Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#1

Post by keiferski » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

I only see 7 posts in the Ask HN section. The other day, there were only 10. Is this due to a cap on Ask submissions, or something else?

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#2

Post by cebert » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

Many of the Ask HN posts are lower quality. Additionally, with LLMs, everyone has access to personal research assistant that can investigate questions for them.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#3

Post by chistev » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

cebert wrote: post #2

Many of the Ask HN posts are lower quality. Additionally, with LLMs, everyone has access to personal research assistant that can investigate questions for them.

Oh, come on. Users have always filtered out the low quality stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#4

Post by mikhailfranco » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 1:21 PM UTC

Multi-year web traffic statistics for HN?

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#5

Post by keiferski » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

cebert wrote: post #2

Many of the Ask HN posts are lower quality. Additionally, with LLMs, everyone has access to personal research assistant that can investigate questions for them.

I think the majority of Ask HN questions have always been looking for the opinions of the community, not just pieces of information.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#6

Post by Bender » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

Is Ask HN Shrinking?

I only have anecdotal information so take what you want from it. If one of my silly blog articles ends up on the front page I get a total of about 18K unique IP's that are mostly only humans which is about the same as I received last year. Not many people would be interested in my articles so take that with a grain of salt.

When my articles are only in /newest I get roughly ~20 to ~40 unique human viewers depending on the time of day which is down a little bit from last year. That makes sense to me as a number of regulars are probably tired of the LLM slop fest. If I put on my tinfoil underwear I could imagine some concerted effort to use LLM's to drive people away from independent platforms that are unable to filter the slop and/or attempt to warm up accounts and control the narrative on a number of platforms. I am leaning towards organized crime being behind some of it. Thankfully a number of regulars have stuck around and flag most of it and team dang are doing a great job of automating some of this.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#7

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

There's the uncurated version of Ask HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew if you want to see more of them. (It's listed in the Lists link at the bottom of the page.) But it's mostly low quality submissions, particularly with showdead enabled.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#8

Post by mikert89 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

I think opinions on HN are less relevant and less information dense. Many people here are not keyed into the true trends in the industry, and instead are cynics

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#9

Post by sph » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

Everyone bringing their wild theories without answering the damn question:

Yes, it's been shrunk. It was a full page of posts until very recently (changed this week?)

No idea why, perhaps because it was used as if HN were Reddit, and also Ask HN in their implementation has always been pretty bad, suffering from the same downranking system so if your Ask HN has a lively discussion, it gets quickly dropped from /ask, and only questions no one really found interesting enough to engage with remained up for days.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

#10

Post by andyjohnson0 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

For a while now Ask has been plagued by green userids slop-posting random takes like this is the r-site. If someone is doing something about this then good.