In the coming months I suspect it’s highly likely that HN will fall. By which I mean, a good chunk of commentary (not just submissions, but upvotes too) will be decided and driven by LLM bots, and human interaction will be mixed until it’s strangled out.

Reddit is going through this now in some previously “okay” communities.

My hypothesis is rooted in the fact that we’ve had a bot go ballistic for someone not accepting their PR. When someone downvotes or flags a bot’s post on HN, all hell will break loose.

Come prepared, bring beer and popcorn.

I think we are about to see much stronger weight given to accounts created prior to a certain date. This won’t be the only criteria certainly, but it will be one of them, as people struggle to separate signal from noise.

It's already happening. For years now, but it's obviously accelerated. Look at how certain posts and announcements somehow get tens if not hundreds of upvotes in the span of a few minutes, with random comments full of praise which read as AI slop. Every Anthropic press release shoots up to the top instantly. And the mods are mostly interested in banning accounts who speak out against it. It's likely this will get me shadow banned but I don't care. Like you, I doubt HN will be around much longer.