More than 1 in 5 Show HN posts are now AI-related, get > half the votes/comments
105 comments
·July 4, 2025IgorPartola
brogdan
I’m reminded of the posts about a decade ago from various prolific posters waving goodbye to HN. They were too kind at the time to say why.
donperignon
Yeah i am so sick and tired. It was so refreshing to read HN and always find something interesting, now its tiresome, AI marketing everywhere and comments from people that doesn't even like to program and they now can develop a todo list app at the expense of 200$ for whatever claude has release that week.. sad.
internet2000
Anything that gets posted to HN when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that gets posted to HN between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything posted to HN after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
dijit
Yeah, you're right. I should do more blockchain development.
brookst
What a coincidence! It’s just like music! Have you heard the noise kids are listening to these days?
henriquemaia
In a kind of personal plot twist way I'm happy with the outcome. I've now spent way less time here.
If before there was a bit of an attachment to checking what was going on on HN, now there's an overall meh. I still do visit out of habit, but when I do, I have this blasé attitude that quickly takes me away. Too much LLM this or that, AI everywhere.
HN being one of the last Social Media sites I've engaged with, it's good to finally let it go. Yay?
sho_hn
Dunno, I felt way worse during the crypto boom days. At least the AI stuff has a bit more of a generally useful application.
I get my "people doing interesting things" fixes on YouTube and Hackaday.
the__alchemist
Same. I think this is what I need to gradually stop visiting. I'm also not sure how many of the accounts making those posts and comments are bots.
ryandrake
I've always thought it would be a sorta neat project to make a web plugin to remove certain topics from the HN main page, but I have never before been ->this<- close to starting such a project than I am now. These topics have totally taken over, and quite frankly, the volume of them make HN less interesting.
louthy
Bonus points if you implement it with an LLM, then blog about it using an LLM, and then post the link to HN where it will be auto filtered out by the generated tool (maybe, because let’s face it, it’s non deterministic)
layer8
You should be able to vibe-code such a plugin in an evening. ;)
I don’t like it as well, but it’s a reflection of what people are concerning themselves with, so it is what is is.
ghssds
There is an app named "Glider" on F-Droid that allows one to filter the HN main page by keywords and url.
My current filters are:
urls: twitter.com youtube.com
keywords: gemini openai claude llm llms ai agi
Make the front page more interresting. I'm on browser right now, otherwise this thread would have been filtered.
dijksterhuis
i had a similar idea.
i’ve been hiding a bunch of AI/LLM posts out of habit with the background idea that it might be useful for regexs.
jedberg
I'm surprised it's only 1 in 5 to be honest. That actually makes me happy. It means not everyone is trying to build the next AI thing. There's still innovation in other spaces.
omneity
Looking at the post, the methodology (checking the presence of a few keywords, not even including "LLM") is very simple with a lot of potential false negatives. 20% is closer to the lower bound.
It could also explain the lower votes, "AI" or "GPT" being more generic terms is correlated in my personal experience with lower quality.
johnnyanmac
One in 5 on a news site that covers pretty much all topics is extremely saturated, though.
Also, 1 in 5 being talked about is different from what is actually getting funding.
4hg4ufxhy
This is show HN. From articles and discussions it feels more than half being about AI. As an AI doomer the interesting content on HN has plummetted.
binary132
It is horrifying.
I guess that’s because that’s where a lot of VC and hypebuxx are right now, though.
In 10 years either advanced AI will have eaten everything or nobody will even remember any of this.
baxtr
How do you define an AI doomer? I’m wondering if I’m one too.
My position is that I think AI is an amazing tool, but that’s it. It’s like any other tool we humans have developed before – we use it to create more quickly, with less effort.
Personally, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to achieving AGI, and I find the tech bros’ AGI fantasies appalling.
gxs
Who’s to say it’s saturated?
I’d say you can only say saturated relative to the historical popularity of other topics on HN throughout the years. There’s no real golden rule here
Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects
Would be curious to see the breakdown of this statistic
johnnyanmac
>Who’s to say it’s saturated?
Well, you apparently just did. Saturation is indeed relative (or rather, on a spectrum with varying subjective lines). You can explain why it's saturated, but that still means it's saturated.
>Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects
Sure, so was fracking. I wasn't in this community back then, but I'd wager somehow we didn't have 1 in 5 articles about how much better society can drill oil.
vmxdev
I opened shownew just to make sure, 10 out of 30 posts there are AI-related. I caught myself thinking that because of this AI-hype I read HN less and less. Sure, it is clear that AI is interesting to people (or at least someone wants more hype around AI), but it would be nice to read about real hacker news and projects somewhere.
ysavir
As sick as I am of them, I wonder how it compares to past trends. What does the data show about Crypto/NFT related show-HNs? Is HN consistent across trends or is AI unique?
spondylosaurus
I had the same thought about crypto/NFTs... Before AI exploded it seemed like that was the "big topic" on HN for a long time. But there may have been less Show HNs for crypto since it has fewer applications.
v5v3
I would guess higher.
Only a subset of people were, and still are were involved in Crypto, whereas LLM is of use to pretty much everyone.
As a seismic change, of course it's going to be everywhere till the hype cycle flattens.
namuol
Meanwhile articles like this get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44481964
(Caveat; not sure this kind of flagging is a pattern)
Link to the original article: https://www.the-independent.com/tech/chatgpt-psychosis-ai-th...
BrawnyBadger53
Weird to block this considering how on topic it is. Any insight as to why?
Related to the article, are there actively updated benchmarks for plan recognition?
namuol
I would love to see if there’s a pattern before making any hypotheses, but my go-to assumption is just run of the mill conflict of interest bias.
timewizard
There's billions upon billions of dollars on the table. I'm a simple man. I'd suggest overt manipulation.
southernplaces7
Not weird really. On the one hand, you have a flagging policy that lets any random man-child with some specific bias and enough karma completely eliminate a post for whatever bullshit emotional reaction of their own, and at the same time, you have a bunch of people here who suffer from AI-fanboy derangement and hate to see any criticism of their fantasies about a glorious future in which current LLMs are just a hop away from making all things wonderful.
somewhereoutth
As ever, it is the cover-up that is the real scandal.
hyfgfh
There clearly some bias, some post critical of LLMs have been flagged [1]
Idk is 3th party actors or an push for "AI"
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lsukqwhjvk26
jakelazaroff
Title nit: the actual title says "less than half" but the title on HN says "> half" (more than half)
creativenolo
It is a very confusing title that only gets more confusing when starting to read the article
stirfish
Thank you, I thought it was talking about the > symbol for qoutes
miduil
Back when Bitcoin had it's first hype around ~5-1000USD/Bitcoin it was almost the same just with blockchain stuff. Would be very curious how that has changed over time as well.
hdivider
I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do. On top of cognitive processing of all the ambient events in our time, which is a heavy load just by itself.
Most of the time, AI tools promise to be timesavers. So it's natural many folks look for shortcuts. We're simply overloaded, partly due to current situations generated by existing machine learning tools deployed elsewhere in the system.
johnnyanmac
Who's pushing y'all/us to do do much work? Maybe that institution or society should take responsibility instead of putting the burden on the workers.
zvorygin
I think society has never, does not, and probably will never work the way you suggest it should.
johnnyanmac
Nothing is ever ideal, but centuries of labor laws gets us in the right direction. A 4 day workweek would do wonders while still having plenty of work to be done.
Your statement is also why I fear this supposed promise that "AI will do all the work, society won't need jobs!". I don't think we're getting this post-work utopia that tecunocrats love to promise.
candiddevmike
During COVID, society worked this way with lots of compassion and empathy, but then it broke some people's minds and it has been downhill ever since.
doug_durham
"y'all"??? Is this a 1970's episode of "Hee Haw"? This faux authenticity is annoying.
johnnyanmac
Yes, my family was raised in the southern US.
I didn't use it much growing up since they moved west when I was young. but it turns out that "y'all" is surprisingly nifty: a gender neutral, 2nd person pronoun for a group of peope. So I picked it up more in adulthood and put it into my daily vernacular.
dinkumthinkum
What are you babbling about? You think that word is indicative of the 1970s? I think you should get out more. Maybe, dare I say, touch grass
spapas82
I'm also very tired of such articles. Each article with the same content and unfortunately more or less the same comments.
Would it be possible for the moderators to penalize such articles so they can't easily gain traction similar to articles about politics?
pvtmert
I am not sure if it's ironic or not, but this post itself is also AI related :). An it's getting quite a lot of votes & comments...
Meanwhile, I really liked the blog theme/design. (reading on an iPad) Simple, yet powerful, with a nice touch of the blinking underline at the end of the title. (It's a simple trick via CSS, but nice to see!)
This is probably really well known here but hackaday.com is where I get actually hacker news. The stuff here is 90% valley drama, AI stuff, and random product launches that generally don’t interest me. I do love this community and have learned a lot from it over the years. But the hacker ethos has left HN a decade ago.