alt Hacker News> This is a lovely bit of writing
A lovely bit of AI slop.
Edit - This is not the first time I'm observing this. Could somebody explain to me why the comments which point out the discussed texts are AI generated are being frequently downvoted on Hacker News?
In the very same thread there is this apparently downvoted (as of now) comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47807528
Why is it so, is this really this community's stance on LLM-generated, mostly weak and empty writing?
Replies
I think your comment was maybe downvoted for being so terse and dismissive.
But you're right that it is anything but a good piece of writing and it is genuinely strange to see people act otherwise.
> That kind of furniture organized more than just objects. It organized a relationship with technology. It suggested that the computer (and with it, the internet) was something used under particular conditions: seated, in that spot, for a certain amount of time. Something that was switched on and off, opened and closed.
It's making a nice point and one that I'm sure most of the people here do find appealing, it's an idea that I relate to myself. But the words used to make that point are bordering on nonsense.
I think HN is just fucked. A lot of people either genuinely don't see the problem with having a bunch of AI-generated slop garbage on the frontpage, or they are themselves posting it so they have a personal stake in not seeing anything wrong with it.
Don't be too surprised: there are literally comments that are just blatantly written by Claude on HN, which seem to be coming from human accounts that predate Claude. Which means that there are people here who, in trying to respond, actually ask Claude to basically do it for them. I find this utterly stunning and honestly, truly alarming. Even if the person behind the keyboard is technically alive, what exactly are they becoming? Are they even going to think for themselves, or will they just ask Claude what they're supposed to think from now on?
And as much as HN moderation has been genuinely pretty great at keeping the community under control with a relatively light touch, it's already too late. Dang and friends needed to do something much sooner, and they didn't. It literally doesn't matter what they do now, so there's no point in bugging them, not that I expect they would be interested in listening anyway.
I'm not going to make a lot of dramatic "I'm leaving Twitter" type comments, but I'm losing respect for HN's rules and guidelines the more I see this page overran with literal CRAP. And just so I can make my opinion clear, it's not crap because it's AI generated, it's crap because I can tell it's AI generated, full of fluff, cliches and a lack of substance.
It says a lot about the taste of the average person voting on HN that this is what we get now, and it fucking sucks because I don't really like any of the competing news aggregators either. I actually had to log in to post this comment because lately I've been staying logged out of HN and visiting less frequently now that I'm not sure what I get out of it.
At least I won't miss HN when the internet becomes an inaccessible hellscape in part due to AI crap outnumbering human posts 1000:1 and in part due to horrible legislation screaming ahead at breakneck speeds with literally no opposition from anybody.
I downvote them because they are tangential to the content. They are like complaints about scroll bars and back button hijacking, or annoyances about the website's color scheme. Valid complaints, but contrary to the HN guideline:
I don't like AI slop articles either, but I also don't like articles where the text is formatted in a tiny column in the middle of the browser. Neither are really useful to complain about here. By the end of 2026, 90% of the articles here are probably going to be AI slop, and it will be totally useless to complain about each and every one of them.