We present a multifaceted analysis showing that Hacker News, a venue for deep discussions 15 years ago, has reached an oversaturated state due to the flood of AI projects. It now feels like it has lost its former vitality and expertise due to too much information and 'confidently incorrect' answers.
Imagine this. Ten years ago, you stumbled upon a small, quiet, regular cafe in a back alley. There, true masters of each field always gathered over a cup of coffee to have philosophical, deep conversations. It was a magical space where, no matter when you visited, there was always an abundance of things to learn and new inspiration to gain.
But one day, this cafe became famous nationwide through social media, turning into a massive, chaotic market swarming with hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world. Deafeningly loud music plays, and hundreds of new drink menus pour out every day. The formerly quiet and deep atmosphere, and the people who used to respect each other and debate seriously, are nowhere to be found. As a regular customer, you might sip your coffee bitterly and lament, “This cafe just isn’t what it used to be. It’s essentially dead.”
In fact, this is exactly what is happening right now in ‘Hacker News (HN)’, the heart of Silicon Valley and the mecca for genius developers and ambitious founders worldwide. Among longtime users who have been active here daily for 10 or 15 years, sighs that “Hacker News feels dead compared to how it was” are frequently heard. They argue that the brilliant discussion culture of the past has disappeared.
Simply put, the truth analyzed through massive data points to the exact opposite of our intuition. Hacker News is by no means dead. Rather, it is currently “drowning” in too many people and a sea of information.
Why It Matters
Hacker News is not a typical internet humor board or a simple news scraping site. Operated by the famous US startup accelerator Y Combinator, this space has served as the ‘melting pot of future technology’ for the past 20 years, where numerous innovative startups in Silicon Valley, new programming languages, and the AI trends dominating the world today first emerge and are fiercely vetted.
| The footprint this community has left on human tech history is truly enormous. According to massive data analysis by [Home | HN Zeitgeist](https://hn.mrzepa.com/), over its 20-year history, Hacker News has generated over 40 million comments across 10,000 different technical topics. This staggering number of comments, nearly matching the population of South Korea, contains the full context of modern tech history: exactly when the NFT craze peaked, how this community foresaw technological leaps that Wall Street financial experts missed, and even who first predicted the massive success of the programming language ‘Rust’. |
The fact that the “quality of posts and discussions is declining” in such an incredible space cannot be dismissed as a light complaint about “the internet board going downhill.” It is a strong warning that the most important technological discoveries or groundbreaking ideas that will change our lives and the future could be buried under meaningless noise and never see the light of day. It also means that the soil where the convenient features of the smartphones you use daily or the seeds of future AI services grow is not as clear and healthy as it used to be.
The Explainer: The Brain’s Illusion, and the Truth
So why do longtime users strongly feel that Hacker News is ‘dead’? This is due to both environmental changes in the community and the psychological illusions created by our brain structures.
According to a fascinating discussion on Reddit, the perceived speed of time changes completely depending on a person’s age. As one user insightfully pointed out in 10 years doesn’t feel the same as it did “10” years ago - Reddit, “When you are 10 years old, 1 year makes up 1/10th of your entire life. But as the years go by, 1 year takes up a decreasing proportion of your life. To a 10-year-old, a tenth of their life is a huge portion, but to a 20-year-old, a twentieth feels relatively short.” Furthermore, our brains are very poor at clearly distinguishing everyday, repetitive memories.
In other words, the intense memories and emotions engraved in the brain of a young developer 15 years ago—when their heart raced as they first logged onto Hacker News and learned new technologies every day—can never be the same as their dulled senses today as they log into the exact same cyberspace daily. In a way, nostalgia is applying a somewhat harsh standard to the present.
However, we cannot blame it all on the brain’s illusion, as the changes actually occurring within the site are too distinct. The real problem is not the community’s ‘death’, but ‘drowning’.
To most accurately diagnose the present state of Hacker News, let’s look deeply into ‘Show HN’, the core board and the flower of this community.
‘Show HN’ is a stage where genius developers from around the world proudly present their self-made programs, services, and hardware to community members and receive sharp feedback. In the past, becoming an honored top post here required tremendous time and sweat. For example, massive-scale projects like “I made an open-source laptop from scratch,” which is considered one of the greatest ‘Show HN’ posts of all time, had to endure a bone-chilling time of ‘Proof of Work’ just to be posted. Best of Hacker News Shown HN of All The Time: 2008 - 2026
Metaphorically, the ‘Show HN’ section of the past was a high-quality ‘boutique handmade furniture exhibition’ where craftsmen spent a whole year carving and refining wood to present a one-of-a-kind piece. In contrast, it has now become a ‘massive warehouse furniture expo’ where tens of thousands of factory-assembled furniture pieces churned out in a single day are poured out.
According to an IT blogger’s analysis, the current state of this board is very chaotic. As declared in Is Show HN Dead? No, But It’s Drowning - arthurcnops.blog: “Of course, Show HN is by no means dead. It’s more vibrantly alive than ever. What has decisively changed is the tremendous ‘Volume’ of posts and the ‘Engagement’ people show per post.”
Why did this happen? Ironically, the biggest cause is the dazzling advancement of technology. Websites or applications that used to take months of all-nighters to build can now be whipped up in a single weekend with the help of excellent coding tools like ChatGPT or GenAI. Thanks to the lowered barriers to entry, the painful process of creation has been skipped, and as a result, an overwhelming volume of new projects is pouring down like a waterfall on Hacker News every single day. Countless witty and brilliant projects are drowning, buried by other posts before they even see the light.
Where We Stand
| What tortures existing users even more than the quantitative expansion of posts is the deterioration of the discussion culture. An old user of Hacker News recently expressed his honest feelings on the board. [HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago | Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48448447) |
“I don’t think Hacker News is dead. But compared to 15 years ago, it is an undeniable fact that the quality of commenters has noticeably dropped. While this is an unavoidable natural phenomenon as the community’s history lengthens and its mainstream popularity rises, what’s really maddening is that there are too many ‘confidently incorrect’ people now.”
Imagine this situation applied to cooking. A 3-star Michelin chef (a true Subject Matter Expert, SME) who has studied nothing but pasta in Italy for 30 years carefully writes a post about the authentic temperature for boiling pasta and the exact ratio of salt. But then, someone who just watched a 3-minute “quick cooking for singles” video on the internet yesterday shows up and confidently lectures in the comments: “You’re completely wrong! Putting pasta in a microwave-safe container and running it for 5 minutes is the standard of modern cooking!”
In the past, Hacker News had a strong culture of humbly asking what one didn’t know and deeply respecting the opinions of experts. But as the site became popular and the influx of the general public exploded, it has become commonplace for these ‘confidently incorrect’ answers armed with shallow knowledge to constantly tackle the explanations of true experts. Eventually, exhausted true experts choose to quietly close their mouths and leave rather than waste their energy arguing. Even the moderators of Hacker News have lost the ability to censor and control this massive noise that pours in by the tens of thousands every day.
The Tearful Struggle to Get 100 Points, Seen Through Data
This qualitative decline and public apathy are clearly proven by concrete statistical figures. According to a statistics blog analyzing the Hacker News ecosystem, user engagement in the community has cooled dramatically in recent years.
Looking at the statistical analysis results from State of Show HN 2025 – Sturdy Statistics, the probability of a ‘top-tier’ popular post getting 100 community upvotes on Hacker News in 2025 has plummeted to the exact same level as the probability of a completely ‘average’ post getting 100 points just three years ago in 2022. In other words, while in the past you could easily gain the warm support and cheers of 100 fellow developers just by bringing a decently useful idea, now the public’s attention is so fragmented and fatigued that it’s hard to catch people’s eyes even if you bring a brilliant project capable of changing the world.
Interestingly, the way people communicate in this massive tech community is closely linked to the harsh economic and social atmosphere of the times. Looking at the 19-year data visualization by 19 Years of Hacker News, Visualized — Ritesh Khanna, since 2011, ‘statement’ posts (posts announcing new facts) have always scored higher on average than ‘question’ posts. People overwhelmingly preferred clicking on fascinating tech links over reading other people’s questions.
However, the only exception in the community’s 20-year history occurred in 2022. In 2022, question posts (averaging 16.1 points) exceptionally outpaced informational posts (averaging 15.2 points) in popularity. What was the reason? 2022 was the year when ruthless massive layoffs hit giant tech companies and a severe tech industry recession began. Amid despair and confusion, users relied on each other through posts like “Ask HN: I suddenly lost my job, what should I do?”, offering comfort and seeking sincere advice. It is a heartwarming record showing that, even if things seem drying up on the surface, the human bond of sharing warmth in times of crisis is still alive.
AI’s Takeover and the Community’s Unfamiliar Evolution
Amidst this chaotic transition period, the new mainstream force currently completely dominating the main screen of Hacker News is undoubtedly ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’.
According to the tally on HN Top Links - Popular Stories from Hacker News, one of the hottest recent posts was a question: “Ask HN: What was your ‘oh shit’ moment while using GenAI?” This post quickly gathered a massive 724 points and a staggering 1,098 comments. The awe and chilling fear of the moment when technology overwhelms humanity were vividly debated among thousands of developers.
The 1st and 2nd most popular stories of 2025 selected by Hacker News Universe 2025 - andreyandrade.com were both also occupied by AI. 1st place was the release of “Google DeepMind’s O1-preview model,” which recorded a phenomenal 3,406 points, and 2nd place was a fascinating piece of fiction: “Hacker News’ main page in 10 years (2035) as imagined by Gemini Pro 3.”
| A whole new ecosystem has even been created to rescue users who can’t read everything because there are too many posts. The latest services like [Top Stories | HN Companion](https://app.hncompanion.com/) use the power of AI to pick out key points and summarize the hundreds of texts pouring into Hacker News. It’s an ironic situation: the barrier to writing collapsed because of chatbot technologies they created themselves, causing a great flood of information, and to survive that flood, people are now relying back on the life vests of AI summary assistants. |
Wait! What If You See ‘HN’ on a Gen Z Messenger? (Bonus Track)
Let’s take a breather from the heavy talk about Hacker News (HN). If you ever see your teenage child or nephew using the word “hn” to someone on smartphone messengers, Snapchat, or TikTok, you should absolutely not mistakenly think they have joined the deep Silicon Valley tech community ‘Hacker News’. In the context of social media and young generations’ conversations, the slang ‘hn’ has a completely different meaning.
According to meme interpretations in Forgotten Old Sayings People Used to Say (150 Examples …HN Meaning in Text, Snapchat, and Social Media – Simple …10 years doesn’t feel the same as it did “10” years ago - Reddit, a lowercase “hn” in a text message is usually a dry reaction thrown out when you are largely unimpressed, indifferent, or completely unsurprised by what someone said. (It is also frequently used as an abbreviation for ‘Hell No’, indicating strong denial.)
Let’s take a specific situation explained in HN Meaning in Text, Snapchat, and Social Media – Simple … as an example. If a friend texts you bragging, “Hey! I beat the final stage of that really hard game on my first try!”, and you reply with a blunt lowercase “hn.”, it perfectly conveys the apathetic meaning of “So what, I’m not impressed?” or “Yeah right, first try? I don’t believe it.”
As explained in HN in Text Explained: Common Uses and Examples, this short word isn’t intended to be explicitly rude, but it’s a magical, cost-effective term favored by the younger generation active on TikTok when they simply don’t want to waste energy typing a long sentence. However, as warned in Hn Meaning Slang: The Ultimate Fun Guide To Mastering It, if you cluelessly overuse this slang in situations requiring serious discussion or genuine comfort, you risk having your social ties severed, as it may appear you are blatantly ignoring the other person.
It provides a strange amusement that the name of the massive community (HN) where adults in Silicon Valley pour out tens of thousands of lines of code daily discussing the future of humanity is used as the most indifferent two-letter abbreviation (hn) symbolizing annoyance in the teenager world.
What’s Next
Let’s return to Silicon Valley’s Hacker News to conclude. The growing pains this community is currently experiencing are, in fact, a fateful rite of passage that all great platforms and communities on Earth must face at the peak of their success. Complex programming, once the exclusive domain of computer science majors or geeky hackers, has now become accessible magic for anyone with a few clicks. The fact that more ordinary people have become interested in the world of tech startups is something that should undoubtedly be celebrated from the perspective of our entire civilization.
But behind that shining exterior, we have faced a serious side effect: a ‘terrible poverty in the midst of a massive flood of information’. If the coding abilities of AI tools become exponentially smarter tomorrow, the day after, and next year, people will churn out thousands of plausible apps in just half a day and dump them on the ‘Show HN’ board.
Now, the most important question for securing supremacy in the future tech ecosystem has changed. It is no longer ‘Who makes faster and newer software?’, but rather ‘How do we efficiently filter out the single innovative engine that will truly change the world from the tens of thousands of mediocre cogs pouring out every day?’ Perhaps in the very near future, instead of people manually deleting comments, Hacker News moderators will employ a ‘massive AI moderator’ trained to the palate of a 3-star Michelin chef to filter out the shallow ‘confidently incorrect’ answers.
Ultimately, this massive confusion caused by the rapid advancement of technology has paradoxically entered a new phase where it can only be overcome by even more advanced AI technology. The legendary community Hacker News didn’t die of old age; rather, it is suffering from fierce growing pains as it transitions to the next generation louder and more intensely than ever before.
AI’s Take by MindTickleBytes
It might be a painful sense of loss for old regulars that the cozy library where geniuses quietly shared knowledge has become a noisy square where anyone can pump out code and sell products. But this is the most dazzling proof that software creation technology has finally been fully democratized into our ordinary daily lives.
The threshold of knowledge that only a few experts could possess in the past has been lowered infinitely, and we have entered an era where anyone with imagination can enjoy the benefits of technology and become a creator. The task the tech ecosystem must now ponder is not to return to the closed past and raise barriers again. Rather, it is to invent powerful curation algorithms and new rules of communication that will reclaim the ‘order and depth’ lost amidst the overwhelming quantitative expansion, and to filter out the true gems. The library hasn’t disappeared; it just expanded its territory into the largest square in the world.
References
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[HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48448447) -
[Home HN Zeitgeist](https://hn.mrzepa.com/) - 10 years doesn’t feel the same as it did “10” years ago - Reddit
- Best of Hacker News Shown HN of All The Time: 2008 - 2026
- Is Show HN Dead? No, But It’s Drowning - arthurcnops.blog
- State of Show HN 2025 – Sturdy Statistics
- 19 Years of Hacker News, Visualized — Ritesh Khanna
- HN Top Links - Popular Stories from Hacker News
- Hacker News Universe 2025 - andreyandrade.com
-
[Top Stories HN Companion](https://app.hncompanion.com/) - Forgotten Old Sayings People Used to Say (150 Examples …HN Meaning in Text, Snapchat, and Social Media – Simple …10 years doesn’t feel the same as it did “10” years ago - Reddit
- HN Meaning in Text, Snapchat, and Social Media – Simple …
- HN in Text Explained: Common Uses and Examples
- Hn Meaning Slang: The Ultimate Fun Guide To Mastering It
- All users have left, and the community functions have completely stopped
- Thanks to AI tools, too many posts are pouring in over a short period, creating an oversaturated state where individual posts get buried
- It has transitioned into a closed community where only a small number of invited experts can write
- The number of people giving 'confidently incorrect' information has increased, frustrating true experts
- Not even one new post goes up a day, leaving nothing to read
- It changed to a paid subscription model, making access fees too expensive
- Music recommendation playlists
- Question posts
- Video clips