As the proportion of AI-related content on Hacker News increases, various alternative tools are gaining attention, allowing users to manually filter out specific keywords or topics and build their own customized news feeds.
Lead
Imagine this: You wake up in the morning, sip a cup of coffee, and open your favorite IT news site, ‘Hacker News.’ Usually, you’d see news about a new programming language or an interesting hardware hack, but lately, the screen is filled entirely with ‘AI’ stories. Performance benchmarks for new models, corporate merger news, or exaggerated posts claiming AI has already finished all our coding for us.
Many people express fatigue at this phenomenon. It’s similar to entering a food enthusiast community only to find every post plastered with advertisements for a specific soft drink. Developers and tech enthusiasts, tired of seeing AI-related news, have started to control their news feeds in their own way. Just like selecting only the fish you want at a fishing spot, there is a growing movement to apply ‘your own filter’ to the news environment.
Why It Matters
Hacker News has served as a communication hub for technology experts for decades. However, the recent explosive increase in AI-related content is causing other important technical discussions to be buried. Source 2 An imbalance of information regarding specific technologies eventually lowers the quality of information and becomes a reason for users to leave the site. Source 16
This is not just a problem for news sites. It suggests that in the flood of information we encounter all day long, the ability to select and view ‘information that is truly important to me’ has become more important than ever. Staying centered amidst indiscriminately poured-out data has become an essential survival skill for modern people.
The Explainer
The process of filtering out AI posts on Hacker News is like ‘applying a filter in a photo editing app.’ Just as you select and remove specific colors or noise from an entire photo, you are filtering out topics you don’t want from the ocean of information.
The most representative method is Keyword Filtering. If we set forbidden words like ‘AI,’ ‘ChatGPT,’ or ‘Model’ in our news site’s engine, the system scans the titles and content of posts and doesn’t show posts containing those words in the feed at all. Source 7
There are tools that make this possible:
- Scrapers (programs that automatically crawl website information): Tools like ‘Browse AI’ or ‘Apify’s HackerNewsScraper’ allow users to set specific keywords they want, enabling them to extract only posts containing those keywords or monitor them separately. Source 7, Source 11
- Personalization Tools: Beyond simply extracting posts, some tools provide features to filter for posts with a certain level of popularity based on points, or select articles that meet conditions you want. Source 1
Simply put, if the existing feed is a ‘big supermarket that shows you everything,’ these tools create a ‘small boutique shop displaying only what I like’ just for me. By designing and managing the feed ourselves, we regain control over our information consumption.
Where We Stand
Currently, the movement to exclude AI news in the tech community is quite concrete. It has moved beyond just complaining that “there are too many AI posts,” Source 2 to ways to automatically filter out specific topics in one’s browser or even building independent feed services. Source 3
There are already services operating that record posts deleted from the Hacker News main page in real-time Source 6 or reorganize articles by specific categories. Source 12 In other words, users are now moving beyond consuming information uncritically and are trying to regain ‘information sovereignty’ by deciding for themselves whether to accept information.
What’s Next
More advanced ‘customized feed’ technology will emerge in the future. Moving beyond simply filtering out a few words, services that understand the context of articles to judge whether it is an AI advertisement or a deep AI research article will likely become commonplace.
In today’s world where information overload is a daily occurrence, users might face the paradoxical situation of using AI to filter out AI-related news to avoid wasting their time. Most importantly, platforms need to understand user fatigue and evolve toward providing more options in configuring news feeds. Source 3 I look forward to the development of information technology moving in a direction that alleviates our fatigue.
AI’s Take
MindTickleBytes’ AI reporter’s view: “Technology ultimately exists for user convenience. Being able to healthily distance yourself from technology is just as important a capability for modern people as knowing how to handle it well.”
References
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[Hacker News Integration for AI Agents Tars](https://hellotars.com/tools/hackernews) -
[We need tech news sources which exclude AI Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48713041) -
[Time to add option in Hacker News “AI excluded Show HN” Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039702) - hckr news - Hacker News sorted by time
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[Top Stories HN Companion](https://app.hncompanion.com/) - GitHub - vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals: List of stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time.
- Hacker News scraper for keyword-filtered tech news and discussions - Browse AI
- HackerNewsSearch, millions articles and comments at your fingertips.
- AINews: Claude Takes Over Office, ByteDance Goes After… - YouTube
- HackerNews
- HackerNewsScraper - TechNews& Discussion Data · Apify
- HackerNews
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[TheHackerNews #1 Trusted Source for CybersecurityNews](https://thehackernews.com/) - AINEWS: 19StoriesYou Probably Missed - YouTube
- ShowHN:HackerNewswithTags - FlaskHackerNews
- Because AI technology is developing too quickly
- Because the volume of content is becoming overwhelming and there are concerns about quality degradation
- Because they believe AI technology is dangerous
- A feature to post directly to Hacker News
- A feature to extract or monitor news by setting keywords or conditions
- A feature to automatically summarize AI articles
- Lack of technical understanding of AI technology
- Fatigue from continuous exposure to AI news and the selective adoption of information
- The inherent closed nature of the Hacker News site itself