3,800 Developers Voted to Ban AI Comments on Hacker News

Source: Dev.to

Don’t post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

Here’s Why This Matters

Hacker News receives millions of monthly visitors—developers, founders, and scientists. While the posted links are important, the comment section has traditionally been the site’s most valuable feature.

This year many users began noticing comments that felt polished yet empty: paragraphs with perfect structure but lacking creativity, often starting with phrases like “It’s worth noting” or “To be fair.”

Users had been reporting the issue for months. A few weeks before the new guideline, a post titled HN is drowning in AI comments highlighted growing frustration.

What The Community Actually Said

The HN discussion attracted over 1,400 comments—enormous by HN standards.

One commenter summed it up:

“There used to be a sort of gentleman’s agreement that I could spare the time to read and judge your comment because you went through the effort of writing it.”

This social contract assumes the author invested effort. AI-generated comments break that relationship: the reader spends time, but the author may have spent none.

Moderator dang noted that users who rely on LLMs only for grammar corrections underestimate their broader impact. It’s not just about fixing mistakes; it can erase personal style. 🤔

The Non‑Native Speaker Problem

The issue is nuanced. Some users employ LLMs to “anglicize” their comments because a direct communication style tends to be downvoted. Others use LLMs to improve English phrasing in search queries rather than to create content.

These are legitimate, practical uses, yet the new guideline makes no allowances. A comment with a few grammatical errors that comes from a genuine place can be more valuable than a flawless paragraph that could have been written by anyone.

Poor writing can serve as a heuristic, indicating that a human authored the text and invested thought—something that counts.

This Isn’t Just a HN Thing

• Reddit has battled AI spam bots for over a year.
• LinkedIn comments are often flooded with low‑quality AI content, leading users to scroll past them.
• Stack Overflow prohibited AI‑generated answers back in 2022.

Every major developer community faces the same challenge: the tools that enable high‑quality writing also enable large‑scale flooding.

HN’s response is notable because it’s not technical—there’s no AI detection model scanning each comment. Instead, it relies on community norms and moderation to enforce the rule. How well this scales remains an open question.

What This Means For Us

Consider how you write online, not just on HN but everywhere:

• Your voice, quirks, and rough edges are what separate your posts from what a model would produce.
• Grammar mistakes, odd analogies, un‑hedged opinions are the “good stuff.”
• Ironically, we’ve built tools that can mimic our writing, yet the most respected developer community prefers reading the authentic, warts‑and‑all version of us. 🙂

Discussion: Do you use AI to edit your comments or posts? Where do you draw the line between using it for editing and using it to write? 👇