HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago

8 pointsby morpheos1373 hours ago5 comments

mirmor23a minute ago
recently, you were rambling on-and-on about how netbsd was not a good desktop setup, even though netbsd primary usecase is embedded systems. nobody owes you anything; so just read threads that are interesting and ignore the rest; if that is not acceptable, why don't you be the change you wish to see in the world?
dangan hour ago
This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016)
Examples are legion. Here are a couple others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020)
I don't know of any good way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.
- thegrim338 minutes ago
  And the "people in the past said things were worse, so therefore it's impossible for things to ever actually be worse" line is just as old.
- byoung2an hour ago
  I agree about the bias to believe the past was better than it actually was. I think it's called rosy retrospection, like when people are nostalgic for their high school days even though they were bullied and had no friends. Maybe HN isn't getting worse, it's just that the negative parts are more recent and noticeable.
Bender2 hours ago
The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and enhancing them assuming LLM's can do such a thing. The voting ring detector probably needs some tuning as well. I can't tell if the goal is to poison the search engines and AI platforms so nobody can find the original open source programs or what else may be going on. Robert Hanlon said, never attribute to malice..., well I do.
- dangan hour ago
  It's a transitional situation and will be that way for quite a while. We're doing what we can. For example, the measures described here have stemmed the runaway growth in low-quality Show HNs:
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516 (March 2026)
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300772 (March 2026)
  There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the community needs growth, just not runaway growth.
  Major new tools like LLMs are inevitably going to get widely used, as they should. Figuring out what the best uses are will take time. Figuring out how to share what one is doing with them is an unsolved problem.
  - Bender22 minutes ago
    I see others also mentioned the voting ring detector. I think they're correct that something needs adjustment, but I don't know how it works exactly so it's hard to suggest thresholds. The patterns I am observing is that the LLM generated clones will get instantly upvoted multiple times I assume by other warmed up LLM accounts. Back in the days of running phpBB I would mitigate some of that with ranks and I assume there must be some parallels to that with account age and comments. Perhaps some math to lower the weight of upvotes by newer accounts, or the newer account being the upvote target so they can still gain some traction but slower. Perhaps one of the factors could be if the submission is for one of the public git repo sites AND it's a newer account it could have a divisor in the voting formula if it is not already.
    The risk I see is that if the goal is growth but the low quality submissions are drowning out other submissions that could negate growth as some of the newer accounts that legit try to be part of a community would just drift away as they are in the poisoned well. I too struggle to think of a way to separate them out of the noise without creating a system that would just be gamed by the LLM's. On one hand if the system requires the regulars to "vouch" so to speak it will create little elitist bubbles whereas too much tweaking to algorithms will just be detected and gamed by LLM's.
    Out of curiosity, are the LLM posts coming from residential and mobile addresses or from AI data-centers themselves? If it's not already that could be yet another weighting factor. And/or AI user-agents as a weight. There are many bot signals that could be weighting or division factors.
  - an hour ago
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lellow25 minutes ago
As someone who has been coming here for the past 8 years, I can't comment on "10-15 years" ago, but my experience hasn't changed a bit. This is and has been the only place where I visit almost daily (new account if you are looking at my profile) - and this is during vacation, during work, during weekends, etc. There is ALWAYS, literally, always an interesting discussion happening on topics that I would never be part of, if it wasn't for someone starting the discussion here. Yeh, today there is a bunch of AI, bla, bla, bla... so what will be next?! Not sure, but I know it will be here.
david9273 hours ago
HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
- byoung22 hours ago
  I agree there. Back in 2009 I used to be excited by each new YC batch. There were fresh new ideas like Dropbox, AirBnB, Instacart. I feel like there were cool stories around those startups, like Drew losing a thumbdrive and coming up with the idea for DropBox, or the AirBnB marketing hack with the cereal, or Instacart's founder having beer delivered during the YC interview. I can't think of any recent YC startups that I've cared about. Maybe it just became saturated or maybe I just moved on to other things. I will say this, that the ideas I had 15 years ago needed a startup and investment. Now I'm able to build a lot of those ideas using the cloud and AI. It seems inevitable that some solo founder will soon be able to build a unicorn with no investment and no employees.
- USTECH_WORKER3 hours ago
  Can you expand on that idea ? May be backed by evidence etc.
  - byoung22 hours ago
    The recent batches all use the following formulas which I don't find particularly interesting:
    AI native ______ for _______ ______ for AI agents AI _______ for _______
    https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&ba...
    dangan hour ago
    Isn't that how every major tech wave works? "Thing, but for $X" is what everyone was doing when $X was personal computing, the web, mobile.