This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been surprisingly stable—fluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10 years—has recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double, though...yet.
Stories: https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4
Comments: https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ
The number of new submitters has indeed increased significantly since the beginning of 2026.
Now that I think of this, whoever solves this well will have the next hyperscaler.
It has a lot of red flags. Second (re)post of dormant account, vive coded, AI, the biological model is horrible. But it was a nice project, 5/5 would upvote again.
Perhaps the important detail is "[I] spent about a month on it."
I collected a few of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130684
But it also seems some topics (in particular AI) attract a lot of accounts that post incredibly low quality comments, far below the quality you'd expect from HN. Ofte it's in reasonable English, but it's just inane reddit-level drivel. Unclear if these topics attract low quality posters, or if these are bot accounts.
Also looking at the three first pages of /noobcomments, we find 28 comments with EM-dashes in them. That's not proof of AI, but if you compare with /newcomments, you find exactly one EM-dash going back as far. That's a bit of a statistical aberration.
Old accounts from multiple social media platforms has a $$$$$ value.
"When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Goodhart's law