5 ms·
HN is drowning in AI comments
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 7mo agoYou are late to the party....
- waygtdai 7mo agoI get the joke and I myself called it awhile back, I just thought we had a bit more time.
- amelius 7mo agoWe need more jokes on HN. It's the only good way to prove you're human these days.
- krapp 7mo ago>We need more jokes on HN. I see... Hacker News needs to get a sense of humor or else get drowned in AI slop. So we're doomed is what you're saying.
- CSSer 7mo agoThis is seriously a good point. Maybe that and typos or bad phrasing
- AstroBen 7mo agoAI is a master at bad phrasing. Typos are just an extra bullet point in your prompt to add
- lkbm 7mo agoThe dumb jokes we've been flooded with June 2023 are some of the easiest content for AI to produce.
- tredre3 7mo agoThe flood of humorous GPT-generated reviews on Amazon made me stop reading reviews altogether. I can understand someone using a LLM to extrapolate one sentence into two paragraphs. I don't like it, but I understand that on Amazon the button is right there and it helps people feel smarter about their literary skills, in the way that filters help people feel prettier on instagram. But the added snark or humoristic tone? Why instruct the LLM to do that? To get more likes? On a review?
- schappim 7mo agoDepends on the context ;-)
- smitty1e 7mo agoI don't know. Most of my attempts at humor here seem to attract the moderation PETN.
- Bender 7mo agoFor a better chance of reply email hn@ycombinator.com.
- einpoklum 7mo agoHow 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 7mo agohttps://www.marginalia.nu/weird-ai-crap/hn/ 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 7mo agoThat doesn't mean there are many of these staying alive.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Hnrobert42 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- AstroBen 7mo agoThere are a lot, but they tend to get heavily downvoted and end up hidden
- greesil 7mo agoHow would you know?
- bryanlarsen 7mo agoThere's a showdead option in settings
- brg 7mo agoTo 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.
- subsection1h 7mo agoI'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zartan [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1704153600&dateEnd=1735689600&type=story&sort=byDate https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=custom... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=pastYear&type=story&sort=byDate https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=pastYe...
- pixl97 7mo agoNo, 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-42 7mo agoThe 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.
- waygtdai 7mo agoI 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.
- verdverm 7mo agoIt's the community moderation that keeps HN resilient, i.e. many-humans-in-the-loop
- waygtdai 7mo agoThat fell apart quickly due to sheer scale that AI operates at. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter mentioned a significant increase in Show HN. It is impossible to keep up. I wonder when HN will go down due to scaling issues.
- Jensson 7mo agoYou do see a lot more comments with AI tells in show-hn, I guess because not many view those so they aren't moderated out as quickly.
- truthneversleep 7mo ago[flagged]
- flir 7mo agoHow do you get it to add the typos?
- aaron695 7mo agoNo 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 7mo agoCan you point out any that you feel were written by LLM? I can't say I've noticed anything out of the ordinary lately.
- wetpaws 7mo ago[dead]
- ZeroGravitas 7mo agoThere 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dreamhomestore.co.uk
- gus_massa 7mo agoI agree. Looks like spam with many posts. Dang/tomhow would love to get an email about it hn@ycombinator.com
- bryanlarsen 7mo agoYou 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.
- verdverm 7mo agocheck out Show HN, in particular /shownew, though they are starting to make non-show posts now
- kgwxd 7mo agoRocket 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 7mo agoWait, how is Rocket League affected by AI? I play infrequently these days, but I hadn't noticed anything :(
- hexaga 7mo agoAI 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.
- kgwxd 7mo agoThey'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 7mo agoMaybe OP has a few good examnples to link us to?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- schappim 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoI understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.
- readthenotes1 7mo agoPerplexity 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."
- ShroudedNight 7mo ago"I think" is explicitly disclaiming authority. Omitting it changes the social signaling of the response significantly. Switching "wooden" for "a bit unnatural" also does a disservice: "wooden" describes a specific quality of deviance. Over-all, I would definitely consider the revision stiffer and more reserved than the original.
- WD-42 7mo ago“Wooden” is much richer and unique than “a bit unnatural” so yes the ai version does sound more like a robot.
- krapp 7mo agoTo 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- msuniverse2026 7mo agoI 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.
- verdverm 7mo agoWhen 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 7mo agoThat'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?
- orionblastar 7mo agoYou 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.
- adampunk 7mo ago[flagged]
- Simulacra 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoTwo 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.
- waygtdai 7mo ago[dead]
- marginalia_nu 7mo agoYeah, 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 7mo agoI 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.