Ask HN: Significant reduction in AI related submissions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Significant reduction in AI related submissions?

8 points3vidence7 comments

It's kind of meta but has anyone noticed a pretty significant change in the distribution of submissions?

I kind of stopped visiting HN for a couple of months because most submissions were AI related in some way and the conversation were not very interesting imo.

It's actually nice to see more balanced distribution of stories on different parts of tech, reminds me why I found this community so interesting.

There are still lots of AI stories but its closer to like 1 to 3 per 30.

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There seems to be a lull right now. I did this silly thing:

https://hntags.com

Mostly 'cos I was trying to track whether the surfeit of AI stuff was real or my imagination - when I did it I was consistently getting four to eight AI stories per front page view. Right now there's only one. The categorisation is very loosey goosey, but I think it's reflecting something real there.

More details on the logic: https://paperstack.com/hntags/

I'm currently on a delightful honeymoon with my wife (6 years after the wedding because of covid and procrastination), but when I get back I intend to add some tracking of category stats over time as well as in-the-moment.

Are the tags themselves AI generated? they are quite funny in how specific they get e.g. "gaming culture" as the tag.

Also some tags include quotes and other don't haha.

But yeah you should respond to the other comment asking someone to use an LLM to show the trend in AI topics.

> Are the tags themselves AI generated?

Yes. The full explanation's on my blog and the code's public in my GitHub repo btw.

The main nuisance is that it will use inconsistent synonyms, so an article might be "ai" or "artificial intelligence" or "llms" without obvious differences in the topic.

When I get around to the stat-tracking I might do a Show HN or something, although it feels a bit frivolous for that.

> Also some tags include quotes and other don't haha.

Yeah, that kind of thing is a nuisance too. I'll add some more scrubbing rules to clean questionable characters out when I get back.

Repo: https://github.com/dcminter/hntags.com

It coincided with Claude Code but now that the novelty has wear off, there isn't much to interest the public with.

nah you're off there, it's as bad if not still getting increasingly worse actually based on common things like AI, LLM, etc topics. :-\ Perhaps there's just some more attention/discussion going on in the other submissions also so it feels a bit better.

Interesting! Good to know other people's experiences, yeah maybe my sampling is just off

I am waiting for someone with an AI tool that visualises the actual trend.

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