Ask HN: How do you feel about posts about GenAI taking over the HN front page?

14 points by blenderob 35 days ago | 19 comments

There seem to be a lot of opinion pieces about GenAI on the front page lately. How do others feel about this?

I feel conflicted. I understand that GenAI is one of the biggest topics in tech right now. Yeah it makes sense that it gets a lot of attention. But I would find it a loss if the front page became too heavily skewed towards commentary on a single topic... more so when there are so many other technical areas worth discussing.

pubby 35 days ago |

HN is mostly dead to me. The site was billed as a place for curious minds, but there is little curiosity in letting a machine do your thinking.

badtuple 34 days ago | |

Honestly, same. I spend most of my time on Lobste.rs, private blogs, and chat communities rather than HN for this reason. I check in every so often out of habit and can catch some business news here or there...but the joy, growth, and curiosity have moved to smaller bastions specifically to avoid the slop and its glorification.

grvdrm 32 days ago |

I'm probably not alone in this: feel caught (somewhat) in a vicious cycle where I favorite many GenAI posts thinking I'll come back to comments and posts to learn and build more AI skills.

That happens, but the system is not balanced. Way more saving than practical use, similar to other platform like the socials where you save posts for ... what?

I'm also thinking that I could use AI to summarize all this AI stuff! How fitting.

codingdave 35 days ago |

If a discussion about GenAI adds something new to the discussion, I think it is great. But most of them do not. Most of them are either generic posts about whether or not someone likes it, stories of someone's experiences as they learn it, or fanfiction about where they want it to go in the future. Or, at the worst, links to simplistic wrapper apps someone is trying to market.

I would prefer that it lands in the same place as any other topic - if it is interesting, it gets traction, and if it is boring, it does not. But how to make that happen is a challenge.

mikewarot 35 days ago |

Well, it sure is a relief from all of the Rust Über alles posts. There will always be trends, this is just the latest.

Money got expensive which is why everyone is being let go. AI is a convenient cover story to deflect attention.

necovek 35 days ago |

I was thinking of making an alternative frontend to HN with GenAI stuff filtered out — using GenAI to do it, obviously (both build it and use it to filter things).

But mostly as a social experiment to test how fed up are people with AI-in-our-face ;)

This is what my sentiment is: there is genuinely useful stuff, but it really overwhelmes anything else and it's hard to find non-AI valuable stuff on the frontpage these days.

blenderob 35 days ago | |

Thank you. It is good to know that I am not the only one feeling this way.

Imustaskforhelp 35 days ago | |

Fun fact but I suggested it by making a Ask HN post about it nearly 2 years ago at this point:

Ask HN: Are you interested in a Hacker News alternative which doesnt focus on AI:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789661 (oct 9,2024)

I for one would be interested if you do end up making one.

Some people have ended up making Ublock origin blocklists which block any post which mentions AI iirc.

necovek 35 days ago | | |

I am not surprised others had a similar idea well before me: I'd just keep it as a "lens" into HN, and not a new thing.

As always, it's all about execution: we just need someone to do it.

linkdd 35 days ago | |

I do apprehend this kind of ideas. It would make it easier for models to be trained to bypass that filter, making it even harder for humans to detect slop.

necovek 35 days ago | | |

This is not about detecting AI generated content but detecting HN posts which mention/discuss AI.

paulcole 35 days ago |

I feel awesome about it!

IMO this would be like in 1997 (or pick whatever year you think the Internet took off) asking, "How do you feel about posts about the Internet taking over the HN front page?"

chistev 34 days ago | |

Exactly.

CM30 34 days ago |

Not a huge fan of it, but I'm not really a huge fan of any one topic dominating Hacker News.

For a while that was crypto, now it seems to be AI.

registeredcorn 31 days ago |

Without going into an exceptionally long rant: bad and angry.

There is no aspect about it that I enjoy.

ex-aws-dude 35 days ago |

It is kind of annoying but to be fair, developing software with agents is a big paradigm shift in the field so its not surprising.

chistev 34 days ago |

It's a phase. There have been different phases in the past. This too shall pass.

firefax 33 days ago |

I find it weird that the same set that gatekept me from CS in the twenty aughts because I wasn't a hardcore C coder and quant now can't even write so much as a bash script while feeling entitled to pontificate.

My code is shit but it's MINE