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Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

468 points bookofjoe | 13 comments | 15 Jul 25 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 1.34s | source | bottom

I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.

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Lerc ◴[15 Jul 25 15:10 UTC] No.44571964[source]▶
I have seen this question asked on subreddits, Not about AI, but for other topics that some people dislike.

They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy"

Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group A and will not be a participant in group B.

To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"

Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community. Directing a community to divide to remove an element you dislike is an attempt to appropriate the established community.

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1. ffsm8 ◴[15 Jul 25 16:16 UTC] No.44572732[source]▶
To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced something like user provided tags and users can vote for/against (to circumvent abuse)

Then the people wanting to filter "x" could just do it via simple grease monkey scripts or if HN natively supported it.

Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but neither does it have to be.

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2. photonthug ◴[15 Jul 25 17:49 UTC] No.44573909[source]▶
Most platforms don't grow this feature because they can benefit from redirecting user energy into places that the platform is choosing. Or some vocal minority of the user base benefits from redirecting the platform to a place of their choosing.

Similar to nest usurpation with eusocial insects, this is by definition parasitism when the energy-redirection is unwanted or unavoidable.

In the specific case of AI it's way worse than the usual suspects where everyone is effected and so everyone has to have some opinion (looking at you politics). Because even some rant about how much you hate AI is directly feeding it at least 3 ways: first there's the raw data, then there's the free-QA aspect, then there's the free-advertisement aspect when others speak up to disagree with your rant. So yeah, even people who like some of the content sometimes quickly start to feel hijacked.

3. Kiro ◴[15 Jul 25 22:19 UTC] No.44576460[source]▶
No. HN is good as it is and I find it disrespectful when newcomers are demanding changes like this. There's a good reason the forum has stayed the same for almost 20 years.
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4. pxc ◴[15 Jul 25 23:05 UTC] No.44576853[source]▶
Topic tags wouldn't kill HN.
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5. ethbr1 ◴[16 Jul 25 01:08 UTC] No.44577694[source]▶
> There's a good reason the forum has stayed the same for almost 20 years.

You mean like when vote changing was added?

6. ivape ◴[16 Jul 25 01:26 UTC] No.44577788{3}[source]▶
I don’t want the visual clutter.
replies(1): >>44580213 #
7. bookofjoe ◴[16 Jul 25 01:38 UTC] No.44577845[source]▶
1. I joined in 2016. I guess it all depends on what the cutoff is for "newcomers." I suppose you could call anyone who signed on after 2007 a newcomer.

2. "demanding?" I wrote:

>Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across. The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.

replies(1): >>44578303 #
8. NaOH ◴[16 Jul 25 03:08 UTC] No.44578303{3}[source]▶
>The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.

Since you say this, I'm curious why you've also submitted about a dozen AI/LLM or adjacent articles in just the last two weeks. One was even a few hours before posting this Ask HN. That makes me think I'm not understanding something about your thinking.

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9. c23gooey ◴[16 Jul 25 04:07 UTC] No.44578577[source]▶
The UI might be the same but there's clearly been a lot of work done on the backend of the site in that time

edit to add: Don't gatekeep by using the pejorative "newcomers". Unless you're PG there will always be someone who has been around here longer than you

10. andybak ◴[16 Jul 25 09:08 UTC] No.44580213{4}[source]▶
greasemonkey / custom css
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11. bookofjoe ◴[16 Jul 25 11:05 UTC] No.44580852{4}[source]▶
You make sense. In my ideal world there would be HNxAI and HN. I'd submit to both, and also regularly frequent each.
12. kamaal ◴[16 Jul 25 11:38 UTC] No.44581073[source]▶
>>To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced something like user provided tags and users can vote for/against (to circumvent abuse)

HN's power is its simplicity. We don't need any of those features.

This is one of those rare old internet places that still has no feature clutter, ads and other distracting and irritating UI elements.

Sometimes something works fine and it doesn't need to be changed.

13. pxc ◴[16 Jul 25 11:51 UTC] No.44581176{5}[source]▶
If the main purpose of topic tags is to allow filtering and aggregation, the tags don't need to be that visible/prominent in the first place.

I'm not saying this is the answer either, because I don't know if it's a great fit for HN, but managing and verifying such tags would fit well into somethingkme the ol' the moderation and Meta-moderation systems from Slashdot.

(Using LLMs to generate initial topic tags once per article instead of having independent implementations burn up compute over it dynamically also seems like a way more reasonable way to use them toward this end.)