My perception is that HN got pickier, more hostile, less listening and more "broadcast-only mode" writing, progressively, over several years. It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.

And then LLM happened. And HN got more LLM writing, more LLM articles, more complaints about LLM-written material, plus AI became a dominant subject of conversation. LLM is in addition to the other negative changes.

I'm here because there's zero gate to signing up and ocmmenting.

I'd bet the closure of other walled gardens like reddit drives traffic more than anything of content.

These comment sections follow the same trajectory of all comment sections since the birth of the internet.

just a side note: HN is just a well laid out site thats easy to read and easy to comment on. i find reddit hard to use, making me click to see more comments and then taking me to a new page and disrupting my flow, yuk.

>My perception is that HN got pickier,

While HN is part of the set, I think we need to look larger. Is it just HN, or is it everywhere? If it's not everywhere, what percentage of sites is it? What are the sites that don't have this issue like or do different.

I think part of it is that HN has grown a lot because of a lot of other sites getting worse. The problem is that growing makes it worse. Then add on top of that there are a lot of high value targets here on HN that bots try to target, financially or politically.

Internet is a messy place now. I remember years and years ago, like early 2000s people thought that things like astro-turfing weren't real, and governments were not targeting individuals/groups on forums. How nieve their were.

I don't think accepting that the rest of the Internet became more hostile is a good defense IMO. I understand it's probably a "top of funnel" problem but the fact that it's leaking out here shows that HN needs to evolve with the new norms.

HN's entire thing is to not evolve with the new norms.

Well yes and no. It has an LLM detector now (which has some false positives I've noticed but I'm generally a big fan of.) I'm advocating for changing this position. I understand minimal change but I think the time to not evolve is gone if the forum doesn't want to get blown away by outside trends.

I would argue that LLM is not an addiction, it’s a negativity multiplier, as it lowered the barrier of entry for low quality content and promotional material

> It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.

While it has always been a thing on here to some degree, the one growing trend I will note is that people are increasingly more forceful in demanding that everyone know about the things they aren't interested in, and more demanding that other people don't talk about things that don't interest them.

It's like people can't just skip a submission on the front page. They absolutely must go in to every discussion to tell everyone how much they don't want to read about or talk about that subject, and how much they want everyone to stop talking about it.

It's tilting at windmills. Right now this can mostly be seen in AI discussions where just about every AI-related submission will have a number of people declaring that it's all so boring and they wish there was an HN ban on such submissions. Cue someone foolishly believing them making yet another "HN without the AI" variant that sits unloved.

But the same thing could previously be seen against things that people don't want to be a thing. When WWDC happens people will announce that they're sick of all of the Apple news. The same for Google during I/O. Etc. People are against some thing and they really, truly think they can shame or scold others into falling in line.

This is what my analysis [1] so far supports. It's not really a topic distribution. The temperature in comments here is rising. I suspect that's changing a lot of the site culture.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225117

A couple years ago it was all about blockchain or complaining about blockchain. I think hyped technology just gets tiring really fast.

[delayed]

Yeah? You reckon they are on the same level? I wasn't there but I find it hard to believe people were as worried about PHP as they are blindly prompting an LLM for 10 hours a day.

For a period it was endless NoSQL submissions. Then endless Anti-NoSQL submissions. Then there was the Ruby period where every Ruby release yielded endless submissions and murmurations. Then that turned to Go. Then, as you said, how we all needed to become blockchain experts and everything was going to be built on blockchains, also did you see some random retailer uses a payment processor that through a long and convoluted process will let you pay with BTC?

At every juncture there have been people reminiscing about the good old days that never actually existed at all. About how great it used to be compared to day.

I think the funniest are the constant "man, remember when the BIGS used to engage with us proles?" Ignoring that there are still many founders and the like hanging out here, present, future and past, what a weird thing to reminisce about. It's like "I used to be in the presence of people who mattered". I mean, matter yourself, because pretending you're in a club with them is foolhardy.

The prevalence of blockchain-related tangents then is nowhere near the amount of LLM discussion injected into every topic today, it's not even close.

the amount of money invested into AI is far in excess of the blockchain

and LLMs are good for only a few things, one is shitposting

And here is another thread of people picking at each other.

i was going to agree with you but before doing that I went to Algolia to confirm that this was the case [^0]

it is definitely not the case

This year's most popular posts are mostly about AI. That was not the case for 2020 [^1], 2018 [^2], 2016 [^3] or 2014 [^4].

[^0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1798502400&dateRange=custom&...

[^1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1609113600&dateRange=custom&...

[^2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545868800&dateRange=custom&...

[^3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1482710400&dateRange=custom&...

[^4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419465600&dateRange=custom&...

> In my experience, the conversation has died because everything turns into either: "That article was written by LLM" or "how this relates to LLM"

Which is why every few days, I have to post a comment along the lines of:

"At some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder."

I get downvoted every time, but it's refreshing to know others share my gripe that it is tiring to virtually every day see this discussion play out in some HN thread or other. Those threads rarely add anything to the discussion.