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Comment by mPReDiToR | Hacker News Reader

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mPReDiToR

I thnk it's 50/50

Half the stories are about ChatGPT or AI, the other are about Twitter/Musk.

I find it a chore to scroll past these two topics some days.

Am I alone in noticing this?

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You're not but (and I'm going to get flagged for this probably) I seem to understand there are so many people voicing their discontent about the abundance of AI posts, they get immediately downranked. I.e. swept under a rug.

I actually wrote to dang to ask why a prominent "Ask HN: why so much GPT" post disappeared after an hour and they confirmed this. I still am disappointed to have learned from that conversation that "downranked" means "basically shadow-banned and you can't find it anywhere unless you use a direct link".

So yeah, I dislike what HN has turned in 2023. We're not the only ones, but we're the vocal minority and thus put aside.

I don't even want to blame dang, he's got the short end of the stick moderating this chaos, but the result is that HN is less and less about hackers because we're the minority now.

(In any case, this post is about YC, not HN itself, so we're probably off-topic here)

i noticed it too, that popular and engaging post can be downranked very fast especially when it's bad for yc companies, last example being post about kagi price update.

I joined HN few years ago, right away I felt 'these are my people'. The conversations are still pretty good for the most part but there is definitely a weird uptick of low effort borderline trolling comments.

I am not sure what the stats are for the site but I wouldn't be surprised if there was significant growth and when communities expand you start getting average content and average users which can change the experience old timers expect. I have seen these occur in many niche subreddits that grew.

I feel the the quality of HN discussions been downtrending, and recent months have personally felt disengaged. I’ve been wondering how much of this being the current tech market being a brain / time drain. I would have thought there would be a renaissance of startups and projects with layoffs and all, but maybe it’s far too early to tell

It also has to do with the people the startup scene attracts nowadays.

10 years ago, the majority of candidates for a tech startup qualified as 'builders', very broadly speaking. Now, a larger chunk want to work on 'product' and growth, with an immediate focus on financial upsides.

And there is nothing wrong with that inherently, but this is a different (and I daresay, more conformist) culture.

Not alone. I usually scroll past about ChatGPT or AI. Too much noise. It is literally the new Crypto and I know that die hard AI people would throw a fit at this comparison but funny enough, people have been throwing fits about blockchain/crypto criticism for a while as well even though it is cooling down a bit.

I think most founders/startups in AI space are in it because its the new shiny thing to chase just like everyone wanted to start a blockchain startup 5 years ago.

Blockchain/Crypto Bros ==> AI/GPT Bros

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