Mastodawn

How much of HN is AI?

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/how-much-of-hn-is-ai

How much of HN is AI?

I have a complicated relationship with Hacker News. The site is the most important aggregator of geek news and a major source of traffic to this blog. At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general direction; if you want a taste,

lcamtuf’s thing

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kylecazar Mar 12

Maybe add a category for posts and comments about AI on HN :)

"Stories about AI" is not offensive to me. Its influence on the industry is undeniable and if I'm feeling tired of that content I just won't engage with it.

AI-writing is another story, but yeah -- HN is downstream of that problem. You can encourage people not to submit articles that seem to be LLM authored, but it won't work.

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tptacek Mar 12

Part of the ethos of HN is that we don't do content/subject silos; it's a way in which HN is very distinct from Reddit. I don't think this will happen and I think if it does it's a bad idea (not least because I don't think a site dominated by software developers is going to separate itself from AI, any more than it will separate itself from programming language discussions), but I understand the impulse. They're not the funnest stories to comment on.

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csande17 Mar 12

/ask and /show are sort of HN's version of content/subject silos; posts there can technically appear on the front page but are comparatively less likely to. I imagine they could add a /slop section for AI posts, and then tweak the ranking logic for the main /news page to prevent too many from showing up at once.

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tptacek

I understand the suggestion to be moving all posts about AI, agents, etc to a silo. Generated posts are generally already off-topic here (I gather they're about to add a new flag for that).

I think it's going to be really difficult to segregate discussions about AI from discussions about software development over the next few years.