. They'll type in all lowercase, they'll have the creator post manually to throw you off, they'll make multiple comments within 45 seconds that normal human couldn't do. All things I've witnessed here over the past couple of weeks. And those are just the ones I've caught.
- Retr0id 9mo agoI'd love to see some graphs
- hunterpayne 9mo agoWould it matter? Even before AI, most papers couldn't be replicated. Do we really think this is going to help the situation? Even if some of the AI papers are amazing, will anyone ever read them if most of the papers are useless? More research != more useful research. This is the logical outcome of publish or perish and Q-rankings being the main metric used. "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Goodhart's law
- Retr0id 9mo agoDid you reply to the wrong thing?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- snowhale 9mo agocurious whether the quality distribution changes too, or just the volume. arXiv can't really downvote noise but HN can at least flag/bury it. might be why the doubling shows up on arXiv first and HN is catching up more slowly.