How do you deal with it? Besides the simple solution of simply ignoring interesting stuff more and more.
I've always used the comments to upvotes ratio to workout if an article is worth reading. If the comments are higher than the upvotes, it's poor. Vice versa it's worth looking into. I skip all AI posts.
(or are you saying you fond the category itself is boring?)
But be careful, compulsively bookmarking isn't a good idea either. I see my AI bookmarks from 2023, most are irrelevant now. Same for a ton of new releases at that time, whatever homelab config, rumors around silicon architecture, geopolitical events, retrocomputing, etc.
So what actually helped me was realizing that after any ramp up period there's stabilization: you let the world figure out what works, then eventually you will see what sticks mentioned everywhere when going back to that topic.
There are also some evergreen discussions here. Those get more than a thread a year, like the tinnitus stuff, and they tend to stay up for a good part of the week.
There's also the "hidden" https://news.ycombinator.com/best which is a bit the same, but not per day
A few weeks ago several HN users presented solutions for filtering out AI results, but I haven't used any of those solutions much.
What I’ve been doing for several years is to use hckrnews.com as my default first level filter. I rarely go to the HN front page directly. I never visit the New or other pages either.
Sometimes I notice, after weeks or months or years, that there was a very interesting topic I missed out on. But such is life. It’s ok not to keep up with anything.
I then miss a few days and get overwhelmed with the backlog.
I call it "Seeking Orange" because interesting posts are highlighted. Features include:
- Point/comment counts become increasingly more orange with higher counts (50+, 100+)
- Orange accent bar on left indicates new items since last visit
- Support for several different feeds including: HckrNews (chronological front page appearance time), Classic Stories, Best Stories, Active Stories
- Thresholds to de-emphasize posts from users with low karma/recent creation dates: https://hn.leftium.com/newest?min_karma=500&min_age_years=5
Browsing by time is easier rather than popularity. There's no FOMO if you can't keep up, just scan the latest headlines and if it catches your eye click it.
> ignore all posts about MCP
> ignore all posts containing "agent"
> also ignore everything frontier labs bragged about hacking this week
> ignore AI psychosis posts praised as being the future
> check out everything else
> close HN
or hit "v" to change views
If I tried to keep up, I'd be run over. It's too much input for the normal individual I am.
Or is it because of AI-generated posts ? (I have to admit I'm not good yet at "guessing" when a post is slop...)
At any rate, I find AI interesting, but have a similar opinion that most of the HN discourse has become low quality. My solution is to follow individual users I know are high quality with similar interests.
I'm curious to hear why AI made it harder to read HN. Is it because there's lots of it and you don't like it?
But I'm guessing you have more of a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kind of problem, which admittedly I don't have. However, you could look at something using RSS, maybe in combination with an agent told to find and show articles based on some heuristics.
Personally, I'm OK with missing something. If it's good, I figure it'll surface somewhere else and impinge on my notice sooner or later.
For me same as always also.
My "same way" is the HN RSS feed. RSS is the best.
Goes straight to my email and I skim the headlines, click on the ones that seem interesting.
I don't thing 'hide' applies to the domain of the post, but only the post itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=What%20do%...
I thought hide just hid that particular entry. Have I been wrong all this time?
Ive been on hn with one account or another for close to a decade now. I have never used that feature nor did I think it would permanently hide the domains entirely. Super good to know though.