I mean, it's not as though I know the opposite is true, but I don't see some fundamental change from a few years back that makes me think that.

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.

It's drowning in low quality human NPC comments.

Maybe that's because all resources are tied up fighting AI, but it's been going on for a long time now.

This post is a great example of low quality. No evidence, no solution. Just NPC bitching.

Unless it's AI, then well played.

Also, have you by chance seen John Connor?

/newest is chock full of submissions that were written by AI, though. That's another, broader problem.

It was a fun 2 decades. Time to stick to private discords and real life friends from here on out, though.

Likely flagged quickly but they might show up in these stats.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dreamhomestore.co.uk

The data seems to suggest it.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of green accounts posting nonsense. They generally do get flagged or moderated quickly though, so I wouldn't say they have a large effect overall, at least yet.

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.

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...

I've seen some where they have hallucinated the github account or project name, often matching the hn handle or project name which is slightly different.

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.