# The AI flood that ate the HN front page > A top Ask HN argues the front page has shrunk to one topic, and 212 replies cannot agree whether that is a bug. - Title: The AI flood that ate the HN front page · Hacker News - Summary: A top Ask HN argues the front page has shrunk to one topic, and 212 replies cannot agree whether that is a bug. Filters can subtract AI from your feed, but… - Keywords: hacker news, ai hype, moderation, community, tech media, technology, startups, flood, ate, front, page - Source: Hacker News — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657850 - Read time: 3 min - Topics: hacker news, ai hype, moderation, community, tech media, technology, startups ## The feed went all AI cromka says the last couple of months of Hacker News have been almost nothing but AI and AI-adjacent stories. The post hit 394 points and 212 comments in an hour. > HN feed is almost exclusively AI or AI-adjacent news. ## Not about lost karma His own ignored submissions are not the grievance. If his posts sink, everyone else's do too, and he never gets to read the things he came for. > I don't need that validation. ## Two posts that sank A Lenovo laptop with production-ready solid-state air cooling, and Brax Industries' open-source wall display that runs Home Assistant on device. Both got no traction. > I honestly believe this would gain some traction here on HN a year or two ago. ## The actual ask Give drowned-out submissions a visibility bump, or ship simple tags so readers can filter topics themselves. Not a ban on AI, a way to see past it. > maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump? ## HN mirrors the industry The first reply reframes it: the front page is not broken, it is accurately reporting where the whole industry's attention sits right now. > HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. ## A cottage industry of filters hnsansai strips anything that mentions AI. unslop.news and hcker.news drop only the AI posts. sprinklz.io lets you write custom rules on top. ## Roughly half the page One filter reported its own hit rate, and a reader ran another against the day's front page and watched 30 posts drop to 14. The gut feeling checks out. > 92 of 179 articles survived the filter. ## AI filtering AI One of these tools was vibe coded and uses a model to classify posts, because keyword lists cannot keep up. Commenters found that funny and slightly grim. > An AI slop to filter out AI slops, the pinnacle of AI. ## Filters subtract, they don't add cromka's sharpest point. Hiding AI posts leaves a shorter page, not a better one. The laptop cooling story is still buried in /newest either way. > these pages filter AI stuff, but do not make room for non-AI stuff ## Nowhere obvious to go Lobste.rs comes up, but you need an invite. Mastodon, Lemmy and tildes.net get named too, each requiring you to build your own feed from scratch. > to post there you need to be invited by an existing member ## This has happened before Old-timers list the past monocultures: Rails, a wall of Erlang after pg complained the site was slow, Haskell, Clojure, the JS framework wars, blockchain, web3. > AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely ## Or maybe it hasn't Others reject the cycle framing outright. Rails made one class of web app faster. This claim is that the scale is different in kind, not degree. > That seems like comparing the internet to jQuery. ## The rescue tool already exists Mods run a second chance pool for good posts that got buried. Anyone can email hn@ycombinator.com with that subject line and nominate someone else's submission. > there is a very high chance one of the lovely mods will take the submission and second-chance it ## The votes are the algorithm Every AI story on the front page got there by upvote. Asking for curation is asking thousands of readers to stop voting for what they actually want to read. > So you are effectively asking these readers to not vote on a topic because you are not interested in it but they are. ## Unless the votes are fake One reply pokes at the premise underneath: with AI came cheap astroturfing, so the upvote count may not be a clean signal of what humans want. > You're assuming there are human eyes behind all of these accounts. ## Even the counting is contested One reader tallied 21 of 30 front-page posts as non-AI. Sixteen minutes later another counted 11 AI titles and guessed half the rest was AI-written anyway. > Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. ## Slop is the real target JoshTriplett splits the category. Keep genuine model releases, cut the vibe-coded demos and machine-written blogspam. The reply: nobody can reliably tell them apart. > check out this article that's obviously LLM-written and provides very little value ## Some readers come for this hannofcart shows up daily specifically for new model news and takes from people who have used them. Any topic filter destroys that use of the site. > I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are ## What people say they lost The quieter thread underneath: programming articles are gone, GitHub trending is all AI, and comments feel more reactive than they used to. > It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now ## The post proves itself A complaint about AI dominating HN became the day's top AI story. ChrisArchitect links four near-identical Asks from the past few months. > But this post is about AI news! ## Key takeaway Filters can subtract AI from your feed, but only votes and human curation put anything else back in.