[ryandrake]

I downvote them because they are tangential to the content. They are like complaints about scroll bars and back button hijacking, or annoyances about the website's color scheme. Valid complaints, but contrary to the HN guideline:

    Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I don't like AI slop articles either, but I also don't like articles where the text is formatted in a tiny column in the middle of the browser. Neither are really useful to complain about here. By the end of 2026, 90% of the articles here are probably going to be AI slop, and it will be totally useless to complain about each and every one of them.

[fsckboy]

>Valid complaints, but contrary to the HN guideline

the site not too long ago banned ai generated content. i don't know if they changed it but pointing out that something was AI would have been following/flagging the rule/violation

[jchw]

I want to respect the guidelines for the good of the community, but at this point it isn't serving the community well for there to not be backlash against the rising flood of AI-generated garbage.

It was really truly bad enough when it was ~half the articles either being about AI directly or indirectly. Now it's that, plus half of it is written by Claude too.

What meaningful community is going to be left for these guidelines to protect?

Moderation needs to put their foot down in some cases, as a matter of necessity. Sometimes users need to put their foot down, too.

[ryandrake]

I'm all for banning AI slop articles. The HN guidelines were recently updated to address slop comments[1], but they have not put their foot down yet about slop articles.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

[relevant_stats]

> I downvote them because they are tangential to the content. They are like complaints about scroll bars and back button hijacking, or annoyances about the website's color scheme

I don't agree with you. They are not at all like the examples you mentioned. Calling something "AI slop" signals that the writing either fails to raise any important point or, even when it raises a decent point, it is so repetitive it wastes time of readers. This is not only a style problem.

To put it in LLMish: It's not 'tangential to the content' – it's directly addressing (the lack of) the content.

If LLM worked perfectly we shouldn't have noticed the text was generated. I and others did. I feel it's important to point it out, if we don't want low-quality texts fully flooding us.

> By the end of 2026, 90% of the articles here are probably going to be AI slop, and it will be totally useless to complain about each and every one of them.

Using the policy you personally adopted it surely will be so. I don't think news aggregator comprised of junk information is something which should be embraced, so maybe reconsider your position?

[ryandrake]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809309