HN is drowning in AI comments • Hacker News Board

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#71

Post by marginalia_nu » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

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.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#72

Post by BillSims » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

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.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#73

Post by kldg » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

schappim wrote: post #19

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."

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.

Re: HN is drowning in AI comments

#74

Post by eibrahim » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

pibaker wrote: post #70

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #8

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.

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 rep…

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.