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Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

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Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#21

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

aebtebeten wrote: post #19
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

If you are feeling overwhelmed with slop posts about ai, camp on the new page and upvote any halfway decent story about something else. Many of us would thank you if they knew.

also, RSS is an alternative to camping

Tangential:

Afaict mods are on our side, despite whatever "aggregated" data "suggest"

This site (which I peruse everyday) claims that 3 AI articles were modded down today, but in actual fact the single nonAI article that was supposed to have been modded down was modded up.

https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals?tab=rea...

I trust however, that the political calls are representative

One has to delve into the data before arriving at broad judgements :)

Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#22

Post by muzani »

HN is the low AI version.

Social media has made it normal to have closed social circles. You like a couple posts by Karpathy and LeCun and your feed is now full of AI. Or you like a post by the anti-AI folks and your feed is now on how useless or harmful it is.

With HN, we all see the same news. But now it's far to the extreme of either party.

HN is often around the early majority of the Innovation Adoption curve. I was actually going to ask why Clawdbot wasn't even mentioned on HN when it had been everywhere else... but the news did hit the front page a few days later. There's a few killer updates from the AI coding groups which only get 0-2 upvotes and disappear.

HN is not the place to go to be up to date on AI, it's where you go to see the news that has hit the mainstream. Opus 4.6 was "leaked" on media and hyped as if it were Claude 5 or something. By the time the news was actually out, people had formed their opinions.

Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#23

Post by satvikpendem »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #14
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #8

I don't think its possible, you're just going to have to wait for the hype to die down like any hype wave When's the last time you saw blockchain on the front page?

Blockchain was useless and in 5.5 years of working in cloud consulting - first at AWS and now at a 3rd party firm, I never once heard a serious business ask - “how can we make or save money using the blockchain”.

You're too late, businesses absolutely did ask that before 2020 when the hype was at its peak.

Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#24

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #23
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain was useless and in 5.5 years of working in cloud consulting - first at AWS and now at a 3rd party firm, I never once heard a serious business ask - “how can we make or save money using the blockchain”.

You're too late, businesses absolutely did ask that before 2020 when the hype was at its peak.

Regular old boring profitable f500 enterprises?

Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#25

Post by satvikpendem »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #24
satvikpendem wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're too late, businesses absolutely did ask that before 2020 when the hype was at its peak.

Regular old boring profitable f500 enterprises?

Lots of examples, such as Walmart and IBM's collaboration: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326188675_Food_Trac...

Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#27

Post by 3vidence »

nanocat wrote: post #17
kirubakaran wrote: post #13

HN minus AI: https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+all-ai (Dis: it's mine, but it's free)

This is cool! Thanks for sharing it. I’m more interested in forums that attract a crowd much more measured and skeptical about AI, though - I know there are a lot of you here at HN (like me)

Yeah honestly I've been racking my brain about the same question (where can I move on to).

HN has been my home for learning about all sorts of things for 10+ years but blockchain + AI has just killed all interesting discussion that can be had.

It's hard to define a community around "not being obsessed" with something. Maybe instead it's worth thinking about what the goal of such a community / forum is. Might be easier to find / define.

If you come up with something I'm happy to check it out.

Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#29

Post by sph »

csomar wrote: post #16
kgraves wrote: post #4

Try lobsters and probably Reddit which have a hard stance against AI. You're right in HN heading down the path in favouring slop, constant posts and startups about AI with now 'influencers' (simonw in particular) aggressively posting and shilling AI. With the moderators knowing that these 'influencers' and their kind violate the HN guidelines every day by purposefully linking back to their site for farming backlinks.…

Lobsters stance is anti-AI and cautious at best. But plenty of AI-related articles there.

I like that for all the LLM/agentic news spam they apply the tag "vibecoding" (derogatory)

Re: Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

#30

Post by stephenr »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #7

Asking to have a tech forum in 2026 that doesn’t discuss AI is about as much of a Luddite as asking about having tech forum anytime in the past 25 years that doesn’t discuss the internet or the 15 that doesn’t discuss mobile. Absolutely everything in tech is touched by AI/ML in 2026 except micro controllers/embedded systems On another note - YC 25 batch https://www.extruct.ai/data-room/ycombinator-companies-s25/ YC 2…

> I’ve had 5 projects since the beginning of last year and they have all involved Amazon hosted LLMs in some form or fashion.

Cargo cultists are going to cargo cult.

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