Thank you OP, this puts into words why I no longer look at Show HNs.
I am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.
Online communities are definitely dying. I guess I hope that maybe IRL communities have a resurgence in this wake.
Please don’t do this here.
I've seen some claim they do it to avoid stylometry or being fingerprinted, or because of social anxiety problems.
Some people just have a compulsive need to optimize everything, and HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.
HN's guidelines aren't that strict and the mod hammer is a plushie. It's not difficult to get by here. It's also kind of useful for critical reflection/self-regulation to hear the occasional "you came in too hot" or "don't be boring" from a moderator.
Seems better to me to just try to be sort of reasonable and let the mods nudge you if they need to and let your comments be downvoted from time to time. What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?
Yes?
Look at all the people who complain about cancel culture. There's a huge swath of people who don't ever want to hear "that was mean/bad/shitty".
This part of the guidelines is a 15 year out-of-date bad joke:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, > foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually > mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and > we'll look at the data.
"We'll look at the data". Sure buddy. You'll do what you always do, which is apply to banhammer to anyone that's not following your talking points, and tone police the actual humans.
Enjoy "conversing curiously" with bots while the mods tone-police non-bots out of existence.
The only thing worst than a slop comment are the people that bitch about it incessantly. I'm convinced it's become a new expression of a mental illness.
I guess… “that’s not just an AI red flag, it’s generally shit prose” would be how ChatGPT would describe most things nowadays.
More, commenting that just as bad as generated content if not worse is every thread where the top comment is an accusation and ensuing witch hunt.
So, no, having an opinion is not a mental illness. Feeling compelled to call it out and discuss it on everything one reads may just be.
Threads that aren't - like this one - don't.
If you are reading LLM content just about everywhere and have no idea. Obviously there are easy to spot things, but the stuff you don't spot is the stuff you don't spot
I'm not saying being a mod means it's bullet proof, but i do notice smaller communities tend to self police better and know what's real.
That said, your experiment scares me as well.
My experiment was focused on niche subreddits as well due to the nature of the product I was trying to market.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-06/Is_The_Inter...
Personally I'd love to find a decent online community these days, my social circle has shrunk considerably, but idk. It seems difficult to start fresh with new people nowadays
I see the same thing with "AI Slop". Yes, there is AI Slop but (IME) it's pretty easy to spot. But what's more annoying is how often people are willing to throw that accusation whenever someone takes a position they don't like, much like the "political" label. It's lazy and honestly just as bad as the slop itself because it unintentionally launders the slop in a "boy who cried wolf" kind of way.
I also have a theory that some AI slop isn't inherently successful. It's just heavily botted by people who are interested in promoting certain positions. I bet you could make a pro-administration LLM bot and another one promoting a communist revolution and no amount of model tuning would make the second as popular as the first because the first would hit third-party botting as well as platform content biases (eg Twitter).
I've personally been accused of being a bot. This is particularly true in recent time as I've tried to share facts and fact-based analysis of, say, what's going on with crude oil markets, the military operation in the Gulf and the politics and economics around it. I even saw one hilarious comment saying (paraphrased) "the bots are getting clever and posting about unrelated topics". This was funny because it never occurred to this person that no, it was just a real person posting something you disagreed with.
Was this a browser using agent? What did you use?
Using just a browser is way too token intensive and slow. It would look for 401 errors then run the browser automation to login with the credentials and grab the token.
I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple platforms. I've no doubt this clock is ticking too but it's still harder to fake a user across a mix of text chat, voice and video calls, playing an online game, etc and when much of the web of relationships extends back into real life activity.
But I agree the golden age of easy anonymous connections online has ended.
Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.
This seems self evident to me too.
It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.
I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity
I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity
I've been thinking about it a bunch and it seems like a really interesting problem. Difficult though.
I suspect there is too much political and corporate will that wants to force everyone online to use their real identity in the open, though
Not too dissimilar to people bot-leveling in MMOs to the sell the accounts.
They aren't going to care about any of the advice in the article about not posting slop -- finding a job is (of course?) more important to them.
Can't really say they are doing anything wrong, maybe I too would have? ... Just that large scale, doesn't work
There are obvious benefits to controlling public discourse, right? Even if it's just to support some project you're working on.
Frankly, online communities have been doing for many years now, when the censorship, anti-free-speech, tone policing mods and mobs started dominating online and America really did not have the self-respect or confidence anymore to enforce the Constitution online.
We're all recalibrating.
I do really think this is just a quick period in time before most people realize that the slop posting doesn't help them personally get anything and most give up and we go back to roughly the ratio of cool things with real value to see but like on a bigger scale because AI helps you do more as one person.
I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or whatever and just let it run. Why not? Little effort on their part and they might actually have influence. The same reason why spammers apparently think sending me 10 text messages per day about a loan I've been approved for. It probably does work 0.0001% of the time, but that's okay if it's all automated.
Especially say here on HN with Show HN and such the forcing factors are "i get no votes or community recognition"
But I don't entirely disagree with you I think things won't totally go back I think it will settle way more than now though especially where things are a little more niche.
Maybe it's hard getting across what I mean so a more concrete example is there will be SO MUCH clickbait out there that serious outfits instead of being forced to do it will be able to successfully differentiate themselves by NOT doing it. (and many similar things in different arenas)
I'm trying to say that LLMs raising the noise floor will drown out a lot of the toxic noise that's been plaguing us.
I can hope.
Now there's more pressure to have a stronger signal and hopefully rewards to match.
I really want to believe this will be true. However, I also suspect there's some external driving force, that I cannot readily name, which is making people incapable of consuming anything except this low-effort content. I mean, obviously it's working to some extent. Perhaps AI will be the thing that accelerates its death, but part of me thinks something else needs to happen beyond just an increase in useless content.
Strict invitation trees? Small signup fees? No SEO incentives?
* dead online communities
* highly-invasive, government-mandated "prove you are a human" requirements in order to participate in online communities
The intriguing part is that I think it works against scaling. The incremental cost for me to use the 500GB of free space on my disk is $0, but someone scaling a bot farm has to buy all their space.
Real people tend to have a lot more idle capacity than optimized, scaled businesses, so any kind of proof of idle capacity seems like it would disadvantage bot farms.
I’ve also thought that proof of collateral spending would be a good system. For example, you buy groceries and the store gives you a token saying you spent $X of real world money. Those tokens help show you're not a bot. Keeping that system honest and equitable would be extremely difficult though.
Maybe schools could give kids tokens for attendance. It sounds kind of dumb, but who knows.
While the site has moved to using /showlim, the AI garbage just bypasses that and goes straight to the home page. Almost every project that’s being shown is vibe coded and looks exactly the same - generated by Claude or the like. This is an excellent test for the site: will it be able to adapt or do we simply end up with a husk of what HN was and it’s the AI posts driving majority of engagement, Overton window, and upvotes/downvotes?
I look forward to this, I think it is an exciting development.
That people trust AI over an organizational knowledge is bad enough. I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.
It's frustrating because we're bundling this shitty AI with our product so we're just making more work for ourselves. Then there's the push from leadership to use more AI...
I don't think it's making people antisocial though, people just like easy solutions to their problems. We're giving them what seems like an easy solution. But it's easy for them, not easy for the reviewers.
> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.
I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nuance there.
For example a project might have no active contributors. It might not be something you can drop directly into your codebase. Neither of those is inherently bad.
As AI becomes more responsible for higher-level planning decisions, the value of an OSS project becomes less tied to visible community activity like PRs and issues.
I notice this in my own work a lot. I might not use that project's code directly. But I think about a problem differently as a result. I often point my agent to existing OSS projects as inspiration on how to solve a problem. The project provides indirect value by supporting architectural decisions, deployment approaches etc. Unfortunately OSS activity doesn't capture this.
We get it, the current narrative is that coding is the big thing, promoted by billionaires and scabs alike.
So, the coding narrative must be protected until the IPO of Juniper^H^H^H Anthropic happens and the whole thing implodes.
You already could have code for free and faster by using "git clone" without a company of thieves selling your own output back to you.
Edit - I am not anti AI but it is slowly killing the digital human interaction.
Upvotes are not a good mechanism for quality control in any way because they force good content to have the same metadata as the content that is technically well-constructed but is irrelevant, meaningless, just a platitude, too obvious to be obvious or pablum. Upvotes turn everything into a shock-value dominated 101 space.
They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me.
There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.
They muddy the waters. They wheedle, rules-lawyer, carve out exceptions, and talk about how important it is to have nuance in separating virtuous applications for slop from bad ones, and that focusing on the bad ones is actually very tedious and rude. We should have polite discourse about the good things about slop and stop being so mean about bad slop, which isn't even really a problem. The bad kinds of slop will be solved soon, probably, and the harms are overstated. They colonize spaces.
If moderators don't swiftly throw these slop enthusiasts out on their ass, slightly less polite ones will post slop slightly less politely. More and more of the people participating in the space will have favorable opinions toward slop, and shout down people who object to slop. In no time at all, your community is a slop bar. Who could have imagined?
It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly.
It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost.
I fear losing the battle.
No, it's a problem with art, text and videos too. Reddit was already becoming a creative writing exercise in many ways, with infamous subs like 'Am I the Asshole?' seemingly being about 80% fiction labelled as fact. But now you don't even need to know how to write to flood the site with useless 'content'.
YouTube is arguably even worse, since AI led content farms are not just spamming the hell out of every topic under the sun, but giving outright dangerous advice and misinformation on top of that. I saw this video about medical misinformation by these 'creators' earlier, and it genuinely made me want to see them crack down on this junk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfCTCBDKIU
And there's just this feeling of distrust everywhere too. Is anyone on Hacker News human anymore? Is that Reddit poster I'm responding to human? Are the folks on Twitter, Threads or Bluesky human?
The scary part is that you basically can't tell anymore. Any project you find could be AI generated slop, any account could be a bot using stolen images or deepfakes, any article or video could be blatant misinformation put together as a cash grab...
If something doesn't improve, pretty much every platform under the sun is going to be completely useless, as is a lot of the internet as a whole.
I have turned to blunt instruments: blocking individuals on their first cliche banner-wave. It has substantially improved comment quality but I still suffer from the problem that I don’t block stories entirely.
This synthetic participation (LLM or otherwise) has catalyzed weakspots in HN's high-trust environment. The weight we give to the average HN comment is orders of magnitude higher than the average Reddit (& co.) comment, and this relationship probably goes both ways (much higher ROI on ads/propaganda). Due to the low volume & high trust, it seems to be a very different (easier) environment in which to achieve pervasive propaganda/advertising/etc with a disproportionate impact.
I remember when some new LLM version came out (maybe from Meta?) I saw something like 3 of the top 10 posts on the front page were all variations of "Foobar 2.1 New Model". Perhaps not explicit, deliberate manipulation, but the result was the same, and apparently allowed. How many of those generic LLM websites (https://letsbuyspiritair.com/ comes to mind) show up on the front page per day? Zero effort static front-ends for some unremarkable data. I'm not going to touch the politics minefield, but that is a weakspot too.
All of this, and yet I think HN has handled it relatively well. I really appreciate not seeing comments of the form "I asked Clog/Gemini/etc. here's 5 paragraphs". Places like Reddit do not have the agility or control, and have degraded accordingly.
It makes me sad to think that a short time ago, every forum was ~100% humans, and now it is some fraction of that. I wonder if I will ever see that again.
josefritzishere•1h ago