https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016)
Examples are legion. Here are a couple others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020)
I don't know of any good way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.
One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.
So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.
The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.
AI native ______ for _______
______ for AI agents
AI _______ for _______
I guess I don't care about today's "AI agent for the agricultural industry" as much as I cared about yesterday's "Tool to help farmers plan crop rotation".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300772 (March 2026)
There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the community needs growth, just not runaway growth.
Major new tools like LLMs are inevitably going to get widely used, as they should. Figuring out what the best uses are will take time. Figuring out how to share what one is doing with them is an unsolved problem.
The risk I see is that if the goal is growth but the low quality submissions are drowning out other submissions that could negate growth as some of the newer accounts that legit try to be part of a community would just drift away as they are in the poisoned well. I too struggle to think of a way to separate them out of the noise without creating a system that would just be gamed by the LLM's. On one hand if the system requires the regulars to "vouch" so to speak it will create little elitist bubbles whereas too much tweaking to algorithms will just be detected and gamed by LLM's.
Out of curiosity, are the LLM posts coming from residential and mobile addresses or from AI data-centers themselves? If it's not already that could be yet another weighting factor. And/or AI user-agents as a weight. There are many bot signals that could be weighting or division factors. Bots are easy to spot from the server.