I am 100% behind this. I've been browsing hackernews since I started in tech, it is the only forum i regularly browse, and partake in. Simply because the quality of submissions and conversations are so high. There has been more AI related articles this part year, and it only seems ramping. I personally haven't found the AI part of the comments as big of a deal but dang and tom might be doing more than I realize on that front.
Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.
The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.
It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely. And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)
But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.
> It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely.
alternative view. it is going way too quickly and premature rules can be reduced if the actual damage is less than theexpected model.
You can always make things easier, its much harder to rebuild a community that hass been destroyed.
> And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)
You saying that in a website with a UI straight out of the 90s is really fucking funny. Cause HN is a perfect example of resistance to change working out. Facebook chased every trend and failed (the social media, meta as an ad platform is doing ok), tech blogs chased trends and failed. This place said "nah this is good", and is still here.
> The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.
That's true, but it also means that Show HN has less value than it used to: the SNR is falling off a cliff :-(
I planned to post a Show HN for a new product I want to launch (all human written by myself, with only the GEO docs vibed currently), but not sure now that any decent/quality product will ever get air. All the oxygen is being sucked out by low-effort products.
> If you (or anyone) have ideas about other pragmatic measures we could take, we're interested.
Suggestion: Make it clear and explicit in guidelines and FAQ that this forum is for human conversation and that writing/editing post or comment by LLM or automated posting is bannable offense.
Second and similarly, "vibe-coded" should have no place on Show HN and this could be made much more explicit.
Invisible text that will serve as a honey pot for LLMs is one thing to try. Imagine a comment where half of the words are marked as invisible by CSS, the other half has letters rearranged, but at the HTML level all the words look the same. LLMs will have to render pages which is a lot more expensive.
1.) Rendering pages is table stakes for an AI headless browser tool, and 2.) most of the LLM comments probably come from copy and pasting to ChatGPT, not from autonomous agents.
maybe you guys already do this, but what about having a line of text near the submission fields that says "If you are submitting a Show HN post, please do not post an AI generated version, it degrades the quality of submissions (or it makes it harder for others to submit high quality content, or something like that)
I know when I see those guidelines show up in reddit submission forms, i respect that because I see what the sub exactly wants..
You'll be fine. I don't want to say much specifically because it'll just end up as extra steps on some "how to promote your project on HN" checklist somewhere.
> But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.
Is this page meant to be discoverable normally, or is it just there to host a message for those who encounter the restriction?
Will removing the incentive, which is the upvotes, help reduce this spam? You can disable public access to the points gained by a new account (or may be for every account).
Or if the ranking that's attractive to spammer, may be try experimenting with randomizing order of comments in a discussion.
What I hope not to see is the Reddit method of "Oh you made a new account? Cool. You can't post anywhere and you can't post until you've posted catch 22"
I feel the same and find myself extending it beyond forums. I've started skipping over articles about AI more and more from authors I normally enjoy reading because so few of those articles end up being particularly interesting or insightful.
AI is obviously an important topic but it has been discussed to absolute death the past couple years and very few people have anything useful to add at this point. Things will of course evolve and change in the near term but someone speculating that maybe this will happen or that will happen isn't very useful.
Given the risks and unknowns I think we should collectively be treating it as a major risk to our economic and national security, and figuring out how to mitigate the downside risks without stifling the upside. But most of the people in power have zero interest in doing that so we're all going to YOLO this in real time.
> Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
Exactly. I feel like HN has never been this boring. Enough of the slop, let’s talk about interesting stuff again!
If you haven't yet checked it out, I'd recommend taking a look at Tildes for similarly high quality submissions/conversations as on HN. It really is such a breath of fresh air compared to most other platforms.
Just had a look, it is pretty interesting, just from the few times I've checked the frontpage there was some interesting articles to me. with a variety of topic. Great suggestion!
I personally joined HN because of various AI discussions.
Comparatively, other sites such as Reddit, Twitter and YouTube just shill content, applications or products. A ton of the posts on Reddit are just AI written ffmpeg wrappers which no one should care about but apparently people do...
Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.