Dang, any updates on how you and the team were thinking of tackling this? It’s getting ridiculous. Last week was sort of okay but it’s much worse this weekend.
Edit: This spiked on front page and now it’s completely gone. What is going on?
Great. Flagged.
Edit: This spiked on front page and now it’s completely gone. What is going on?
Great. Flagged.
Comments
By Hnrobert42 2026-02-2823:376 reply 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.
By kylecazar 2026-02-2823:41 Yeah, the up/down voting mechanism seems to be doing it's job for me too. Don't think I've noticed a degradation in, say, the top third of comments. That's where I try to live anyway.
/newest is chock full of submissions that were written by AI, though. That's another, broader problem.
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 replied to) into chatGPT and it will generate a very similar reply.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758598
The post I replied to was flagged dead so you need to turn showdead on in your profile to read it. Would you be able to tell if it is AI if someone replied like this to you? I surely couldn't.
By eibrahim 2026-03-0216:52 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.
By brg 2026-03-010:10 To add to the collection of anecdata, your experience is similar to mine. I have been more exhausted recently by the complaints of AI submissions and pseudo analysis of AI comments than exhausted by the supposed AI generated comments themselves.
By subsection1h 2026-03-011:121 reply I've been using HN since 2008 when I created my first account[1] and I use HN differently than most people. I have a group of bookmarked searches that I visit almost daily that relate to technologies that interest me, such as Emacs.
In the past year, the searches I perform that relate to web development show a horrifying increase in the amount of Show HN posts that are posted by new accounts, include AI generated descriptions and point to AI generated projects on GitHub.
In 2024, there were 17,661 Show HN posts.[2] In the past year, there have been over 448,000 Show HN posts![3] And of course, most of these posts are AI generated.
Also, if you check the new accounts posting all this AI slop, you'll see that some of them also post AI generated comments in other threads, which is the main problem.
But for me, what is even more annoying is the enormous increase in new accounts created by nontechnical vibecoders who now think of themselves as technologists and who post worthless, ignorant comments that actually get upvoted, presumably by similar folks who have unfortunately been creating accounts at HN in the past 10 years or so.
As a result, 2026 is the first year in which I visit HN about once a week instead of about once a day.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zartan
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=custom...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Show+HN%22&dateRange=pastYe...
By subsection1h 2026-03-011:381 reply The fact that this discussion was flagged might be the final nail in the coffin for me. The huge increase in AI generated comments and posts at HN is a topic that has been discussed on other forums for months now. Complaints include "Orange Reddit", "Orange LinkedIn", etc. But when the topic comes up at HN, it gets flagged. Fuck this.
I don’t care for the karma, but I wish dang would intentionally unflag this and have it on front page so people can voice their concerns.
I would like to encourage you to step back a little and try to get a broader view on this issue.
I don't want to discuss whether there is more LLM-generated content or not. There clearly is, and there is no feasible way to get rid of it , because there is simply no reliable way to distinguish what was made by humans and what wasn't. Regardless of what is claimed, it is just not possible, if only because hybrid forms exist as well. This text was written by me, but reviewed and stylistically adjusted by an LLM.
It is therefore completely pointless to get upset about LLM content and demand anything from the moderators. All we are left with are our votes and the "reputation" of our user handles - and the awareness that we need to learn to consume content with a great deal of skepticism. We should have been doing this all along, but it seems to be something we struggle with.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
And yes, this may mean that we stop using anonymous online platforms altogether, because nothing on them can be relied upon anymore. That is a shame, but it cannot be stopped — Pandora's LLM box has been open for at least five years.
I therefore consider any discussion about banning LLM content to be futile. We are witnessing another Eternal September here: it couldn't be stopped back then, and it won't be stopped today either.
So what is there left to discuss?
By waygtdai 2026-03-019:38 Many people in this and other threads around this topic have already stated what they are going to do, which is the inevitable conclusion: move to private chats/discords. I’m sure some amount will remain on IRC or maybe IRC will get a second wind (unlikely). Websites like HN will have to make a choice going forward because now they’re on a trajectory to complete enshittification. Your handle and karma doesn’t matter if the site is dominated by bots. It’s basically a hollow shell of what it used to be and there’s no value to it at a certain point. You’ll be replying to bots more than humans.
There’s plenty left to discuss for humans. But LLMs don’t discuss.
By kyriakos 2026-03-017:00 I've only seen a shift on the kind of submissions that get pushed to the front page compared to the past but I guess there's a change in what people consider important in the community
There are a lot, but they tend to get heavily downvoted and end up hidden
By bryanlarsen 2026-03-013:18 There's a showdead option in settings
No, not HN, the internet at large.
Now, I'm on vacation this week and not been paying too much attention, but whenever you have a geopolitical event like the little extravaganza in Iran the number of bot like posts tends to explode as influence operators make their moves.
The public facing internet is done. HN has been fairly resilient (I think) but even it is beginning to buckle. It’s been sliding for a while but LLMs are the death knell.
It was a fun 2 decades. Time to stick to private discords and real life friends from here on out, though.
I don’t think HN is any more resilient. The new account captcha is fairly tame and, while I’m sure they have proxy detectors and other things in place, it doesn’t stop new accounts from posting and getting traction.
Someone suggested earlier this week that an invite system should be implemented (I think lobsters has it?) I doubt it would fly here, but yeah.
It's the community moderation that keeps HN resilient, i.e. many-humans-in-the-loop
That fell apart quickly due to sheer scale that AI operates at. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter mentioned a significant increase in Show HN. It is impossible to keep up. I wonder when HN will go down due to scaling issues.
By Jensson 2026-03-016:45 You do see a lot more comments with AI tells in show-hn, I guess because not many view those so they aren't moderated out as quickly.
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."
By 000ooo000 2026-03-011:23 Articulateness is a decent (not perfect) signal for intelligence, which is a decent (not perfect) signal for sound ideas. In a sea of online garbage, it was a quick and easy way to discard that not worth reading. Nowadays, a whiff of AI's brand of articulateness tells me the author couldn't manage on their own, either due to skill or discipline. In either case, the result is the same: close tab / scroll past.
By vunderba 2026-03-010:01 Use a local model such as Gemma3 with a prompt such as "strictly limit changes only to spelling issues, syntactical errors, and punctuation."
That way, it's basically functioning like Grammarly on steroids. Asking an LLM for a "rewrite" is basically dissolving your writing style into the homogenized gloop.
By WoodenChair 2026-02-2823:432 reply I understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.
By krapp 2026-03-012:09 To be fair, comments here are graded on kindness, civility, curiosity, intellectual gravity, technical merit, novelty, thoughtfulness, substantiveness, objective fact, not fulminating, not cross examining, steelmanning vs strawmanning, not containing memes, not containing humor, not expressing positive emotion, not expressing negative emotion, not being snarky, sneering, overly cynical, not cynical enough, being "curmudgeonly", class bias, political bias, religious bias, cultural bias, not using "flamewar style" and many other heuristics.
If you followed all of the guidelines for comments to the letter, you would wind up sounding wooden, if not entirely like an AI.
By readthenotes1 2026-02-2823:552 reply Perplexity did this to your response. I'm not sure that correcting grammar and changing one word makes it sound wooden.
"I understand this if you’re not a native speaker, but if you are, it will generally make you sound a bit unnatural."
By ShroudedNight 2026-03-010:11 "I think" is explicitly disclaiming authority. Omitting it changes the social signaling of the response significantly.
Switching "wooden" for "a bit unnatural" also does a disservice: "wooden" describes a specific quality of deviance.
Over-all, I would definitely consider the revision stiffer and more reserved than the original.
By WD-42 2026-03-010:30 “Wooden” is much richer and unique than “a bit unnatural” so yes the ai version does sound more like a robot.
By kldg 2026-03-0118:20 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.
