Ask HN: Is there a desire for an AI summary friendly version of Hacker News?

linotype · 2025-09-07T19:46:51.000Z

Recently I received a lot of negative feedback from a few HNers about an AI summary I posted about a complex immigration concept (changes to non-Immigrant visas in the US). The post received a number of upvotes but the comments were negative from Anti-AI folks. I’ve seen a number of negative posts about AI here as well. Would there be any interest in a static site that would regularly scan the public HN posts from their API and generate AI summaries of the content without a comment section?

3np 275 days ago |

No. And it's not just "anti-AI folks" who consider it spam and noise to copy-paste LLM summaries into a discussion forum.

vunderba 275 days ago |

Why not just go full-on dystopia and make a slackernews.com site that is an exact mirror of the submissions from HN api, and then populate them with entirely chatbot generated comment sections?

linotype 275 days ago | |

There would be no comments, just a summary of the contents of the post with a link to post.

baubino 275 days ago | | |

But…why? This is a discussion forum. We come here to discuss. Also, none of the posts are so long that they warrant a summary (AI or otherwise).

minimaxir 275 days ago |

The main reason your comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160084) got downvoted was because you gave a summary without disclosing it's AI-generated, which made other users upset.

But even if you did disclose, it's still against HN rules, as other people in that thread told you. You commented "they’re free to delete it. I think it adds value", but as you've seen the community disagrees.

linotype 275 days ago | |

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not according to the guidelines and the upvotes the comment received.

minimaxir 275 days ago | | |

The guidelines are out of date and they don't mention anything for or against AI comments. Having your comment flagged makes the number of upvotes irrelevant.

The search thread you were linked to (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) are comments from dang, the head moderator of HN. His word is the law.

linotype 275 days ago | | |

> His word is the law.

Well now that sounds dystopian.

minimaxir 275 days ago | | |

All high-quality internet forums require good/strict moderation.

linotype 275 days ago | | |

Where you apparently have to search for the text from one person to see if speech is allowed or not.

brudgers 275 days ago | | |

People often upvote comments that are contrary to the spirit of HN.

And for better or worse, lawyering the guidelines is not in the spirit of HN. Better because moderation is generally patient, kind, and soft touch. Worse because the guidelines are guidelines not so much bright lines and some people want bright lines.

linotype 275 days ago | | |

He’s the one that said it was in the guidelines, not me.

brudgers 274 days ago | | |

You are responsible for your behavior.

ForHackernews 275 days ago |

Why? Anyone who wanted that could copy-paste into chatgpt or install a browser extension to do it for them.

linotype 275 days ago | |

That creates a ton of traffic to LLMs for the same summary. Why not have one person do it and post it?

minimaxir 275 days ago | | |

If there were a actual demand for that, Y Combinator could implement something similar to Google AI Overview that automatically summarizes each post, which would strongly discourages people from actually reading the articles and giving thoughtful insights.

linotype 275 days ago | | |

That would be the idea of the static page. Save people time from reading an article they aren’t actually interested in.

3np 275 days ago | | |

It does sound like making your site and going wild there is a better approach than contaminating HN threads with LLM-generated comments.

While it will probably be appreciated as a "Show HN", please refrain from spamming links to it in threads here.

brudgers 275 days ago | | |

If people are not interested in the article, it might not belong on HN.

minimaxir 275 days ago | | |

People can already do that from the submission headline.

MilnerRoute 275 days ago |

In addition to everything else, this is bad for all web publishers.

No matter whose link is being shared on Hacker News... This would siphon away some traffic -- all the people who now just read the AI summary, without clicking through to the article.