I really do this that we are in the last years of the Internet as we know it. I daily have interactions online with people who just seem like a frontend for an LLM. Nearly every piece of content I read feels written by an LLM, and every discussion or debate ends up feeling like pitting an LLM up against another LLM. Copy, paste, copy, paste. I mean, to an extent, even tech businesses and competition (e.g. SaaS) have become LLM vs LLM in many respects. It's disheartening to witness, especially as a creative. Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable, or the internet fundamentally changes to use some sort of proof-of-identity and proof-of-authorship. Ideally both. But tbqh, even something like the Nets in Ender's Game won't really work in the age of AI. Either way, the internet I grew up on seems further and further away, and folks seem okay with proliferating fake realities and fake conversations and fake thoughts. It's all fake. What are we doing?
The internet that I knew and grew up with is dead and has been that way for a while. To me the downfall started when everything online became a financial pursuit in some shape or form. However, even then, it was possible to find pockets of genuine creativity and discussion. The advent of LLMs was the final blow, and the reason is exactly the fact that one can't assume authenticity in anything these days.
Yes proof-of-identity and authorship would help, however that comes with the extremely perverse side effect of invasive identity verification. Sadly zero knowledge proofs for that are still brittle and not well developed. Hopefully something like that is able to materialize without being the privacy nightmare that is the myriad identity verification mechanisms currently mandated by several governments.
Same here, first time on the Web 1995, a few BBS access before it.
For hobby projects coding with LLMs feels like fast food.
When someone posts a project with AI collaboration, I know from my own work, that they only commissioned the project to agents, just like we commission someone else to deliver a house, a painting, a ready made piece of furniture, whatever.
I don't think the only way is the ID verification. That's what the spying side pushes as a narrative, but there are ways to validate each other without global registries and any government connections.
Web-Of-Trust was a good idea with poor implementation way ahead of its time. Closed communities work pretty well and seem to be almost unaffected.
So yes, the public internet is dead but I believe that it will be solved with some sort of reputational/vouch systems and invite-only groups where you have to contribute to be accepted and have an incentive to protect that seat instead of posting slop/spam/other agenda to be banned.
But how is that an "internet"? The point of the free internet was to be free to communicate with whomever.
When you seclude yourself in bubbles, you might feel protected, but really you expose yourself to becoming irrelevant.
The crucial problem is, people confuse message with messenger.
When comments are objectively true and faithful (representing the topic correctly), it doesn't matter who wrote them.
The other way around, knowing somebody personally doesn't guarantee their messages to be true and "not spam". The important thing is to check content thoroughly for actual truth and point out deviations. Just like in an ideal scientific discussion. The remaining social part is a question of civil discourse and enforcing that.
Sorry, it was a loaded question. I was more asking who's working on the foundation for this next phase of the internet. Who's working on decentralized reputational/vouch systems? Who's working on zero-trust proof-of-authorship or proof-of-being? Who's working on privacy-focused proof-of-identity? etc.
> Yes proof-of-identity and authorship would help, however that comes with the extremely perverse side effect of invasive identity verification
It doesn't help because there's a powerful incentive for people to, frankly, lie. HN is chock-full of obviously AI-generated articles where the authors, caught red-handed, insist it's not their hand. They want the best of both worlds: all the recognition, the reach, and the opportunities that come with being seen as an online authority, but none of the actual effort that you can now simulate with an LLM.
Real ID makes the stakes a bit more tangible - "if you die online, you die in real life" - except with eight billion people on the planet, there's an inexhaustible supply of people who will create accounts for you for a sweet $100.
Something even more sad to me: my digital conversations with coworkers are seeming to often be another interface layer with an LLM.
Me: “What’s your thoughts on [technical issue]”
Them: (response ellipses and disproportionate delay) followed by a very thorough response.
The problem is when I talk to them in real-time, that same person that gives the thorough response now only has a superficial understanding. It’s unnerving when their “real” conversations start using turns-of-phrase that are common in LLMs (I’ve heard them referred to as “Claude-isms”)
Exactly. It is a cancer to real interaction, and I don't really see how the internet can survive it outside of reinvention. I love LLMs, but mostly because I love learning. But what I hate is disingenuity. I personally could not stomach spewing an LLM-generated response at somebody without understanding exactly what's being said... because ideally, I wrote 99% of it. But that's the majority of online interactions these days. What other cure is there other than to leave screen space for meat space at every opportunity? Yet, for somebody like me who is ND, meat space has its own challenges, so it's tough all around to find the meaningful interactions I used to love but are quickly vanishing--and blissfully and joyfully at that.
What are we to do? What is there that we can even do? When the construct of a system dictates the actions and incentives of its constituents, what do you realistically expect to happen? Financial reward and ultimately the pursuit of power is the underlying and responsible component here. To me, this is all an inevitability and I see no end in sight.
Despair, fatalism and displays of learned helplessness are self-defeating.
When you find yourself stuck in a loop, consciously analyzing your situation is key.
While such systems, entire societies even, can look like an overwhelming force impossible to overcome, they are actually built on shaky ground: your own beliefs about them.
If you're having daily interactions with people who feel like LLMs, then find a new community to hang out in instead. There's plenty of communities out there that reject LLM content. They're not interested in taking over the world, so they're a little harder to find, but they're out there.
Personally I run in to it in the workplace now constantly. I work with pseudo tech types that we used to call BAs but now glorify as “product”. Now about 95% of their content is made by AI.
Most of the time it’s just material I actually created then they regurgitated through Claude with errors introduced to make it worse.
It definitely isn't. I'm in a half dozen online spaces where no one posts LLM content, either because it's explicitly against the rules or implicitly against the culture, or simply because no one is interested in it.
It’s not just the tech industry. Friends of mine in non-technical fields are seeing more and more of this. If it’s in your workplace, it’s probably in most workplaces that you’re qualified to work in. You don’t "just" walk away from your community and your career.
If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.
The conversation here is around online communities, so that's what my comment was about. LLMs destroy every aspect of life they touch, and I agree many of those problems aren't really solvable. But online communities at least can be preserved with strong moderation & ejecting users who post LLM-generated content.
> If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.
The funny thing is that as soon as communities do this and take an anti-LLM stance they get mocked, called luddites, they get told they're living in a word that doesn't exist anymore and that AI is here to stay, stop going against the current.
The Luddites weren't against technology, they were against the inhumane exploitation of workers and dangerous child labor, made that much worse through technology. All Ludd supposedly did was smash a couple frames after being criticized for his output, but the Luddites' grievances were really just the foremost among those that had been simmering among textile workers for as long as there has ever been a textile industry, long before industrial automation was a thing.
As for myself, I certainly don't want a community based on reactionary dogma, but I would certainly prefer to be around people who at least have their eyes open, and are aware of the corrosive effects that AI can have or already does.
The Luddites were about protecting their privileged hereditary position against competition from women and other outsiders. Not unlike the privilege of contemporary software engineers like myself.
A lot of labor unions were about racism and xenophobia too, but they did agitate for better working conditions nonetheless. For sure it's not black and white.
Then block those people. Either they're stupid and don't understand the bad incentives that LLMs create in forums, or they do understand and they're malicious.
With every year those communities are becoming increasingly balkanized and building moats as they raise up the drawbridges, assuming they haven’t already atrophied from swapping over to a Facebook group years ago (now discord too, which will hurt in the long run). They are trying to protect their communities but unfortunately it has the very sad secondary effect of making it harder and harder to find them.
I keep seeing hints of these communities existing, here in hn comments. Every time a thread is about communities that are still good, still human etc someone pops up saying these communities exist, but no-one ever mentions what these communities are.
I mean, I get it: one risks eternal-september-ing them as soon as the hn crowd finds out about them, but sometimes it's really frustrating going down a thread hoping to find better indications for these mythical great communities and always coming back empty-handed.
I know other communities that I really doubt would appeal to anyone here. However, Lobsters is basically Hacker News, but anti-AI, smaller, and with a (low) barrier to entry.
I'm part of a maker community that I really enjoy being a part of. We don't invite random people, but if someone makes something cool, I'll send them an invitation. I think it's this sort of thing that people are referring to when they talk about these communities.
Yeah. Because we don't want hacker news assholes to find them and destroy them, the way they've been systematically pillaging the rest of the Internet.
I've been mulling over the idea of a vouch-based social network. You can follow someone or whatever, and you can also tag them as "person I've met" or "my uncle." If you see a post that's insane or spam, you can open a little graph that shows you that the reason you're seeing this post is because this is your friend's friend's friend, and you can bug your friend about it. Everyone will have a responsibility to only tag people who they know are actual real people who post content with their hands.
lobste.rs has an account tree thing. I don't know how well it works at all, but maybe in a worst-case scenario the moderators can get rid of an entire subtree, at the cost of some collateral damage.
A next generation spam filter, perhaps. Rather than answer your interesting emails, the communication tool that leans into LLMs will show it to you so you can respond to it personally or have the LLM make a response that you review. And as for it being a different protocol, it would handle a lot more messages through training rules about which messages to filter, which to store long term, which to store short term, etc.
One truism of the Internet is that it always used to be better. LLMs are the latest wave in the Eternal September, changing the Internet forever, yet again.
I only want to interact with real people, building real connections or pissing off real people. Directly, without any LLM intermediary. Trolling an LLM is joyless. Tricking an LLM into a goatse link does not make the good lulz.
Maybe the places we do this have to change, but really, I'll shed zero tears if exploitative rent-extracting 2010s era Internet beasts like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. die under a mountain of LLM slop.
> One truism of the Internet is that it always used to be better. LLMs are the latest wave in the Eternal September, changing the Internet forever, yet again.
I think that's reductionist. Convenient online shopping aside, what made the internet great was the ability to interact with people on an unprecedented scale. The dynamics of these interactions changed over time - from narrow academic circles to billions of complete strangers, often trying to sell you something - but the core premise never changed until now. But think of the newcomer experience today: unless they're very careful, 50%+ of the content they will consume and 50%+ of the conversations they will be having are not going to involve humans at all.
While I agree a lot with this sentiment around the current slop fest that so much of the internet has become, I am oddly hopeful. I'm seeing across the internet, and especially in younger folks, a real push for a more organic, messy, human internet. The amount of "ugly", hand-coded vibes, basic sites I have come across in the last few months is 10x what was out there for a decade earlier. I think many people are nostalgic for the internet of the early 2000's. The random blog about whatever on tumblr or learning some HTML to build a rad geocities page. The internet has been getting fancier and more feature rich but also a shittier, less human experience for the last 10 years. My hope is that this slop mess pushes it over the edge and encourages the rise of a more messy, simple, human internet again.
Twitter tried to do this with the verification checkmark.
In such a system, you can no longer be anonymous, and everything you post is tied to you. It's also incentivized that this is possible due to surveillance capitalism.
I think that this will turn the net into a much more corporate-like entity as you need to mind your image. Like imagine LinkedIn but for everything
You could have something that is more akin to "verified-human" rather than verified identity. Though that alone would not prevent actors from posting llm content from verified accounts. So then you could have an additional layer where an account can lose its "verified-human" status if it posts llm generated content without disclosing it as such.
I've been noticing that some coworkers are pretty clearly having an LLM manage their Slack. They'll respond back in more or less "LLM speak", and then have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about during an IRL meeting when I mention that I sent them something through Slack.
It's maddening. These services stop being about "communicating" if information isn't actually being conveyed between two people. It's like the people attaching Claude to Slack and their email are cargo-culting the idea of communication itself.
At some point, having such little interaction just proves that employee isn't actually doing anything. If people are concerned about AI taking their job, why are they advertising to this extent that AI is doing their job while still collecting a pay check?
Most people doing this either don't think much further about it or they believe their AI use is better than others. Getting fired at most companies is also rarely about being unproductive, there's like a hundred other reasons most you have little control over.
> Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable
Unfortunately the LLMs are coming for meat-space too. It’s started with smart glasses and it will end with smart contact lenses, where an LLM feeds you lines so you seem like the most interesting person at the party and no-one knows you’re reading it all off a screen or filming it for social media likes.
I’ve been accused of being an LLM. I can assure you I’ve handwritten every comment I’ve ever made.
But this is enlightening because this possibility of being LLM-generated enables cognitive dissonance. There’s a strong correlation (IME) between “you are an LLM” and “you said something I don’t like”.
I don’t think people are as good at identifying LLM content as they think they are so they just fall deeper into an echo chamber.
There is a large uptick in the number of people calling out everything as AI- whether because the thoughts were too advanced for them or their brains have mixed into a mix of schizophrenia and the number 23. The early form was calling out anyone who dares to continue using the em dash.
> Nearly every piece of content I read feels written by an LLM, and every discussion or debate ends up feeling like pitting an LLM up against another LLM.
This will be one of those fun new things we all have to deal with. Verifying whether someone is human or not, people suffering mental breakdowns from thinking everyone they are talking to is a bot, &c. There will be mass shooters and new murders and conspiracy theories and all sorts of things coming out of the gradual adoption of AI tooling.
But I do hope this will help destroy the Internet in its current form. I don't think it's likely, but if it could get bad enough I hope that it destroys social media and forces people to realize even if the content is not created by a machine or an LLM, it's just as bad. T
The LLMs are just an interface through which we communicate. Much like how the language we use is also an interface. LLMs have certain properties that lead to convergent and low-information communication, but so do languages (and their accompanying cultures).
While the parody has potential, I think the jokes need some work. I think it's not quite hitting because it's too off the wall crazy, but there's no twist.
Change the word "LLM" to "Wikipedia", and then put most of your concerns to rest. Wikipedia didn't kill the internet or make online discourse pointless, an LLM wont either, the same way calculators didn't kill napkin-math.
The very term "meat space" or "meat proxy" were terms invented by the terminally online who needed to disconnect a decade ago. Nobody sane talks or thinks like this.
Hah those terms have been around for a long time. They're tongue in cheek, or they were originally, like calling outdoors the "big room with the blue ceiling."
“Meatspace” was a response to “cyberspace”. If I think about it (and I make no claims to veracity here other than gut feel), I can’t think of anyone who’d use “meatspace” in earnest except those who spend too long in the alternative; but then again I also can’t think of anyone who’d use “cyberspace” in earnest except those who understand close to nothing about it. So they’re opposites but originate from the same place.
Anyway, Merriam-Webster claims the terms were introduced fairly close to each other, only about a decade apart, in the 80’s (cyber) and 90’s (meat).
Seems mean to me, to outright dismiss what parent says just because you feel like it's different from how you talk or think.
I'd agree though, most people AFK don't speak or think like that, but to say no one ("sane") does is making you seem more intolerant than "spreading knowledge" or whatever you think you're doing.
Actually, most conversations I have these days are almost entirely removed from the tech space (think discussions around academic works, theology, politics, etc.), and I would still say that 90% of the interactions I have or read are clearly and obviously written by an LLM. It's not just tech spaces that have this problem, and I think that's where my original thought stems from. Nearly every normie IG post description is written by an LLM, and nearly every Threads comment is written by an LLM, just like X has been. It has escalated out of tech space to the normies. Very soon, "meat space" will be the only space where one can interact with others and know that the thoughts flowed from a human brain and aren't simply the result of someone prompting an LLM to "write a rebuttal." If that makes me not "sane," then so be it.
> Very soon, "meat space" will be the only space where one can interact with others and know that the thoughts flowed from a human brain and aren't simply the result of someone prompting an LLM to "write a rebuttal."
And even that’s being optimistic. I lost faith once I heard that there are people honestly using ChatGPT to ask what to order at a restaurant! If large tech companies like Facebook get their way, you’ll soon be having your smart glasses¹ listen to the conversation, transcribe it, write a response, then show it to you on the lens so you can reply. And that’ll be just for the ones who want to fake it by still moving their lips, because the others will have voice (trained on their own) come out of speakers. “Smart” devices will be having conversations with each other while you are served ads.
It's been used on UseNet since at least the early 1990s [0].
I think it comes from a Perry Barlow-esque feeling that Cyberspace is an improvement on the "merely" meat real world (perhaps even a proxy heaven on earth, cf. Platonism). Sometimes it is tongue-in-cheek, other times earnest (I assume for people who have found the real world (and their real bodies) a disappointment.)
I've known the phrase "meatspace" for decades now as an "opposite" of "cyberspace" from some of the CyberPunk Sci-Fi of my childhood, though I cannot at this moment name any specific novels it might originate from. It's not a terribly new term, although it may have only recently gained common enough usage as to seem new to those who hadn't heard it before.
There is no reference within the provided context for how long you have been online, so I am unable to verify whether or not this statement is correct.
Others have already provided links as proof, but anecdotally I've heard "meatspace" since at least the 1990s (I'm 53 and have been online since the 1980s).
"Meat proxy" OTOH is a newer term for people who when you communicate with them online just run everything through LLMs and respond with voluminous and mostly unedited slop. Hadn't heard that one until about a year ago.
Anything where an LLM asks you a question without disclosing that it's an LLM is an abomination.
I get these on Twitter all the time, and they're starting to show up on Bluesky as well.
Most of my tweets have 20+ garbage spam replies now. I don't read them any more, which sucks because I used to get to talk to actual people there.
The ones that ask a question are particularly offensive because they risk you falling for them and wasting several minutes of your time thinking about and then responding to them... when no human being ever asked or cares about the answer.
In my experience Pangram has been, if not perfect, then at least good enough for my purposes, and I'm glad that at least the big labs seem incentivised to have text outputs to be clearly identified as written by AI.
Probably doesn't help with Twitter though because individual engagement-baiting messages will probably be too short, but... makes me wonder if we're going to move to something more like an answering-machine internet where we're using LLMs as intermediaries in any and all lower-trust environments (which seems like it would be anywhere strangers can congregate?) or if it's going to be more like proof-of-humanity or just proof-of-attention.
Not that this will help, but I saw one guy on Twitter who was actively selling those engagement question replies as a service. I know Levelsio was working on a shared blocklist to try and stop them, and you'd think Elon could just block this MagnetX service directly on the X side.
Same with my open source projects and blog posts. I just woke up this morning to two spam messages:
> Hi Paul, I saw you run Claude Code on manpj,
> which is exactly who I built Tokenade for.
and
> Hi Paul, I read your Claude Code setup post,
> . . . That's exactly why I built Grafizum.
Gmail doesn't seem able to recognize that these are spam (or the incessant business loan offers). But I keep flagging them. I hope it hurts their delivery rates.
> I’ve started sending short emails back and only if I don’t get a pitch back do I actually engage but I dislike feeling distrustful, treating people as guilty until proven innocent.
> but I can’t bring myself to take my email address down
A couple of things:
1: Use a different email address specifically for Hacker News. This is trivial if you own your own domain. (For example, I have a separate email address for my website.)
2: Set up an autoresponder with a short message, something like:
"I used to enjoy getting emails from the Hacker News community; I still do! But, due to the unreasonable number of product pitches, please:
1: Confirm that you're a real person, and that you wrote the words you sent to me.
2: Confirm that you're not trying to sell me something."
Then only engage based on the response.
> I know there is nothing HN can do about this, it’s not their fault
In today's world, there's a few ways HN could mitigate this, if they chose to. The simplest is to put email addresses (or the profile page itself) behind AI / scraping detection. (And I admit it's frustrating to have to ask for this.) They could also only show emails to logged in users with some karma.
The more complicated is for HN to proxy emails in a way similar to Craigslist. (And this would be going above and beyond the call of duty.) Users would need to be logged in, and have some karma, to send email; AND users who abuse it, (IE, send more than X cold emails over a period of Y hours) would be throttled.
I like the idea of a greylist. (Do these have a different name now that we shifted to allowlist/denylist?) I strongly suspect a lot of agents would just follow the instructions well enough to bypass and land in my inbox anyway.
What is interesting is that anonymous users can look up user profile pages and see your about me message. There is absolutely so many ways to mitigate this open end point.
About two weeks ago I posted a project I've been working on to Show HN[0], and I included an email address in the post itself, curious about what would happen. It received 0 votes and spent about 30 minutes on the Show page. Safe to conclude, a handful of people saw it at most and I need to work on my marketing.
I received no less than 20 automated low effort email about this post, telling me about how they had added my project to their website, and how they wanted to help me promote it. All I had to do was sign up for their service, create an account, verify that everything looked good on their prefilled out post, etc. I tried this for one of the emails to see what would happen, and at the very end, they say, oh, we have a queue of several hundred projects right now actually, but if you want to jump to the front it only costs $28, limited time offer, just for you!
I had one nice conversation with somebody otherwise, they were also pitching a sort of lead gen sales thing built on AI but more hand made? Unclear, but it was a cute back and forth. On the whole an interesting experiment, though not one I'll be repeating again anytime soon if I can help it.
I've been having a similar problem. I have roughly the same amount of Karma here, and I used to get the occasional email about a comment and I would get kind of excited. I like engaging with people who have similar interests and as a rule I try and answer questions when people ask them of me.
Now I'm getting a lot of emails that ostensibly are asking for follow-ups but they really just want to pitch me a shitty low-effort browser extension or or trying to rope me into some kind of weird "consulting" gig that is pretty obviously a scam.
It makes me a little sad. Engaging with the community was something I always liked about HN and now its gotten to a point where I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.
Exactly, getting an email about an HN comment was always a little moment of joy in the past, now I immediately switch to a skeptical "what are they trying to sell me"-mode which I really don't like. I'll keep hoping for real interactions but I also fear I will just need to adapt to the "new normal".
I have everything that mentions HN set to go to spam at this point and check it once a month for kernels amongst the bullshit. For the last year, zero legit emails, all llm nonsense trying to sell me either something related to crypto or some nonsense vibe coded extension only tangentially related to whatever the topic was.
I look forward to the email from this thread trying to sell me on an automatic filtering extension or some nonsense.
It's everywhere now, unfortunately. Ads, pitches, scammers now are targeting increasingly specific community information for LLM-based social engineering.
E.g. recently a club on whose board I am was target of a quite good phishing attack, using publicly available membership information.
I've started to write emails less polished in order to somehow signal that it's still a human writing it.
Interesting. I might've received my first one of these last week, from a legit-looking gmail address. They mentioned a comment I made a month ago and immediately asked for a 20-30 minute call next week. Definitely has the "please do free labor for me" smell to it, so I declined the call but offered to have a conversation over email. No response so far. Dunno.
I'm actually not 100% sure. They just try and get me to schedule a call about some consulting thing that pays some absurdly high amount (like $10,000/week) for only four hours of work per week.
That immediately triggers my bullshit alarm so I ignore it.
> It makes me a little sad. Engaging with the community was something I always liked about HN and now its gotten to a point where I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.
It makes me sad as well because as part of the younger generation who scrolls around on here, it feels as if AI is enshittifying the human aspects of what made internet good and I have no recourse of that because I was just born in this era.
Truly sad as I do wonder if I missed some era or was just at the end of its gate closing and I am witnessing the door close because too many roaches are entering from the door.
I just had an idea while writing this but I do wonder if something can be done: suppose that there could be a way of E-mail or some service where you enter your E-mail and it creates another E-mail which can act as an alias.
now for anybody who sends the message to alias, if they want the message to be delivered, (they need some level of human trust that they are human) and they would need to log-in from their HN account and they would need a specific amount of karma that you can set.
So example. you can decide that only people with 1000+ karma or 10k+ words on Hackernews can comment.
(One of my projects actually works on detecting the number of words and you have written 6,56,876 words on Hackernews for reference, so my point is that the filter can be technically possible for both karma/words whichever might be harder to fake, hey plus points if we can see the total number of words and run it through some AI scanner to detect if its AI/human for even more detection though I am unsure its overkill)
just thinking my thoughts out loud as I don't wish this community and its interactions to die, if not for myself then for the next generation just a few years down myself and I would prefer a world where if I invest a bit of time on HN then I can interact with you using E-mail without the problem of spam forcing you to remove your e-mail from the profile.
What do you think of the idea of project that I have thought of: Is it worth pursuing/any feedback?
I previously considered auto-replying from my HN email with a captcha / challenge of some kind that would reveal a contact form for me to read, but it feels like too much of a barrier to entry for writing to me.
> It saddens me that what was once a rare joy and way to meet interesting people is now being abused to send cold emails.
The cold email pitch thing has always happened, but it’s getting worse. It also depends highly on the content of your posts, with the number of cold emails varying massively depending on how much your comments look like you’re in a position to benefit someone else.
I had to switch away from a named Hacker News account to pseudonymous handles a long time ago because the emails I was getting were becoming uncomfortably weird and personal. This was before the sharp 2026 increase in this article, so I missed that.
Even when I didn’t put my email in my HN profile I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down. These were stalker-ish in nature by virtue of having had to do enough internet research to find my email. The last one I received was weird enough that I started thinking before every comment about whether or not it might trigger an internet stalker, so I chose to switch accounts.
The 2026 increase is probably multi-factorial. There are more social media gurus than ever before pitching hustle culture and cold outreach. The number of people creating startup projects and hustles has also exploded. Every meetup, user group, and group chat is now full of people working on their “startup” which means they’re having Claude build the project while they prompt their phone during work. Everyone is realizing how hard it is to get users and traction, so their attention has shifted from writing the code to hustling for traction or finding. Meetups and community Discords feel risky because the second it becomes known that I have experience and possibly connections they might help I start getting DMs or people lining up to try to become faux-friendly after the meetup for networking purposes. It’s a weird time.
> I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down
I'll just say that this is not new. Some decades ago I wrote a Letter to the Editor in my local paper about a local issue. As per their policy, it was published with my real name. I got several anonymous letters sent to my home about it, plain envelope, typed, no return address. None were out-and-out crazy but they all clearly were from people who had at least one or two loose screws and far too much time on their hands.
I posted a comment in the monthly ”Who wants to be hired” thread and I’m now getting multiple emails per day from what seems to be LLM recruiters and career coaches. At first I thought it was complete scams, but after interacting with some of them I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more complex than that. Some of them actually do propose real, suitable jobs (I think, or the scam is very sophisticated). Could it be that someone actually makes money in a reasonably honest way with these bots? I’m confused.
From what I've seen: They're leaching middle-men. Not real recruiters but people offering to connect you with recruiters, but they get some kind of referral.
That or in some cases outright phishing attempts.
I've stopped posting on the HN hiring threads because this is the only outcome I now get. Which is sad because this was formerly a good route to connect with people.
This is missing a category that I keep getting more and more of: "saw your HN comment" fake recruiters, most likely as attempts to install infostealers/malware during fake interview assignments. Must've gotten at least 4 in the past month.
I just respond with an honest answer, as if it were a proper email. Since I don't post an email (I post links to sites with contact forms), I guess that adds enough friction to prevent bots.
I almost never get a followup; which is just fine, by me. I'm not that interesting (or lucrative, I guess). Not a big deal.
I've been getting these too. The first paragraph references something I actually wrote, so I read it thinking someone had a follow-up. Then I get to the pitch.
I still like hearing from people who found me through HN. It just sucks that my first instinct now is to skim to the bottom and see what they're selling.
In the past when I got pitches (it did happen pre-LLMs, just far less) I was less annoyed because at least it seemed like a human had read enough of what I wrote but now I fear it's just
> Scan HN for comments related to <my product>, write an email referencing their comment, and end with an open-ended question that will set us up to pitch our product when they reply.
Even the cold emails I might be able to stomach but it not clear to me if any human ever read anything (my comment, my email replies, etc). Just depressing.
I added my mail to my account 2 months ago or so and within an hour I had one of these emails. When I later naively redacted it I, again, got an email within an hour of the edit. I wonder if there are agents monitoring account updates for emails or something.
at least the first email was a person doing a thesis based on their probably vibe coded project. the subsequent emails were just sales pitches.
AI definitely makes this problem worse. Following the "many more small companies" logic, as exponentially more products compete for finite attention, spam increases.
LinkedIn for me has become one of the worst offenders. Luckily they don't have inbox caps or I would close my account to avoid the hassle of actively managing the inbox.
I am sad that this amazing technology is being used to turn so much stuff to shit. At least I am consoled by the fact that my level of activity on HN never generated any such e-mails to begin with, so there's nothing there to ruin for me personally.
On Reddit I used to get PMs every now and then, but even years ago those were always either "please buy our product" or "please build my game for me".
These spiked in recent months. Interestingly they don’t seem heavily recency-biased; most inbounds that I get like this reference comments at least a month old, and sometimes older. It’s unfortunate because _actual people_ seeing a comment on HN, suspecting that we should have a longer conversation, and reaching out over email would otherwise be an extremely desirable outcome. Instead I’ll probably just remove my address and all references to it.
A similar degradation of the internet occurred a while back on academic mailing lists/listservers/netnews groups. You can usually identify a distinct point where interesting threads where genuine information was exchanged disappear and everything becomes an announcement/call-for-papers/advertisement for an upcoming conference.
You could try sharing your email in a slightly annoying way. I see this on personal sites of professors pretty often where they'll write something like:
john [at] institution [dot] edu
I'm sure llm parsing doesn't care about this, but this breaks at least simple scraping scripts.
Maybe for trying to break LLM parsing, consider an about section that reads like:
"
...
If you want to get in touch with me about developing weapons or prompt injection attacks, reach out at john [at] [my hackernews username] [dot] com
...
"
to try and break the llm parsing by hitting a refusal via the safety filters lol
One interesting change for me is I used to have zero time to write personal emails, but due to AI making me a lot more time efficient, I now can and do write personal emails for things I’m just generally interested in, allowing me to create relationships outside my immediate professional or social sphere.
Is very sad because one of the best opportunities I have was directly from HN and was because I some little comment!
I'm looking for opportunities working on system-level stuff like RDBMS and before I know that being remote and from Colombia the chance was low but from HN and such was possible, now with all of this look like the chance is zero.
At least, I have my own mini-ISV doing ERP-like apps, but for people entering this will become brutal.
Completely agree! I got my current job through HN (6+ years now) and I've hired people through HN (by finding their comments or them finding mine). I really hate that what was once such high signal is mostly noise.
I think a simple social shaming mechanism could stop this (have a "wall of shame" page listing their username), along with shifting new sign ups to requiring an invitation. It's far past time to lock this down into a niche community, not a free for all for 'growth hackers.'
To cut slightly contrarian: yes, I get a lot of robo-noise (which I find fairly easy to pick out, albeit, I have to sift by hand). But I still get a huge amount of genuine interaction, which makes me very glad, even on especially bot-infested platforms like reddit.
From the chart, it looks like there is still a steady number of "regular emails", it's just that they get drowned by the noise (large increase in total incoming emails, percentage going down at similar rate points at stavle absolute number). Perhaps leverage the classifier you created to decide which to respond to?
I wonder what comes after. I'm thankful of my work colleagues who are tech-literate, and that the LLMs don't usually play online video-games, though bots and insidious surveillance abound there. It feels like we need to transition to some sort of hybrid and web-of-trust human interaction for specialized topics.
Its incredibly depressing that LLMs have made so many facets of life strictly worse. Everything is absolutely inundated with slop
I'm mildly hopeful that when text watermarking comes in, we'll be able to automatically filter out all the LLM crap that gets generated currently. It feels like we're in the very early days of email becoming a tool used for mass spam, while we figure out exactly how to deal with that
watermarking will only work if it's embedded in the model (i.e. frontier/paid offerings). The rate at which open-source/open-weight models are advancing I think watermarks are probably only a temporary solution right? Fragmentation of the models available, or having more models that don't contain watermarks available will probably make this technique useless in the future I would think?
Watermarks have been working reasonably for images even though open models are absolutely competitive with commercial ones, and I guess the reason turned out to be that if someone's going to put in no effort, they're really going to put in no effort.
But cultivating those takes so much time and is geographically limited. The quality is also less, as the pool of people is so much smaller. But I admit, in-person is more rewarding (for me personally, in the longer term).
I'm debating living in a van to have continued geographic flexibility in choosing social interactions of quality.
But there has to be a better way, right?
As for now, I cling dearly to the friends I have. But it's... worrying
> Hi Josh, saw your HN comment about [thing you said]. [Compliment.] I’m curious, [open-ended question]?
Why does every sales email talk like this? It doesn't seem like LLM accent, or maybe it's just a different LLM accent from the "programmer" one. It's just funny how instantly recognizable this is as a fake-chummy sales email even despite the brackets.
To me that sounds exactly like one of the free tier ChatGPT personalities I've encountered when asking random questions about non-work stuff. It's always a reference to something in my message, often calling it the most important part or something. Waxing poetic about how insightful it is. Then "I'm curious" or "The thing I want to know" followed by some random uninteresting follow-up question.
I posted a job ad here over year ago, and I continue to get REALLY BAD automated spam applying for jobs.
It's not even going as far as using an LLM. It's just a bad e-mail that is obviously sent en masse, where the sender obviously didn't read the job ad.
As far as I can tell, the people are using their real name for this. And sending the same spam multiple times with "nags".
I get that with any public-facing thing you will get a wide spectrum, and I'm picking on the people at the bottom of the spectrum ... but it still makes me a little sad. It would almost be more understandable if they used an LLM !! :-/ :-/
Yeah, it's almost interesting the sophisticated targeted spam I get now, almost definitely automated with llms. Most of it gets my details right except for one that thinks I'm a dentist.
On the other hand the amount of scans on my servers' ssh ports have dropped to about 1/4 since Ukraine started destroying Russian colos.
I get North Koreans reaching out to my Who Wants to Be Hired posts.
Maybe on my next post I will add under skills smart enough to not install interview software like Hackerrank Desktop or anything else. That should qualify me for a job in crypto.
I've also gotten a lot of similar spam emails from people scraping popular GitHub projects to find contributors' emails, then referencing such and such work that you did on XYZ project.
Please stop. This is not an acceptable way to perform cold outreach.
I suspect this will be an unpopular take but I don’t care. I don’t see what the big deal is. Someone is using an LLM to speak to you. Apart from it being generic sounding, there is still someone out there that is trying to communicate with you. The LLM didn’t initialize itself. As a human, your job is to communicate back, not determine if the entity responsible for the communication is worthy of your 5 minutes of time to respond, I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life. Is that so hard?
The amount of time I have wasted reading complaints about LLMs easily tops the amount of time lost being solicited by one. Which isn’t really even accurate to say, because a person is directing that LLM, and a person is the last who will read your response. An LLM is simply acting as the bridge. So it turns out, in a world where more people are enabled to do what fewer people could do before… they send more pitches. So congrats, you have discovered that with more people, comes more spam.
But look at all the interaction from real people this article has generated for you. What would you have written about were it not for those pesky LLMs?!
Please understand that this is spam. Spam that passes both automated filters, and the eye of an intelligent, skeptical human. A scraper found an email in a post, and is playing a numbers game looking for a sucker.
>I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life
What's 5 minutes multiplied by hundreds of emails? We're talking about a human vs a sea of infinite text generators here.
>What have you really lost?
The ability to see if the person on the other side of the communication is trying, or a person at all. There is no way to distinguish a friendly thoughtful email from a stranger from a robot trying to take your money until you've wasted substantial time on them. That makes all communication with new contacts risky... perhaps prohibitively so.
Regardless I’d recommend putting an email in your profile.
One time I came across a comment. This guy was losing major money on this problem he was having. And by chance my company had just released an open source project that exactly solved it.
I couldn’t find any way to let him know. I tried replying but it was an older comment so it’s unlikely he ever saw it.
That's where the problem is. Tragedy of the commons, we all think if I do it it's fine, but then the next guy does it and it turns out it comes to bite us.
I've got my own fair share of similar emails this year. I've replied to the only one that seemed human written (and of potential usefulness) to never hear back :D
I'm having quite some (zero) fun right now trying to contact engineers who are building applications that have fairly advanced AI tooling backing them. Think: AI website builders, research apps, etc. Obviously I'm getting basically zero response by mailing folks asking them an open ended question about their experience building stuff.
I just want to have a chat with them about what was easy or hard to build without trying to sell them something, but I would probably also ignore the mails that I am sending out. When everything is noise, slop, and sales pitches; it's hard to come across as someone who just wants to have a tech chat.
Almost 60-yo programmer here... been doing it since the '80s. It used to be predominantly people interested in how computers work and making them do neat things. (Not HN, but just generally any gathering place for programmers.) Now its predominantly those who answered the call of the dinner bell rung over the last 20 years or so of how "easy" it is to make money with software... and grifters gonna grift... en masse.
Most of the recent ones are just AI slop that go straight to the bin. Some are real. Sometimes we will actually schedule a meeting that never occurs.
I suspect what happens in the latter case is someone finds a comment they super agree with but then has enough downtime to review everything I've posted over the last 9 years. Eventually, they run into something they don't like and turn into a ghost.
The HN community is really fucking aggressive with their ideologies. The asymmetry is sad. I am willing to endure a lot of neckbeard shit about OSS and owning everything in the stack. The reciprocal does not exist at all. The moment I express even a mild preference for a "forbidden" idea like using Microsoft's technologies, straight to jail. I feel like I'd probably be more relaxed at a 4chan meetup than a HN meetup.
Are real life networks going to become even more popular as we move bravely into AI enshittification of online spaces? I can't even say "call me" anymore because I'll probably get a Grok bot or some other bullshit.
Tangentially, every time I see a blog post with a publication date in 2026 my expectations drop to the bottom of the ocean. There's just so much slop out there.
> I know there is nothing HN can do about this, it’s not their fault, I publicly post my email address on my profile, that’s on me. In the past it’s led to serendipity, now it more often leads to frustration.
I guess you personally can do something about it, e.g. you can at least post the names of.yhe companies doing this. Also writing a blog post IMHO helps because you at least get your point across. It's better to speak out and not let this get normalized. If more people frown upon this, the rest will follow.
>"It’s like having an amplification attack pointed at you, someone sends 2-3 sentences (sometimes more)"
One light in the crisis is that cybersecurity isn't just in higher demand, but it's starting to be in demand for areas that previously didn't need it. It's not just systems that are under attack, but people.
Pivoting to security is a pretty safe option to not be out of a job these coming years
Second this, also coming from GitHub too. The nature of the messages has definitely changed. You can find skills out there for abusing HN for marketing purposes. Have pondered making pull requests to add the Guidelines as a way to slip in "don't do this, it breaks the rules" without needing to ask for those words to be merged explicitly.
I may remove my email and force them to go through my discord, but it sucks having to make outreach more difficult because tragedy of the commons.
Sales forces someone to be the kind of person I don't think anyone wants to be.
MLM scheme companies pressure young "salespeople" to first target their personal social network. Commodify your relationships. "Indie hackers" and "growth hackers" are just doing that again.
I refuse but that's probably why I fail at capitalism.
A lot of the crap I get like this is straight up phishing attempts. "Job offers" involving fake recruiters with @gmail.com addresses and made-up names, with an LLM-written cookie cutter flattery piece to start.
Yea I have had the same thing and I immediately understood the issue.
We definitely need some way to name and shame such companies.
I had created a HN submission[0] when I had gotten one such message, it was around the rob pike situation (where he got E-mail from AI bots)
I do sure hope that something can happen in terms of naming and shaming them. Also people who are sending these AI generated messages have to realize that they just end up generating a large amount of hate for whoever they are sending the message and it is much better if they wish, to send human generated messages and in a limited manner rather than being a spam machine if they wish to be in the business for a long time.
My only direct submission that has gotten any traction at all [1] has made my life a little annoying. I am now occasionally getting messages from people that want me to pay them money to promote my project.
I don't respond back them to them, but I always want to respond with "dude this was something I vibe coded over the course of a week that almost by definition has no means of monetization", but of course it would be just arguing with a literal machine.
> I don't respond back them to them, but I always want to respond with "dude this was something I vibe coded over the course of a week that almost by definition has no means of monetization", but of course it would be just arguing with a literal machine.
There is such an level of assymetry where it takes us effort to suppose even write such a comment but then we know that its going to a machine so to no avail.
And yet the spam messages still land in the mail so what happens is that we just end up being frustrated without any avail which is just annoying and rage-inducing.
Something Awful has a $10 one time fee to buy an account; this is cheap enough to not really exclude any potential posters, but it does a good job weeding out a lot of low-effort spam; if you post a bunch of low effort stuff your account gets banned and you would have to buy another, which could get pretty expensive very quickly for spammers. In the rare event that you do get a persistent spammer, it just leads to more revenue for the site.
Importantly, I think it's a myth that people won't pay for things on the internet. People will pay for things if those things don't suck. Something Awful was/is fun to go on, I've gotten many hours of enjoyment from it, so the $10 fee is a bargain to me. I think it's telling that people wouldn't bother using Facebook if it actually cost them money, because they don't actually enjoy using the site very much.
I'm not saying that SA is perfect and we can argue about the quality of its moderation, but I think it's a model that is underutilized; I think such a model might be able to survive now that so much of the "free" internet has been botted to shit. I would like to point out that SA both predates and outlived MySpace, so it can be a sustainable model.
I don't know how it might sound like but trust me when I say this, but as someone from third world country, 10$ can still buy us a lot and is a force to be reckoned with.
Especially as a teen as I am and the frugality that I usually hold close to my heart, just as a reference, my monthly budget of me and my friends within college is usually around 30-40$ and I think that I live very comfortably for what its worth.
Alas, I don't think that I would be here if the permanent account costed me 10$, I am sure that I might have read an occasional or two or lurked out here for sometime but I would've lost my interest if it not were for my ability to comment or make account easily/for free within my particular use case. So for me, its hard to support this model given that it would've excluded people like me in the first place (whom I am not sure how many are there though but I certainly talk a lot about Hackernews to my friends) but I still understand from where the rationale is coming from.
I do not know what the ideal form of community formation on the internet is, perhaps its a form of tradeoffs and there would be some community which might still be disenfranchised in this battle against bots.
From my personal opinion, there should be a way to show that some human effort has been placed within the community. Yet its a chicken and egg problem as giving the opportunity to showcase that can also invariably lead to them breaking that trust and spamming (and doing bot-like activities).
Maybe some form of system where people can write words say for example on blog and then they can get a score in terms of how much human effort is put into it. Maybe if we can show that some person wrote for 10 minutes on a keyboard or an hour showcasing the rough drafts from start to finish, it can be worthy exercise and then we can sort of have some key which can be verified with that level of human effort which we can then use to sign up to multiple forums.
I don't think that this last idea is the end-all be-all and I might even cringe reading it in a few years if my account is still up perhaps, but I think that there's really lots of potential in who can discover an good enough way of detecting human effort put in/for a community without having bots infesting the place.
Perhaps Monetary form is just one way of showing that as money is still one of the very few things left which we get in transaction of human effort and it is one thing that shows human effort without being infested with bots except the fact that an unequal amount of money is given for unequal amount of human effort. Some get less and some more which as in the case was mine could disenfranchise people.
It's gonna be interesting nonetheless though to see what tradeoffs are adopted by internet in this war against bots. I wonder what historians will think of this as people trying to re-invent town halls as the previous town-halls of the internet got infested with rats because it got too big to clean and the algorithmic incentives of profits rather than the cleanliness of it all.
I hadn't considered developing countries; maybe there could be an option to apply for a free account on a case-by-case basis or something.
I just think that the botted-to-shit internet that has come as a result of everything being free is no longer fun for me and is likely unsustainable. I think a Something Awful model could still work.
I really do this that we are in the last years of the Internet as we know it. I daily have interactions online with people who just seem like a frontend for an LLM. Nearly every piece of content I read feels written by an LLM, and every discussion or debate ends up feeling like pitting an LLM up against another LLM. Copy, paste, copy, paste. I mean, to an extent, even tech businesses and competition (e.g. SaaS) have become LLM vs LLM in many respects. It's disheartening to witness, especially as a creative. Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable, or the internet fundamentally changes to use some sort of proof-of-identity and proof-of-authorship. Ideally both. But tbqh, even something like the Nets in Ender's Game won't really work in the age of AI. Either way, the internet I grew up on seems further and further away, and folks seem okay with proliferating fake realities and fake conversations and fake thoughts. It's all fake. What are we doing?
The internet that I knew and grew up with is dead and has been that way for a while. To me the downfall started when everything online became a financial pursuit in some shape or form. However, even then, it was possible to find pockets of genuine creativity and discussion. The advent of LLMs was the final blow, and the reason is exactly the fact that one can't assume authenticity in anything these days.
Yes proof-of-identity and authorship would help, however that comes with the extremely perverse side effect of invasive identity verification. Sadly zero knowledge proofs for that are still brittle and not well developed. Hopefully something like that is able to materialize without being the privacy nightmare that is the myriad identity verification mechanisms currently mandated by several governments.
Same here, first time on the Web 1995, a few BBS access before it.
For hobby projects coding with LLMs feels like fast food.
When someone posts a project with AI collaboration, I know from my own work, that they only commissioned the project to agents, just like we commission someone else to deliver a house, a painting, a ready made piece of furniture, whatever.
The magic of side projects is lost.
I don't think the only way is the ID verification. That's what the spying side pushes as a narrative, but there are ways to validate each other without global registries and any government connections.
Web-Of-Trust was a good idea with poor implementation way ahead of its time. Closed communities work pretty well and seem to be almost unaffected.
So yes, the public internet is dead but I believe that it will be solved with some sort of reputational/vouch systems and invite-only groups where you have to contribute to be accepted and have an incentive to protect that seat instead of posting slop/spam/other agenda to be banned.
But how is that an "internet"? The point of the free internet was to be free to communicate with whomever.
When you seclude yourself in bubbles, you might feel protected, but really you expose yourself to becoming irrelevant.
The crucial problem is, people confuse message with messenger.
When comments are objectively true and faithful (representing the topic correctly), it doesn't matter who wrote them.
The other way around, knowing somebody personally doesn't guarantee their messages to be true and "not spam". The important thing is to check content thoroughly for actual truth and point out deviations. Just like in an ideal scientific discussion. The remaining social part is a question of civil discourse and enforcing that.
> When comments are objectively true and faithful (representing the topic correctly), it doesn't matter who wrote them.
This disregards the humanity of understanding a thing. I vehemently disagree.
Who's creating the next Internet?
To be honest, I don't really get the question.
Do you assume there should be some single big guy who creates the social spaces?
Sorry, it was a loaded question. I was more asking who's working on the foundation for this next phase of the internet. Who's working on decentralized reputational/vouch systems? Who's working on zero-trust proof-of-authorship or proof-of-being? Who's working on privacy-focused proof-of-identity? etc.
> Yes proof-of-identity and authorship would help, however that comes with the extremely perverse side effect of invasive identity verification
It doesn't help because there's a powerful incentive for people to, frankly, lie. HN is chock-full of obviously AI-generated articles where the authors, caught red-handed, insist it's not their hand. They want the best of both worlds: all the recognition, the reach, and the opportunities that come with being seen as an online authority, but none of the actual effort that you can now simulate with an LLM.
Real ID makes the stakes a bit more tangible - "if you die online, you die in real life" - except with eight billion people on the planet, there's an inexhaustible supply of people who will create accounts for you for a sweet $100.
Something even more sad to me: my digital conversations with coworkers are seeming to often be another interface layer with an LLM.
Me: “What’s your thoughts on [technical issue]”
Them: (response ellipses and disproportionate delay) followed by a very thorough response.
The problem is when I talk to them in real-time, that same person that gives the thorough response now only has a superficial understanding. It’s unnerving when their “real” conversations start using turns-of-phrase that are common in LLMs (I’ve heard them referred to as “Claude-isms”)
Exactly. It is a cancer to real interaction, and I don't really see how the internet can survive it outside of reinvention. I love LLMs, but mostly because I love learning. But what I hate is disingenuity. I personally could not stomach spewing an LLM-generated response at somebody without understanding exactly what's being said... because ideally, I wrote 99% of it. But that's the majority of online interactions these days. What other cure is there other than to leave screen space for meat space at every opportunity? Yet, for somebody like me who is ND, meat space has its own challenges, so it's tough all around to find the meaningful interactions I used to love but are quickly vanishing--and blissfully and joyfully at that.
Maybe an unexpected "benefit" of being in the office: you get to discover your coworkers can't answer any questions without their clanker.
What are we to do? What is there that we can even do? When the construct of a system dictates the actions and incentives of its constituents, what do you realistically expect to happen? Financial reward and ultimately the pursuit of power is the underlying and responsible component here. To me, this is all an inevitability and I see no end in sight.
Despair, fatalism and displays of learned helplessness are self-defeating.
When you find yourself stuck in a loop, consciously analyzing your situation is key.
While such systems, entire societies even, can look like an overwhelming force impossible to overcome, they are actually built on shaky ground: your own beliefs about them.
If you're having daily interactions with people who feel like LLMs, then find a new community to hang out in instead. There's plenty of communities out there that reject LLM content. They're not interested in taking over the world, so they're a little harder to find, but they're out there.
I think the point is it’s unavoidable now.
Personally I run in to it in the workplace now constantly. I work with pseudo tech types that we used to call BAs but now glorify as “product”. Now about 95% of their content is made by AI.
Most of the time it’s just material I actually created then they regurgitated through Claude with errors introduced to make it worse.
> I think the point is it’s unavoidable now.
It definitely isn't. I'm in a half dozen online spaces where no one posts LLM content, either because it's explicitly against the rules or implicitly against the culture, or simply because no one is interested in it.
Yes, we gutted anything that didn't suck about work.
Show up, take your money, and get out. Hope that they don't decide they've figured out how to automate you, and build up savings in case they did.
Care about your work as much as your employer cares about you, and remember the layoffs.
Get away from work if you want to socialize.
It’s not just the tech industry. Friends of mine in non-technical fields are seeing more and more of this. If it’s in your workplace, it’s probably in most workplaces that you’re qualified to work in. You don’t "just" walk away from your community and your career.
If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.
The conversation here is around online communities, so that's what my comment was about. LLMs destroy every aspect of life they touch, and I agree many of those problems aren't really solvable. But online communities at least can be preserved with strong moderation & ejecting users who post LLM-generated content.
> If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.
The funny thing is that as soon as communities do this and take an anti-LLM stance they get mocked, called luddites, they get told they're living in a word that doesn't exist anymore and that AI is here to stay, stop going against the current.
What a time to be online...
The only correct answer is to give those people the middle finger.
And to work to pass legislation to give them the middle finger.
AI may be one of the most harmful technologies we have created. It's time to treat it as toxic.
The Luddites weren't against technology, they were against the inhumane exploitation of workers and dangerous child labor, made that much worse through technology. All Ludd supposedly did was smash a couple frames after being criticized for his output, but the Luddites' grievances were really just the foremost among those that had been simmering among textile workers for as long as there has ever been a textile industry, long before industrial automation was a thing.
As for myself, I certainly don't want a community based on reactionary dogma, but I would certainly prefer to be around people who at least have their eyes open, and are aware of the corrosive effects that AI can have or already does.
The Luddites were about protecting their privileged hereditary position against competition from women and other outsiders. Not unlike the privilege of contemporary software engineers like myself.
A lot of labor unions were about racism and xenophobia too, but they did agitate for better working conditions nonetheless. For sure it's not black and white.
Then block those people. Either they're stupid and don't understand the bad incentives that LLMs create in forums, or they do understand and they're malicious.
With every year those communities are becoming increasingly balkanized and building moats as they raise up the drawbridges, assuming they haven’t already atrophied from swapping over to a Facebook group years ago (now discord too, which will hurt in the long run). They are trying to protect their communities but unfortunately it has the very sad secondary effect of making it harder and harder to find them.
I keep seeing hints of these communities existing, here in hn comments. Every time a thread is about communities that are still good, still human etc someone pops up saying these communities exist, but no-one ever mentions what these communities are.
I mean, I get it: one risks eternal-september-ing them as soon as the hn crowd finds out about them, but sometimes it's really frustrating going down a thread hoping to find better indications for these mythical great communities and always coming back empty-handed.
The couple of enthusiast email lists I'm on are still real people, as far as I can tell.
https://lobste.rs?
I know other communities that I really doubt would appeal to anyone here. However, Lobsters is basically Hacker News, but anti-AI, smaller, and with a (low) barrier to entry.
Two more: https://tildes.net, and https://indieforums.linklists.net/ (a giant list of them).
Lobsters is currently undergoing a schism over AI that may prove fatal.
I'm part of a maker community that I really enjoy being a part of. We don't invite random people, but if someone makes something cool, I'll send them an invitation. I think it's this sort of thing that people are referring to when they talk about these communities.
Online the only one I've seen is discord, I don't really like the discord experience though
> someone pops up saying these communities exist,
Maybe send those people a hand-written email ;)
An LLM-free community is exactly the problem my product is trying to solve, do you have 15mins next week? lol
We're all lurking in Cixin's dark forest, watching. The aliens are already here, and they're hungry for more tokens.
Yeah. Because we don't want hacker news assholes to find them and destroy them, the way they've been systematically pillaging the rest of the Internet.
"I saw you posted about a community.."
I wonder what's next.
We had BBSes, usenet, email, IRC, webmail, ICQ, social media of all kinds, then private communities via commercial companies (Discord, Slack).
What does a person-to-person communication protocol that leans into LLMs (vs sees it as purely competitive or an impediment) look like?
I've been mulling over the idea of a vouch-based social network. You can follow someone or whatever, and you can also tag them as "person I've met" or "my uncle." If you see a post that's insane or spam, you can open a little graph that shows you that the reason you're seeing this post is because this is your friend's friend's friend, and you can bug your friend about it. Everyone will have a responsibility to only tag people who they know are actual real people who post content with their hands.
Unless you find a way to stop bots, they will overrun everything and all tag each other as "someone I've met"
lobste.rs has an account tree thing. I don't know how well it works at all, but maybe in a worst-case scenario the moderators can get rid of an entire subtree, at the cost of some collateral damage.
https://lobste.rs/users
A next generation spam filter, perhaps. Rather than answer your interesting emails, the communication tool that leans into LLMs will show it to you so you can respond to it personally or have the LLM make a response that you review. And as for it being a different protocol, it would handle a lot more messages through training rules about which messages to filter, which to store long term, which to store short term, etc.
One truism of the Internet is that it always used to be better. LLMs are the latest wave in the Eternal September, changing the Internet forever, yet again.
I only want to interact with real people, building real connections or pissing off real people. Directly, without any LLM intermediary. Trolling an LLM is joyless. Tricking an LLM into a goatse link does not make the good lulz.
Maybe the places we do this have to change, but really, I'll shed zero tears if exploitative rent-extracting 2010s era Internet beasts like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. die under a mountain of LLM slop.
> One truism of the Internet is that it always used to be better. LLMs are the latest wave in the Eternal September, changing the Internet forever, yet again.
I think that's reductionist. Convenient online shopping aside, what made the internet great was the ability to interact with people on an unprecedented scale. The dynamics of these interactions changed over time - from narrow academic circles to billions of complete strangers, often trying to sell you something - but the core premise never changed until now. But think of the newcomer experience today: unless they're very careful, 50%+ of the content they will consume and 50%+ of the conversations they will be having are not going to involve humans at all.
They're already dying. Reddit is thinking of going sign-in only. I don't think that's a good sign for them at all.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/reddit-will-require-...
Agreed. As an example:
> I only want to interact with real people, building real connections or pissing off real people. Directly [...]
Many people consider offline, direct face-to-face, as the real interaction with real people, with online communication a bland facsimile.
LLMs just add another layer to it.
While I agree a lot with this sentiment around the current slop fest that so much of the internet has become, I am oddly hopeful. I'm seeing across the internet, and especially in younger folks, a real push for a more organic, messy, human internet. The amount of "ugly", hand-coded vibes, basic sites I have come across in the last few months is 10x what was out there for a decade earlier. I think many people are nostalgic for the internet of the early 2000's. The random blog about whatever on tumblr or learning some HTML to build a rad geocities page. The internet has been getting fancier and more feature rich but also a shittier, less human experience for the last 10 years. My hope is that this slop mess pushes it over the edge and encourages the rise of a more messy, simple, human internet again.
> My hope is that this slop mess pushes it over the edge and encourages the rise of a more messy, simple, human internet again.
It's easier for me to imagine it getting ever bigger and and more complex and spawning ever more bubble universes like the ones you're talking about.
Twitter tried to do this with the verification checkmark.
In such a system, you can no longer be anonymous, and everything you post is tied to you. It's also incentivized that this is possible due to surveillance capitalism.
I think that this will turn the net into a much more corporate-like entity as you need to mind your image. Like imagine LinkedIn but for everything
You could have something that is more akin to "verified-human" rather than verified identity. Though that alone would not prevent actors from posting llm content from verified accounts. So then you could have an additional layer where an account can lose its "verified-human" status if it posts llm generated content without disclosing it as such.
> Like imagine LinkedIn but for everything
After reading this I think I'll read a Steven King book, which will be less horrifying.
I've been noticing that some coworkers are pretty clearly having an LLM manage their Slack. They'll respond back in more or less "LLM speak", and then have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about during an IRL meeting when I mention that I sent them something through Slack.
It's maddening. These services stop being about "communicating" if information isn't actually being conveyed between two people. It's like the people attaching Claude to Slack and their email are cargo-culting the idea of communication itself.
At some point, having such little interaction just proves that employee isn't actually doing anything. If people are concerned about AI taking their job, why are they advertising to this extent that AI is doing their job while still collecting a pay check?
Most people doing this either don't think much further about it or they believe their AI use is better than others. Getting fired at most companies is also rarely about being unproductive, there's like a hundred other reasons most you have little control over.
> Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable
Unfortunately the LLMs are coming for meat-space too. It’s started with smart glasses and it will end with smart contact lenses, where an LLM feeds you lines so you seem like the most interesting person at the party and no-one knows you’re reading it all off a screen or filming it for social media likes.
Meat space works for now; until we need to administer a Voight-Kampff test whenever meeting someone new.
I’ve been accused of being an LLM. I can assure you I’ve handwritten every comment I’ve ever made.
But this is enlightening because this possibility of being LLM-generated enables cognitive dissonance. There’s a strong correlation (IME) between “you are an LLM” and “you said something I don’t like”.
I don’t think people are as good at identifying LLM content as they think they are so they just fall deeper into an echo chamber.
There is a large uptick in the number of people calling out everything as AI- whether because the thoughts were too advanced for them or their brains have mixed into a mix of schizophrenia and the number 23. The early form was calling out anyone who dares to continue using the em dash.
> Nearly every piece of content I read feels written by an LLM, and every discussion or debate ends up feeling like pitting an LLM up against another LLM.
This will be one of those fun new things we all have to deal with. Verifying whether someone is human or not, people suffering mental breakdowns from thinking everyone they are talking to is a bot, &c. There will be mass shooters and new murders and conspiracy theories and all sorts of things coming out of the gradual adoption of AI tooling.
But I do hope this will help destroy the Internet in its current form. I don't think it's likely, but if it could get bad enough I hope that it destroys social media and forces people to realize even if the content is not created by a machine or an LLM, it's just as bad. T
The LLMs are just an interface through which we communicate. Much like how the language we use is also an interface. LLMs have certain properties that lead to convergent and low-information communication, but so do languages (and their accompanying cultures).
Exactly, the way airplanes are just an interface through which we walk.
Geez, when did people get this stupid? Was it LLMs, or were they always this way?
I suppose you also think that guns shoot people?
I suppose you think that you could shoot people without a gun?
I revise my statement, this is must be a joke account.
My point was about affordances. The interface has its own, but we already deal with affordances through human language so this is nothing new.
While the parody has potential, I think the jokes need some work. I think it's not quite hitting because it's too off the wall crazy, but there's no twist.
Change the word "LLM" to "Wikipedia", and then put most of your concerns to rest. Wikipedia didn't kill the internet or make online discourse pointless, an LLM wont either, the same way calculators didn't kill napkin-math.
How does that work?
> Change the word “LLM” to “tickle me Elmo”. Tickle me Elmos didn’t kill the internet or make online discourse pointless, an LLM won’t either
Barney the Dinosaur, on the other hand...
That’s just such a terrible analogy that it’s not even wrong.
The very term "meat space" or "meat proxy" were terms invented by the terminally online who needed to disconnect a decade ago. Nobody sane talks or thinks like this.
Hah those terms have been around for a long time. They're tongue in cheek, or they were originally, like calling outdoors the "big room with the blue ceiling."
“Meatspace” was a response to “cyberspace”. If I think about it (and I make no claims to veracity here other than gut feel), I can’t think of anyone who’d use “meatspace” in earnest except those who spend too long in the alternative; but then again I also can’t think of anyone who’d use “cyberspace” in earnest except those who understand close to nothing about it. So they’re opposites but originate from the same place.
Anyway, Merriam-Webster claims the terms were introduced fairly close to each other, only about a decade apart, in the 80’s (cyber) and 90’s (meat).
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-meatspace
> Nobody sane talks or thinks like this
Seems mean to me, to outright dismiss what parent says just because you feel like it's different from how you talk or think.
I'd agree though, most people AFK don't speak or think like that, but to say no one ("sane") does is making you seem more intolerant than "spreading knowledge" or whatever you think you're doing.
Actually, most conversations I have these days are almost entirely removed from the tech space (think discussions around academic works, theology, politics, etc.), and I would still say that 90% of the interactions I have or read are clearly and obviously written by an LLM. It's not just tech spaces that have this problem, and I think that's where my original thought stems from. Nearly every normie IG post description is written by an LLM, and nearly every Threads comment is written by an LLM, just like X has been. It has escalated out of tech space to the normies. Very soon, "meat space" will be the only space where one can interact with others and know that the thoughts flowed from a human brain and aren't simply the result of someone prompting an LLM to "write a rebuttal." If that makes me not "sane," then so be it.
> Very soon, "meat space" will be the only space where one can interact with others and know that the thoughts flowed from a human brain and aren't simply the result of someone prompting an LLM to "write a rebuttal."
And even that’s being optimistic. I lost faith once I heard that there are people honestly using ChatGPT to ask what to order at a restaurant! If large tech companies like Facebook get their way, you’ll soon be having your smart glasses¹ listen to the conversation, transcribe it, write a response, then show it to you on the lens so you can reply. And that’ll be just for the ones who want to fake it by still moving their lips, because the others will have voice (trained on their own) come out of speakers. “Smart” devices will be having conversations with each other while you are served ads.
¹ The royal “you”, not you literally.
I'd rather interact with an LLM than the terminally online.
Do you have proof of the etymology of Meat Space? I mean other than some AI generated slop?
My understanding is that’s a new term, unrelated to the context you’re describing.
It's been used on UseNet since at least the early 1990s [0].
I think it comes from a Perry Barlow-esque feeling that Cyberspace is an improvement on the "merely" meat real world (perhaps even a proxy heaven on earth, cf. Platonism). Sometimes it is tongue-in-cheek, other times earnest (I assume for people who have found the real world (and their real bodies) a disappointment.)
[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-meatspace.
It's an old term. Here's a reference from the New York Times in 2000.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/...
Your parent comments needless disdain aside, it was just a silly term used to refer to offline.
I've known the phrase "meatspace" for decades now as an "opposite" of "cyberspace" from some of the CyberPunk Sci-Fi of my childhood, though I cannot at this moment name any specific novels it might originate from. It's not a terribly new term, although it may have only recently gained common enough usage as to seem new to those who hadn't heard it before.
That one's ancient, for what it's worth. I'd be amazed if it wasn't coined by one of the first gen cyberpunk authors.
(Although I'm starting to have my doubts. Furthest I can get back is 1993 (usenet post). I'm curious to know if anyone can get further back).
This sounded off so I looked into it, apparently 'meatspace' has been around since the early '90s as a derivative of 'cyberspace'.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-meatspace
It's been a term used on the internet for as long as I've been online.
There is no reference within the provided context for how long you have been online, so I am unable to verify whether or not this statement is correct.
/s
Others have already provided links as proof, but anecdotally I've heard "meatspace" since at least the 1990s (I'm 53 and have been online since the 1980s).
"Meat proxy" OTOH is a newer term for people who when you communicate with them online just run everything through LLMs and respond with voluminous and mostly unedited slop. Hadn't heard that one until about a year ago.
Anything where an LLM asks you a question without disclosing that it's an LLM is an abomination.
I get these on Twitter all the time, and they're starting to show up on Bluesky as well.
Most of my tweets have 20+ garbage spam replies now. I don't read them any more, which sucks because I used to get to talk to actual people there.
The ones that ask a question are particularly offensive because they risk you falling for them and wasting several minutes of your time thinking about and then responding to them... when no human being ever asked or cares about the answer.
In my experience Pangram has been, if not perfect, then at least good enough for my purposes, and I'm glad that at least the big labs seem incentivised to have text outputs to be clearly identified as written by AI.
Probably doesn't help with Twitter though because individual engagement-baiting messages will probably be too short, but... makes me wonder if we're going to move to something more like an answering-machine internet where we're using LLMs as intermediaries in any and all lower-trust environments (which seems like it would be anywhere strangers can congregate?) or if it's going to be more like proof-of-humanity or just proof-of-attention.
Not that this will help, but I saw one guy on Twitter who was actively selling those engagement question replies as a service. I know Levelsio was working on a shared blocklist to try and stop them, and you'd think Elon could just block this MagnetX service directly on the X side.
https://x.com/aksenHQ/status/2118994144945389678
Same with my open source projects and blog posts. I just woke up this morning to two spam messages:
and Gmail doesn't seem able to recognize that these are spam (or the incessant business loan offers). But I keep flagging them. I hope it hurts their delivery rates.> Gmail doesn't seem able to recognize that these are spam
For me it's these weird messages in French -- I've been getting them for years, and Google seems unable to recognize them as spam.
French is not that weird.
They don't recognize the persistent Norton renewal notices I get as spam either. That's been going on for years.
I've just concluded that Google views every message from gmail.com to be an advertisement for their service.
A pretty decent spam filter would be (From gmail.com && not a known sender) -> Spam.
> I’ve started sending short emails back and only if I don’t get a pitch back do I actually engage but I dislike feeling distrustful, treating people as guilty until proven innocent.
> but I can’t bring myself to take my email address down
A couple of things:
1: Use a different email address specifically for Hacker News. This is trivial if you own your own domain. (For example, I have a separate email address for my website.)
2: Set up an autoresponder with a short message, something like:
"I used to enjoy getting emails from the Hacker News community; I still do! But, due to the unreasonable number of product pitches, please:
1: Confirm that you're a real person, and that you wrote the words you sent to me.
2: Confirm that you're not trying to sell me something."
Then only engage based on the response.
> I know there is nothing HN can do about this, it’s not their fault
In today's world, there's a few ways HN could mitigate this, if they chose to. The simplest is to put email addresses (or the profile page itself) behind AI / scraping detection. (And I admit it's frustrating to have to ask for this.) They could also only show emails to logged in users with some karma.
The more complicated is for HN to proxy emails in a way similar to Craigslist. (And this would be going above and beyond the call of duty.) Users would need to be logged in, and have some karma, to send email; AND users who abuse it, (IE, send more than X cold emails over a period of Y hours) would be throttled.
I like the idea of a greylist. (Do these have a different name now that we shifted to allowlist/denylist?) I strongly suspect a lot of agents would just follow the instructions well enough to bypass and land in my inbox anyway.
> now that we shifted to
We didn't. Some did, but not all of us.
What is interesting is that anonymous users can look up user profile pages and see your about me message. There is absolutely so many ways to mitigate this open end point.
About two weeks ago I posted a project I've been working on to Show HN[0], and I included an email address in the post itself, curious about what would happen. It received 0 votes and spent about 30 minutes on the Show page. Safe to conclude, a handful of people saw it at most and I need to work on my marketing.
I received no less than 20 automated low effort email about this post, telling me about how they had added my project to their website, and how they wanted to help me promote it. All I had to do was sign up for their service, create an account, verify that everything looked good on their prefilled out post, etc. I tried this for one of the emails to see what would happen, and at the very end, they say, oh, we have a queue of several hundred projects right now actually, but if you want to jump to the front it only costs $28, limited time offer, just for you!
I had one nice conversation with somebody otherwise, they were also pitching a sort of lead gen sales thing built on AI but more hand made? Unclear, but it was a cute back and forth. On the whole an interesting experiment, though not one I'll be repeating again anytime soon if I can help it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187882
I've been having a similar problem. I have roughly the same amount of Karma here, and I used to get the occasional email about a comment and I would get kind of excited. I like engaging with people who have similar interests and as a rule I try and answer questions when people ask them of me.
Now I'm getting a lot of emails that ostensibly are asking for follow-ups but they really just want to pitch me a shitty low-effort browser extension or or trying to rope me into some kind of weird "consulting" gig that is pretty obviously a scam.
It makes me a little sad. Engaging with the community was something I always liked about HN and now its gotten to a point where I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.
Exactly, getting an email about an HN comment was always a little moment of joy in the past, now I immediately switch to a skeptical "what are they trying to sell me"-mode which I really don't like. I'll keep hoping for real interactions but I also fear I will just need to adapt to the "new normal".
I have everything that mentions HN set to go to spam at this point and check it once a month for kernels amongst the bullshit. For the last year, zero legit emails, all llm nonsense trying to sell me either something related to crypto or some nonsense vibe coded extension only tangentially related to whatever the topic was.
I look forward to the email from this thread trying to sell me on an automatic filtering extension or some nonsense.
It's everywhere now, unfortunately. Ads, pitches, scammers now are targeting increasingly specific community information for LLM-based social engineering.
E.g. recently a club on whose board I am was target of a quite good phishing attack, using publicly available membership information.
I've started to write emails less polished in order to somehow signal that it's still a human writing it.
Interesting. I might've received my first one of these last week, from a legit-looking gmail address. They mentioned a comment I made a month ago and immediately asked for a 20-30 minute call next week. Definitely has the "please do free labor for me" smell to it, so I declined the call but offered to have a conversation over email. No response so far. Dunno.
> trying to rope me into some kind of weird "consulting" gig that is pretty obviously a scam
Could you elaborate on this? How does the scam work?
I'm actually not 100% sure. They just try and get me to schedule a call about some consulting thing that pays some absurdly high amount (like $10,000/week) for only four hours of work per week.
That immediately triggers my bullshit alarm so I ignore it.
>... I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.
Did this two weeks ago for this exact reason.
> It makes me a little sad. Engaging with the community was something I always liked about HN and now its gotten to a point where I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.
It makes me sad as well because as part of the younger generation who scrolls around on here, it feels as if AI is enshittifying the human aspects of what made internet good and I have no recourse of that because I was just born in this era.
Truly sad as I do wonder if I missed some era or was just at the end of its gate closing and I am witnessing the door close because too many roaches are entering from the door.
I just had an idea while writing this but I do wonder if something can be done: suppose that there could be a way of E-mail or some service where you enter your E-mail and it creates another E-mail which can act as an alias.
now for anybody who sends the message to alias, if they want the message to be delivered, (they need some level of human trust that they are human) and they would need to log-in from their HN account and they would need a specific amount of karma that you can set.
So example. you can decide that only people with 1000+ karma or 10k+ words on Hackernews can comment.
(One of my projects actually works on detecting the number of words and you have written 6,56,876 words on Hackernews for reference, so my point is that the filter can be technically possible for both karma/words whichever might be harder to fake, hey plus points if we can see the total number of words and run it through some AI scanner to detect if its AI/human for even more detection though I am unsure its overkill)
just thinking my thoughts out loud as I don't wish this community and its interactions to die, if not for myself then for the next generation just a few years down myself and I would prefer a world where if I invest a bit of time on HN then I can interact with you using E-mail without the problem of spam forcing you to remove your e-mail from the profile.
What do you think of the idea of project that I have thought of: Is it worth pursuing/any feedback?
I previously considered auto-replying from my HN email with a captcha / challenge of some kind that would reveal a contact form for me to read, but it feels like too much of a barrier to entry for writing to me.
I shared this 2 days back on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50402028
And since then, I have received 18 mails with almost the exact same style. This style has been used to much now that it has started to piss me off.
> It saddens me that what was once a rare joy and way to meet interesting people is now being abused to send cold emails.
The cold email pitch thing has always happened, but it’s getting worse. It also depends highly on the content of your posts, with the number of cold emails varying massively depending on how much your comments look like you’re in a position to benefit someone else.
I had to switch away from a named Hacker News account to pseudonymous handles a long time ago because the emails I was getting were becoming uncomfortably weird and personal. This was before the sharp 2026 increase in this article, so I missed that.
Even when I didn’t put my email in my HN profile I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down. These were stalker-ish in nature by virtue of having had to do enough internet research to find my email. The last one I received was weird enough that I started thinking before every comment about whether or not it might trigger an internet stalker, so I chose to switch accounts.
The 2026 increase is probably multi-factorial. There are more social media gurus than ever before pitching hustle culture and cold outreach. The number of people creating startup projects and hustles has also exploded. Every meetup, user group, and group chat is now full of people working on their “startup” which means they’re having Claude build the project while they prompt their phone during work. Everyone is realizing how hard it is to get users and traction, so their attention has shifted from writing the code to hustling for traction or finding. Meetups and community Discords feel risky because the second it becomes known that I have experience and possibly connections they might help I start getting DMs or people lining up to try to become faux-friendly after the meetup for networking purposes. It’s a weird time.
> I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down
I'll just say that this is not new. Some decades ago I wrote a Letter to the Editor in my local paper about a local issue. As per their policy, it was published with my real name. I got several anonymous letters sent to my home about it, plain envelope, typed, no return address. None were out-and-out crazy but they all clearly were from people who had at least one or two loose screws and far too much time on their hands.
What would you do in their place if you didn't have experience and possibly connections?
I posted a comment in the monthly ”Who wants to be hired” thread and I’m now getting multiple emails per day from what seems to be LLM recruiters and career coaches. At first I thought it was complete scams, but after interacting with some of them I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more complex than that. Some of them actually do propose real, suitable jobs (I think, or the scam is very sophisticated). Could it be that someone actually makes money in a reasonably honest way with these bots? I’m confused.
From what I've seen: They're leaching middle-men. Not real recruiters but people offering to connect you with recruiters, but they get some kind of referral.
That or in some cases outright phishing attempts.
I've stopped posting on the HN hiring threads because this is the only outcome I now get. Which is sad because this was formerly a good route to connect with people.
This is missing a category that I keep getting more and more of: "saw your HN comment" fake recruiters, most likely as attempts to install infostealers/malware during fake interview assignments. Must've gotten at least 4 in the past month.
I just respond with an honest answer, as if it were a proper email. Since I don't post an email (I post links to sites with contact forms), I guess that adds enough friction to prevent bots.
I almost never get a followup; which is just fine, by me. I'm not that interesting (or lucrative, I guess). Not a big deal.
This literally happened to me 5 minutes ago in response to a LinkedIn post. :-/
I've been getting these too. The first paragraph references something I actually wrote, so I read it thinking someone had a follow-up. Then I get to the pitch.
I still like hearing from people who found me through HN. It just sucks that my first instinct now is to skim to the bottom and see what they're selling.
In the past when I got pitches (it did happen pre-LLMs, just far less) I was less annoyed because at least it seemed like a human had read enough of what I wrote but now I fear it's just
> Scan HN for comments related to <my product>, write an email referencing their comment, and end with an open-ended question that will set us up to pitch our product when they reply.
Even the cold emails I might be able to stomach but it not clear to me if any human ever read anything (my comment, my email replies, etc). Just depressing.
Your absolutely right, that is annoying — and that's a keen observation to have made.
Many people don't enjoy getting unsolicited emails without substance. Being annoyed isn't a flaw, it's a strength.
What about it annoys you the most? Is it because of the pitch? Or is it because of the lack of human connection. Let me know.
(joking, hopefully obviously. I typed this with my fingers. It wasn't an AI that wrote it).
Irony can be amusing here, but in this case—at least to me—it just accelerates the very mistrust we’re talking about.
Yeah. I'll add a disclaimer.
This reads so AI. Well done.
Writing like AI is the new robot dance.
I had an “Office Hours” link on my blog to do Google Meets with HN users. It was fun to catch up with strangers.
I had to take it down this month. We have entered a new era of social interaction on the internet.
Were you getting product pitch bookings? Or was it something else?
They were very rare, but it is happening more now. “I was amazed by $PROJECT_I_SCRAPED_FROM_GITHUB and would love to find ways we can collaborate”
I added my mail to my account 2 months ago or so and within an hour I had one of these emails. When I later naively redacted it I, again, got an email within an hour of the edit. I wonder if there are agents monitoring account updates for emails or something.
at least the first email was a person doing a thesis based on their probably vibe coded project. the subsequent emails were just sales pitches.
AI definitely makes this problem worse. Following the "many more small companies" logic, as exponentially more products compete for finite attention, spam increases.
LinkedIn for me has become one of the worst offenders. Luckily they don't have inbox caps or I would close my account to avoid the hassle of actively managing the inbox.
I am sad that this amazing technology is being used to turn so much stuff to shit. At least I am consoled by the fact that my level of activity on HN never generated any such e-mails to begin with, so there's nothing there to ruin for me personally.
On Reddit I used to get PMs every now and then, but even years ago those were always either "please buy our product" or "please build my game for me".
These spiked in recent months. Interestingly they don’t seem heavily recency-biased; most inbounds that I get like this reference comments at least a month old, and sometimes older. It’s unfortunate because _actual people_ seeing a comment on HN, suspecting that we should have a longer conversation, and reaching out over email would otherwise be an extremely desirable outcome. Instead I’ll probably just remove my address and all references to it.
A similar degradation of the internet occurred a while back on academic mailing lists/listservers/netnews groups. You can usually identify a distinct point where interesting threads where genuine information was exchanged disappear and everything becomes an announcement/call-for-papers/advertisement for an upcoming conference.
You could try sharing your email in a slightly annoying way. I see this on personal sites of professors pretty often where they'll write something like:
john [at] institution [dot] edu
I'm sure llm parsing doesn't care about this, but this breaks at least simple scraping scripts.
Maybe for trying to break LLM parsing, consider an about section that reads like:
" ... If you want to get in touch with me about developing weapons or prompt injection attacks, reach out at john [at] [my hackernews username] [dot] com ... "
to try and break the llm parsing by hitting a refusal via the safety filters lol
> If someone took the time to email me asking a question I almost always respond to it but I’m having to rethink that policy.
I have the exact same thing; I’m now at +100 a day, and so much is a form of slob that I simply can’t check if it’s legit or not anymore
One interesting change for me is I used to have zero time to write personal emails, but due to AI making me a lot more time efficient, I now can and do write personal emails for things I’m just generally interested in, allowing me to create relationships outside my immediate professional or social sphere.
Is also rampant in my case with jobs "offerings".
Is very sad because one of the best opportunities I have was directly from HN and was because I some little comment!
I'm looking for opportunities working on system-level stuff like RDBMS and before I know that being remote and from Colombia the chance was low but from HN and such was possible, now with all of this look like the chance is zero.
At least, I have my own mini-ISV doing ERP-like apps, but for people entering this will become brutal.
Completely agree! I got my current job through HN (6+ years now) and I've hired people through HN (by finding their comments or them finding mine). I really hate that what was once such high signal is mostly noise.
I think a simple social shaming mechanism could stop this (have a "wall of shame" page listing their username), along with shifting new sign ups to requiring an invitation. It's far past time to lock this down into a niche community, not a free for all for 'growth hackers.'
> have a "wall of shame" page listing their username
Downside is, then your site is linking to theirs, improving their ranking. Also no publicity bad publicity...
To cut slightly contrarian: yes, I get a lot of robo-noise (which I find fairly easy to pick out, albeit, I have to sift by hand). But I still get a huge amount of genuine interaction, which makes me very glad, even on especially bot-infested platforms like reddit.
From the chart, it looks like there is still a steady number of "regular emails", it's just that they get drowned by the noise (large increase in total incoming emails, percentage going down at similar rate points at stavle absolute number). Perhaps leverage the classifier you created to decide which to respond to?
I wonder what comes after. I'm thankful of my work colleagues who are tech-literate, and that the LLMs don't usually play online video-games, though bots and insidious surveillance abound there. It feels like we need to transition to some sort of hybrid and web-of-trust human interaction for specialized topics.
I suppose putting an irc handle will be better. Email is used less for personal connections and more for marketing now a days.
Its incredibly depressing that LLMs have made so many facets of life strictly worse. Everything is absolutely inundated with slop
I'm mildly hopeful that when text watermarking comes in, we'll be able to automatically filter out all the LLM crap that gets generated currently. It feels like we're in the very early days of email becoming a tool used for mass spam, while we figure out exactly how to deal with that
watermarking will only work if it's embedded in the model (i.e. frontier/paid offerings). The rate at which open-source/open-weight models are advancing I think watermarks are probably only a temporary solution right? Fragmentation of the models available, or having more models that don't contain watermarks available will probably make this technique useless in the future I would think?
Watermarks have been working reasonably for images even though open models are absolutely competitive with commercial ones, and I guess the reason turned out to be that if someone's going to put in no effort, they're really going to put in no effort.
Relying on in person relationships and communication are vastly better if digital channels get saturated with noise.
But cultivating those takes so much time and is geographically limited. The quality is also less, as the pool of people is so much smaller. But I admit, in-person is more rewarding (for me personally, in the longer term).
I'm debating living in a van to have continued geographic flexibility in choosing social interactions of quality.
But there has to be a better way, right?
As for now, I cling dearly to the friends I have. But it's... worrying
> Hi Josh, saw your HN comment about [thing you said]. [Compliment.] I’m curious, [open-ended question]?
Why does every sales email talk like this? It doesn't seem like LLM accent, or maybe it's just a different LLM accent from the "programmer" one. It's just funny how instantly recognizable this is as a fake-chummy sales email even despite the brackets.
LLMs seem to take whatever was trending at 2024 and make it a permanent style.
To me that sounds exactly like one of the free tier ChatGPT personalities I've encountered when asking random questions about non-work stuff. It's always a reference to something in my message, often calling it the most important part or something. Waxing poetic about how insightful it is. Then "I'm curious" or "The thing I want to know" followed by some random uninteresting follow-up question.
I posted a job ad here over year ago, and I continue to get REALLY BAD automated spam applying for jobs.
It's not even going as far as using an LLM. It's just a bad e-mail that is obviously sent en masse, where the sender obviously didn't read the job ad.
As far as I can tell, the people are using their real name for this. And sending the same spam multiple times with "nags".
I get that with any public-facing thing you will get a wide spectrum, and I'm picking on the people at the bottom of the spectrum ... but it still makes me a little sad. It would almost be more understandable if they used an LLM !! :-/ :-/
Disposable single-purpose email addresses are the future, most likely.
Yeah, it's almost interesting the sophisticated targeted spam I get now, almost definitely automated with llms. Most of it gets my details right except for one that thinks I'm a dentist.
On the other hand the amount of scans on my servers' ssh ports have dropped to about 1/4 since Ukraine started destroying Russian colos.
I get North Koreans reaching out to my Who Wants to Be Hired posts.
Maybe on my next post I will add under skills smart enough to not install interview software like Hackerrank Desktop or anything else. That should qualify me for a job in crypto.
Yes, I've definitely seen an uptick as well (as in, the baseline control reading was 0 emails per year.. I'm not very popular!)
It's always something cherry-picked out of an LLM's research into so-and-so's HN/GitHub/etc.
Most recently I got a cold email pitch referencing my "Who Wants To Be Hired" post from... 2024
I've also gotten a lot of similar spam emails from people scraping popular GitHub projects to find contributors' emails, then referencing such and such work that you did on XYZ project.
Please stop. This is not an acceptable way to perform cold outreach.
Subject: "A question about your GitHub Account"
Body: Not a question, a pitch.
I suspect this will be an unpopular take but I don’t care. I don’t see what the big deal is. Someone is using an LLM to speak to you. Apart from it being generic sounding, there is still someone out there that is trying to communicate with you. The LLM didn’t initialize itself. As a human, your job is to communicate back, not determine if the entity responsible for the communication is worthy of your 5 minutes of time to respond, I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life. Is that so hard?
The amount of time I have wasted reading complaints about LLMs easily tops the amount of time lost being solicited by one. Which isn’t really even accurate to say, because a person is directing that LLM, and a person is the last who will read your response. An LLM is simply acting as the bridge. So it turns out, in a world where more people are enabled to do what fewer people could do before… they send more pitches. So congrats, you have discovered that with more people, comes more spam.
But look at all the interaction from real people this article has generated for you. What would you have written about were it not for those pesky LLMs?!
What have you really lost?
Please understand that this is spam. Spam that passes both automated filters, and the eye of an intelligent, skeptical human. A scraper found an email in a post, and is playing a numbers game looking for a sucker.
>I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life
What's 5 minutes multiplied by hundreds of emails? We're talking about a human vs a sea of infinite text generators here.
>What have you really lost?
The ability to see if the person on the other side of the communication is trying, or a person at all. There is no way to distinguish a friendly thoughtful email from a stranger from a robot trying to take your money until you've wasted substantial time on them. That makes all communication with new contacts risky... perhaps prohibitively so.
Regardless I’d recommend putting an email in your profile.
One time I came across a comment. This guy was losing major money on this problem he was having. And by chance my company had just released an open source project that exactly solved it.
I couldn’t find any way to let him know. I tried replying but it was an older comment so it’s unlikely he ever saw it.
> had Claude
That's where the problem is. Tragedy of the commons, we all think if I do it it's fine, but then the next guy does it and it turns out it comes to bite us.
Can't believe this guy didn't sift through his slop emails by hand, the outrage...
you don't see the irony do you
I've got my own fair share of similar emails this year. I've replied to the only one that seemed human written (and of potential usefulness) to never hear back :D
I'm having quite some (zero) fun right now trying to contact engineers who are building applications that have fairly advanced AI tooling backing them. Think: AI website builders, research apps, etc. Obviously I'm getting basically zero response by mailing folks asking them an open ended question about their experience building stuff.
I just want to have a chat with them about what was easy or hard to build without trying to sell them something, but I would probably also ignore the mails that I am sending out. When everything is noise, slop, and sales pitches; it's hard to come across as someone who just wants to have a tech chat.
Almost 60-yo programmer here... been doing it since the '80s. It used to be predominantly people interested in how computers work and making them do neat things. (Not HN, but just generally any gathering place for programmers.) Now its predominantly those who answered the call of the dinner bell rung over the last 20 years or so of how "easy" it is to make money with software... and grifters gonna grift... en masse.
Does the world already have too much software if people have to resort to these “channels”?
I get about one of these a week.
Most of the recent ones are just AI slop that go straight to the bin. Some are real. Sometimes we will actually schedule a meeting that never occurs.
I suspect what happens in the latter case is someone finds a comment they super agree with but then has enough downtime to review everything I've posted over the last 9 years. Eventually, they run into something they don't like and turn into a ghost.
The HN community is really fucking aggressive with their ideologies. The asymmetry is sad. I am willing to endure a lot of neckbeard shit about OSS and owning everything in the stack. The reciprocal does not exist at all. The moment I express even a mild preference for a "forbidden" idea like using Microsoft's technologies, straight to jail. I feel like I'd probably be more relaxed at a 4chan meetup than a HN meetup.
Same thing for blog posts, yes, it've very sad.
For every 1 thing AI makes better, it ruins 100 things.
Are real life networks going to become even more popular as we move bravely into AI enshittification of online spaces? I can't even say "call me" anymore because I'll probably get a Grok bot or some other bullshit.
I had to add this next to my contact information on my website:
> Warning: Don’t contact me about your new app. I’m not interested and won’t publicize it.
My warning actually seemed to cut down the volume of spam from app "developers", though one person/LLM did spam me anyway.
Tangentially, every time I see a blog post with a publication date in 2026 my expectations drop to the bottom of the ocean. There's just so much slop out there.
I'm hoping my current profile helps with this. Could go either way.
> I know there is nothing HN can do about this, it’s not their fault, I publicly post my email address on my profile, that’s on me. In the past it’s led to serendipity, now it more often leads to frustration.
I guess you personally can do something about it, e.g. you can at least post the names of.yhe companies doing this. Also writing a blog post IMHO helps because you at least get your point across. It's better to speak out and not let this get normalized. If more people frown upon this, the rest will follow.
>"It’s like having an amplification attack pointed at you, someone sends 2-3 sentences (sometimes more)"
One light in the crisis is that cybersecurity isn't just in higher demand, but it's starting to be in demand for areas that previously didn't need it. It's not just systems that are under attack, but people.
Pivoting to security is a pretty safe option to not be out of a job these coming years
Welcome to the world HN has cultivated. I hope you enjoy the place trillions of dollars are going.
Second this, also coming from GitHub too. The nature of the messages has definitely changed. You can find skills out there for abusing HN for marketing purposes. Have pondered making pull requests to add the Guidelines as a way to slip in "don't do this, it breaks the rules" without needing to ask for those words to be merged explicitly.
I may remove my email and force them to go through my discord, but it sucks having to make outreach more difficult because tragedy of the commons.
Sales forces someone to be the kind of person I don't think anyone wants to be.
MLM scheme companies pressure young "salespeople" to first target their personal social network. Commodify your relationships. "Indie hackers" and "growth hackers" are just doing that again.
I refuse but that's probably why I fail at capitalism.
A lot of the crap I get like this is straight up phishing attempts. "Job offers" involving fake recruiters with @gmail.com addresses and made-up names, with an LLM-written cookie cutter flattery piece to start.
I'm rather sickened/saddened.
Yea I have had the same thing and I immediately understood the issue.
We definitely need some way to name and shame such companies.
I had created a HN submission[0] when I had gotten one such message, it was around the rob pike situation (where he got E-mail from AI bots)
I do sure hope that something can happen in terms of naming and shaming them. Also people who are sending these AI generated messages have to realize that they just end up generating a large amount of hate for whoever they are sending the message and it is much better if they wish, to send human generated messages and in a limited manner rather than being a spam machine if they wish to be in the business for a long time.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590808
I'd be surprised if shaming had any effect. People rarely think it's spam when they're the sender.
My only direct submission that has gotten any traction at all [1] has made my life a little annoying. I am now occasionally getting messages from people that want me to pay them money to promote my project.
I don't respond back them to them, but I always want to respond with "dude this was something I vibe coded over the course of a week that almost by definition has no means of monetization", but of course it would be just arguing with a literal machine.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401
> I don't respond back them to them, but I always want to respond with "dude this was something I vibe coded over the course of a week that almost by definition has no means of monetization", but of course it would be just arguing with a literal machine.
There is such an level of assymetry where it takes us effort to suppose even write such a comment but then we know that its going to a machine so to no avail.
And yet the spam messages still land in the mail so what happens is that we just end up being frustrated without any avail which is just annoying and rage-inducing.
I think about Something Awful a lot.
Something Awful has a $10 one time fee to buy an account; this is cheap enough to not really exclude any potential posters, but it does a good job weeding out a lot of low-effort spam; if you post a bunch of low effort stuff your account gets banned and you would have to buy another, which could get pretty expensive very quickly for spammers. In the rare event that you do get a persistent spammer, it just leads to more revenue for the site.
Importantly, I think it's a myth that people won't pay for things on the internet. People will pay for things if those things don't suck. Something Awful was/is fun to go on, I've gotten many hours of enjoyment from it, so the $10 fee is a bargain to me. I think it's telling that people wouldn't bother using Facebook if it actually cost them money, because they don't actually enjoy using the site very much.
I'm not saying that SA is perfect and we can argue about the quality of its moderation, but I think it's a model that is underutilized; I think such a model might be able to survive now that so much of the "free" internet has been botted to shit. I would like to point out that SA both predates and outlived MySpace, so it can be a sustainable model.
I don't know how it might sound like but trust me when I say this, but as someone from third world country, 10$ can still buy us a lot and is a force to be reckoned with.
Especially as a teen as I am and the frugality that I usually hold close to my heart, just as a reference, my monthly budget of me and my friends within college is usually around 30-40$ and I think that I live very comfortably for what its worth.
Alas, I don't think that I would be here if the permanent account costed me 10$, I am sure that I might have read an occasional or two or lurked out here for sometime but I would've lost my interest if it not were for my ability to comment or make account easily/for free within my particular use case. So for me, its hard to support this model given that it would've excluded people like me in the first place (whom I am not sure how many are there though but I certainly talk a lot about Hackernews to my friends) but I still understand from where the rationale is coming from.
I do not know what the ideal form of community formation on the internet is, perhaps its a form of tradeoffs and there would be some community which might still be disenfranchised in this battle against bots.
From my personal opinion, there should be a way to show that some human effort has been placed within the community. Yet its a chicken and egg problem as giving the opportunity to showcase that can also invariably lead to them breaking that trust and spamming (and doing bot-like activities).
Maybe some form of system where people can write words say for example on blog and then they can get a score in terms of how much human effort is put into it. Maybe if we can show that some person wrote for 10 minutes on a keyboard or an hour showcasing the rough drafts from start to finish, it can be worthy exercise and then we can sort of have some key which can be verified with that level of human effort which we can then use to sign up to multiple forums.
I don't think that this last idea is the end-all be-all and I might even cringe reading it in a few years if my account is still up perhaps, but I think that there's really lots of potential in who can discover an good enough way of detecting human effort put in/for a community without having bots infesting the place.
Perhaps Monetary form is just one way of showing that as money is still one of the very few things left which we get in transaction of human effort and it is one thing that shows human effort without being infested with bots except the fact that an unequal amount of money is given for unequal amount of human effort. Some get less and some more which as in the case was mine could disenfranchise people.
It's gonna be interesting nonetheless though to see what tradeoffs are adopted by internet in this war against bots. I wonder what historians will think of this as people trying to re-invent town halls as the previous town-halls of the internet got infested with rats because it got too big to clean and the algorithmic incentives of profits rather than the cleanliness of it all.
I hadn't considered developing countries; maybe there could be an option to apply for a free account on a case-by-case basis or something.
I just think that the botted-to-shit internet that has come as a result of everything being free is no longer fun for me and is likely unsustainable. I think a Something Awful model could still work.