I used to love reading the HN comments. When there was a new tool or technology being discussed there would almost certainly be someone who directly worked on it, if not the founder themselves, giving further insight and welcoming discussion. And when there was back and forth discussion, it was people clarifying their questions and answers, and sharing their expertise. Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.
It's the natural progression of websites like this. Reddit went through the same progression: it was very positive and felt like a community when the migration from Digg first happened. 10 years ago, Hacker News felt like an insider website for professionals. It still does, but there's definitely an uptick in negativity.
yeah HN really reminds me of reddit before the Digg exodus. I wonder if it will have the same fate eventually as it gets more popular and moderation can't keep up
- Canada payment system
- folding paper airplanes
- Solar panels
- Raspberry pi price increases
- a bunch of show hns
- how does malloc work
There are more AI posts that's for sure, but it's also not that bad? It's also heavily affecting the livelihood of many people here (for better and often worse), so it's reasonable that it would be prevalent.
There's always been grumpy engineers here, on stackoverflow, reddit, everywhere. Lots of grumpy engineers are also amazing engineers. There's newbies proud to show something, even though it's not really always that great, some people dunk, some people encourage etc.
Almost everything in the new submissions is about AI and has been for a while now. Same with the links you see. It's getting to the point where non-AI tech news and information is completely drowned out. Stepping back month by month you can see how the AI content increases exponentially. Soon it'll be all you can read about it unless something is done. Perhaps a yc.ai site for AI-related news and discussion?
I have a browser extension that auto-clicks the Hide button for entries with AI-related terms in the title. Helps surface the interesting stories. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
I'm a (vocal) proponent of AI (as applied to software development) and even I think, and have been saying all year, that the amount of AI stuff on the front page is unfortunate. It's not a mystery why anyone would think 2-years-ago HN was more fun than today's!
But it's not an easy thing to intervene on. AI is neck and neck with "the Internet" for impact on technology.
From most people I talk to, there is an understanding that the overwhelm of AI content, bot comments, etc. has degraded the quality of community spaces (especially HN but also including Reddit, X/Twitter, etc.). I hope we can figure out a way to get more human-curated content soon and make the economics of amplifying it make sense (obviously it does not in this current transition chapter).
I'd guess more and more valuable discussion will just shift to gated invite only groups. Private discord servers, signal, telegram etc etc
I don't see another feasible way of protecting against the spam.
What's more strange to me is why these content places like Twitter and Reddit don't see this as a danger to themselves? Why would someone want to advertise in a place that's 90% bots? Reddit for example made it harder to check astroturf bots by blocking viewing comment and post history and giving every user default AdjectiveNounNumber style names. I get why it works short term but I've completely stopped using it because I just found myself facing fake botted engagement everywhere.
I propose we sign each other's PGP keys as a honor code system of writing of one's own words. Idk how this will turn out... Complete distrust or tribalism or actually useful?
The problem is that it's too easy to copy/paste a rebuttal written by an LLM as if you wrote it, without actually understanding it. Simply signing such a faux thought does nothing.
I imagine the result would be a mixture of elitism, community fragmentation, and a witch hunt that never stops. Like Stack Overflow meets The Crucible.
Agree that tech was more exciting when AI wasn't in the fold, but it's also true that the tech industry and SF in particular was facing headwinds economically. Without AI there even have been a recession.
So the question is: is it fine for SF to rebound and money to spent on a revolutionary tech, at the expense of human ingenuity and possibly our entire industry?
I'm tired of political/social manifestos as part of the README.md files in github repositories for packages have no choice but to use. I'm tired of command line package manager tools asking for Ukraine support from my command line.
I find it funny that the linked date features a story about the FDA proposing to maybe halt sales of the completely useless "drug" phenylephrine (Sudafed PE, etc). Here we are 2 years later and still zero action.
Relentless negativity drives away people who aren't relentlessly negative. I am dropping in this week after a while being away and my impression is that people got more distant and cynical while I was gone. I'm working on a solo project right now but I can't imagine posting about it here where people seem to want to only find reasons to tear builders down for not doing things their way.
Also massive difference when visiting at different times of day from what I've seen.. When the US is asleep and most of this site is populated by Indians and Europeans, there seems to be much less AI boosting and VC/hustle culture. Maybe it's just my biases showing and real data would reject this, but it sure feels like it.
Yes. HN has slowly turned into the reasons I left reddit. Every topic turning into politics, pure hate and outrage. Massive number of negative sentiment posts. I was going to reddit and leaving angry. Increasingly I'm coming to HN and leaving angry. I don't want that and if it doesn't change soon I'll have to stop coming here to.
I think there was a lot of pressure building in our community because the ballot box has been no outlet for many years. We've had an increasingly burdensome and insane political environment worldwide and people dealing with unmitigated suffering. It leaks into HN and Reddit in different ways. People here are very plugged into policy and national circumstance and so they can't help but color their opinions.
I just want tech news and some discussion. Sure, tech has some downsides on society and the planet. I can, and do, hear about that in many other places. It’s not what I come here for.
I understand younger generations are feeling very disaffected and hopeless. I feel for them. I don’t really have a solution for them and don’t have the power to change it so I’d rather tune it out. Yeah, that makes me a selfish jerk. Ok, cool.
I’ve also noticed a steady increase in what I call “empty sneering”, where they don’t really have a point to contribute but they just want to dunk on somebody. It’s especially noticeable for any hot button topics – yeah, we get that you don’t like Musk/Trump/AI/whatever but do you have an actual point to contribute or not?
I’ve been saying for years that spite should be viewed as a primary metric for social media. The higher the volume of spite, the more harmful it is and the less useful it is. Hacker News is heading in the wrong direction.
"Empty sneering" is a good term for it. Seems like the curse of conversation at scale: Reduction to polarized talking points. Often without engaging TFA at all.
I think there are still good conversations happening here, and I really appreciate the efforts of moderators to keep HN hacky.
I had great luck on there but I also quickly muted people who didn’t add value. Twitter kicked me off and wanted my biometrics though so I no longer use that site.
That’s because the Hacker News crowd has finally found a topic on which it is willing to engage with the same level of outrage that has long defined Reddit. That topic is AI.
Turns out the clienteles of the two platforms aren’t so different after all. The only difference is what triggers them.
It's always funny going through the comment history of people who complain about politics, as if such complaints aren't political in and of themselves:
> I truly hate what HN has become. It has all the expected comments about Musk, fascism, etc
> HN has turned into reddit. It's highly political with strong anti Israeli and anti USA views.
It's completely understandable to want to read about technical topics rather than ever-more coverage/condemnation of Israel's genocide. But when you start characterizing the existence of such discussion as "anti Israeli", or criticizing people for merely having the temerity to discuss contemporary fascism, you've gone solidly into politics yourself.
So it seems you're being quite disingenuous with this comment - you do like politics, rather you just don't like people discussing quite obvious elephants in the room that disagree with your own political views.
Something akin to this has been said at every political movement throughout history. Stop complaining, stop making waves, know your place, stop disrupting order.
Our world and our societies are facing a lot of problems. Technology has a part in most of them. You may desire to live in a bubble where you see no criticism, but this is an open public discussion forum and most people are not. Sorry.
The day I saw HN being linked on mainstream blogs, such as MacRumors - I knew this community was reaching its breaking point on having good conversations again. HN used to be a nice escape for me to have some technical brain teasers, now I see so many hate comments it just makes me upset and no longer feel engaged anymore.
Having been on the receiving end from both dang and tomhow as to how this discussion is "off topic", the "guidelines have been consistent for many years", and "if you have any concerns email us at hn@ycombi..." my genuine answer is: migrate to lobste.rs and the handful of other places. The moderation here has not been good even in light of all the praise they have gotten. This is not a "the ball was dropped yesterday" situation. The ball has been dropping for a long time now, and whenever someone brings it up, it's looked down upon. That's okay, we'll go and play in another sandbox then.
I have a list of suggestions that would have a noticeable improvement on HN, and some of it has been implemented to success (and detriment) elsewhere. But that list is highly unlikely to even be attempted here, until it is too late and much like the Digg->Reddit situation, the barn doors have been left open for too long.
I used to love reading the HN comments. When there was a new tool or technology being discussed there would almost certainly be someone who directly worked on it, if not the founder themselves, giving further insight and welcoming discussion. And when there was back and forth discussion, it was people clarifying their questions and answers, and sharing their expertise. Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.
People were saying the exact same things two years ago.
HN comments are really nothing at all like Reddit comments.
All of the superiority, snark, self importance and toxicity.
None of the juvenile humor.
I mean if I'm gonna be preached at by jerks who think I'm stupid I'd rather they be funny jerks.
I haven’t been on HN for a decade or anything, but I do see founders in the comments more often than not. Of course this is n=1.
HN comment threads have been blamed for becoming Reddified since at least 2009.
It's the natural progression of websites like this. Reddit went through the same progression: it was very positive and felt like a community when the migration from Digg first happened. 10 years ago, Hacker News felt like an insider website for professionals. It still does, but there's definitely an uptick in negativity.
yeah HN really reminds me of reddit before the Digg exodus. I wonder if it will have the same fate eventually as it gets more popular and moderation can't keep up
Its funny, because the Digg migration is probably when Reddit started going down hill.
I don't know, the frontpage looks fine today?
- Canada payment system - folding paper airplanes - Solar panels - Raspberry pi price increases - a bunch of show hns - how does malloc work
There are more AI posts that's for sure, but it's also not that bad? It's also heavily affecting the livelihood of many people here (for better and often worse), so it's reasonable that it would be prevalent.
There's always been grumpy engineers here, on stackoverflow, reddit, everywhere. Lots of grumpy engineers are also amazing engineers. There's newbies proud to show something, even though it's not really always that great, some people dunk, some people encourage etc.
I still like it here.
Almost everything in the new submissions is about AI and has been for a while now. Same with the links you see. It's getting to the point where non-AI tech news and information is completely drowned out. Stepping back month by month you can see how the AI content increases exponentially. Soon it'll be all you can read about it unless something is done. Perhaps a yc.ai site for AI-related news and discussion?
I have been using https://www.unslop.news for non AI related content.
Me too, but if you click on the comments you land on HackerNews, and there you are again..
I have a browser extension that auto-clicks the Hide button for entries with AI-related terms in the title. Helps surface the interesting stories. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
AI-related news could have special tag as “show HN” describes exactly what you can expect. “AI:”
I'm a (vocal) proponent of AI (as applied to software development) and even I think, and have been saying all year, that the amount of AI stuff on the front page is unfortunate. It's not a mystery why anyone would think 2-years-ago HN was more fun than today's!
But it's not an easy thing to intervene on. AI is neck and neck with "the Internet" for impact on technology.
From most people I talk to, there is an understanding that the overwhelm of AI content, bot comments, etc. has degraded the quality of community spaces (especially HN but also including Reddit, X/Twitter, etc.). I hope we can figure out a way to get more human-curated content soon and make the economics of amplifying it make sense (obviously it does not in this current transition chapter).
I'd guess more and more valuable discussion will just shift to gated invite only groups. Private discord servers, signal, telegram etc etc I don't see another feasible way of protecting against the spam.
What's more strange to me is why these content places like Twitter and Reddit don't see this as a danger to themselves? Why would someone want to advertise in a place that's 90% bots? Reddit for example made it harder to check astroturf bots by blocking viewing comment and post history and giving every user default AdjectiveNounNumber style names. I get why it works short term but I've completely stopped using it because I just found myself facing fake botted engagement everywhere.
I propose we sign each other's PGP keys as a honor code system of writing of one's own words. Idk how this will turn out... Complete distrust or tribalism or actually useful?
The problem is that it's too easy to copy/paste a rebuttal written by an LLM as if you wrote it, without actually understanding it. Simply signing such a faux thought does nothing.
Maybe we could have meetups to do this signing to make things more efficient
I imagine the result would be a mixture of elitism, community fragmentation, and a witch hunt that never stops. Like Stack Overflow meets The Crucible.
Agree that tech was more exciting when AI wasn't in the fold, but it's also true that the tech industry and SF in particular was facing headwinds economically. Without AI there even have been a recession.
So the question is: is it fine for SF to rebound and money to spent on a revolutionary tech, at the expense of human ingenuity and possibly our entire industry?
I'm tired of political/social manifestos as part of the README.md files in github repositories for packages have no choice but to use. I'm tired of command line package manager tools asking for Ukraine support from my command line.
I agree, but then again this such a first world problem no?
Latest leak says 400 000 Russians killed in the war, that's a lot more worrying.
If things got worse I'd expect and accept support Ukraine banners thrown in my face while walking down the street.
We are so zombified in our comfort zone that this is what it takes to actually get some attention nowadays.
Not ideal but it is what it is.
Is it really a different universe than going back one year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-11-08
or, for that matter, one month?
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-10-08
Similar perceptions have been around since before Hacker News was even named Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852).
I find it funny that the linked date features a story about the FDA proposing to maybe halt sales of the completely useless "drug" phenylephrine (Sudafed PE, etc). Here we are 2 years later and still zero action.
Relentless negativity drives away people who aren't relentlessly negative. I am dropping in this week after a while being away and my impression is that people got more distant and cynical while I was gone. I'm working on a solo project right now but I can't imagine posting about it here where people seem to want to only find reasons to tear builders down for not doing things their way.
Wow, no kidding. It's almost entirely AI free. A lot more interesting.
I feel it's noticeably better on weekends, when people aren't at work sending stories.
Also massive difference when visiting at different times of day from what I've seen.. When the US is asleep and most of this site is populated by Indians and Europeans, there seems to be much less AI boosting and VC/hustle culture. Maybe it's just my biases showing and real data would reject this, but it sure feels like it.
Yes. HN has slowly turned into the reasons I left reddit. Every topic turning into politics, pure hate and outrage. Massive number of negative sentiment posts. I was going to reddit and leaving angry. Increasingly I'm coming to HN and leaving angry. I don't want that and if it doesn't change soon I'll have to stop coming here to.
I think there was a lot of pressure building in our community because the ballot box has been no outlet for many years. We've had an increasingly burdensome and insane political environment worldwide and people dealing with unmitigated suffering. It leaks into HN and Reddit in different ways. People here are very plugged into policy and national circumstance and so they can't help but color their opinions.
I just want tech news and some discussion. Sure, tech has some downsides on society and the planet. I can, and do, hear about that in many other places. It’s not what I come here for.
I understand younger generations are feeling very disaffected and hopeless. I feel for them. I don’t really have a solution for them and don’t have the power to change it so I’d rather tune it out. Yeah, that makes me a selfish jerk. Ok, cool.
I’ve also noticed a steady increase in what I call “empty sneering”, where they don’t really have a point to contribute but they just want to dunk on somebody. It’s especially noticeable for any hot button topics – yeah, we get that you don’t like Musk/Trump/AI/whatever but do you have an actual point to contribute or not?
I’ve been saying for years that spite should be viewed as a primary metric for social media. The higher the volume of spite, the more harmful it is and the less useful it is. Hacker News is heading in the wrong direction.
"Empty sneering" is a good term for it. Seems like the curse of conversation at scale: Reduction to polarized talking points. Often without engaging TFA at all.
I think there are still good conversations happening here, and I really appreciate the efforts of moderators to keep HN hacky.
Twitter is the one for me. Almost every popular thread immediately turns into arguing and slurs.
I had great luck on there but I also quickly muted people who didn’t add value. Twitter kicked me off and wanted my biometrics though so I no longer use that site.
That’s because the Hacker News crowd has finally found a topic on which it is willing to engage with the same level of outrage that has long defined Reddit. That topic is AI.
Turns out the clienteles of the two platforms aren’t so different after all. The only difference is what triggers them.
I've noticed the exact same thing, and I've cut back a lot on how much I contribute.
I'm hoping it's bots doing that, and not my fellow, because I don't like to think that my fellow humans are actually this full of hate.
But either way, contributing to HN has become rather unpleasant these days.
It's always funny going through the comment history of people who complain about politics, as if such complaints aren't political in and of themselves:
> I truly hate what HN has become. It has all the expected comments about Musk, fascism, etc
> HN has turned into reddit. It's highly political with strong anti Israeli and anti USA views.
It's completely understandable to want to read about technical topics rather than ever-more coverage/condemnation of Israel's genocide. But when you start characterizing the existence of such discussion as "anti Israeli", or criticizing people for merely having the temerity to discuss contemporary fascism, you've gone solidly into politics yourself.
So it seems you're being quite disingenuous with this comment - you do like politics, rather you just don't like people discussing quite obvious elephants in the room that disagree with your own political views.
It’s not that complicated or one-sided. We just don’t want the constant “anti-“ noise everywhere. Take the complaining elsewhere.
Something akin to this has been said at every political movement throughout history. Stop complaining, stop making waves, know your place, stop disrupting order.
Our world and our societies are facing a lot of problems. Technology has a part in most of them. You may desire to live in a bubble where you see no criticism, but this is an open public discussion forum and most people are not. Sorry.
The constant drone of AI psychosis and slop is a thousand times worse than politics.
The day I saw HN being linked on mainstream blogs, such as MacRumors - I knew this community was reaching its breaking point on having good conversations again. HN used to be a nice escape for me to have some technical brain teasers, now I see so many hate comments it just makes me upset and no longer feel engaged anymore.
Having been on the receiving end from both dang and tomhow as to how this discussion is "off topic", the "guidelines have been consistent for many years", and "if you have any concerns email us at hn@ycombi..." my genuine answer is: migrate to lobste.rs and the handful of other places. The moderation here has not been good even in light of all the praise they have gotten. This is not a "the ball was dropped yesterday" situation. The ball has been dropping for a long time now, and whenever someone brings it up, it's looked down upon. That's okay, we'll go and play in another sandbox then.
I have a list of suggestions that would have a noticeable improvement on HN, and some of it has been implemented to success (and detriment) elsewhere. But that list is highly unlikely to even be attempted here, until it is too late and much like the Digg->Reddit situation, the barn doors have been left open for too long.