> submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with respect to the stable numbers of previous years

This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been surprisingly stable—fluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10 years—has recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double, though...yet.

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rob 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would imagine tons of them are bots. They're getting hard to distinguish, they don't do the normal tropes any longer. They'll type in all lowercase, they'll have the creator post manually to throw you off, they'll make multiple comments within 45 seconds that normal human couldn't do. All things I've witnessed here over the past couple of weeks. And those are just the ones I've caught.

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minimaxir 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are the increasing # of distinct submitters from established accounts or new accounts?

	▲	dang 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Don't know that yet either! at least that one isn't hard to answer, it just needs a bit of spare time.

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hedgehog 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Robots coming for todsacerdoti's job.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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vermilingua 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it feasible to differentiate increased agent-traffic from the organic growth in popularity HN has been seeing?

	▲	dang 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We don't know yet.

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readitalready 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it because there's a lot more AI related content as the industry quickly shifts? Or is it bots submitting content?

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marginalia_nu 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've noticed a pretty significant uptick in new accounts posting complete garbage. I don't mean the comments are bad, they're not even words in many cases.

I collected a few of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130684

But it also seems some topics (in particular AI) attract a lot of accounts that post incredibly low quality comments, far below the quality you'd expect from HN. Ofte it's in reasonable English, but it's just inane reddit-level drivel. Unclear if these topics attract low quality posters, or if these are bot accounts.

Also looking at the three first pages of /noobcomments, we find 28 comments with EM-dashes in them. That's not proof of AI, but if you compare with /newcomments, you find exactly one EM-dash going back as far. That's a bit of a statistical aberration.

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rob 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've witnessed bots here on accounts that are years old with no history that start posting multiple times in a short timeframe suddenly after being dormant forever. Makes you wonder how they're getting these old accounts. It's not just new ones.

	▲	dragontamer 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Black market accounts. Some human made them years ago for a price, they are sat on by some black market / grey market guy and now he's selling the accounts for a profit. Old accounts from multiple social media platforms has a $$$$$ value.
	▲	mrguyorama 22 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Account takeover is a thing that happens. I doubt HN has the best measures against credential stuffing.

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krapp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would wager the vast majority are alt accounts of existing users. People who don't want to risk their karma or reputation but who do want to go mask off for certain subjects. After that it's bound to be bots run by HN users. I just don't think HN is so popular that the rush of green accounts popping up actually represents new users. Maybe I'm wrong , though.

	▲	agoodusername63 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Reddit has been shedding its techy enthusiast crowd for the past few years with the combination of policy changes and insufficient moderation against LLM bots. I wonder if that’s contributing.

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dang 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe it's the former, which of course does not exclude the latter.

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cyanydeez 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's likely people with mediocre ideas but access to free LLM tools are able to get over the care-risk-reward activation energy and consequently submit their ideas with the help of LLMs.

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Retr0id 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd love to see some graphs

	▲	hunterpayne an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Would it matter? Even before AI, most papers couldn't be replicated. Do we really think this is going to help the situation? Even if some of the AI papers are amazing, will anyone ever read them if most of the papers are useless? More research != more useful research. This is the logical outcome of publish or perish and Q-rankings being the main metric used. "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Goodhart's law

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oblio 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We need the equivalent of Bayesian filtering for email spam and of Page Rank for search.

Now that I think of this, whoever solves this well will have the next hyperscaler.

	▲	gus_massa 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, but then you get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222 It has a lot of red flags. Second (re)post of dormant account, vive coded, AI, the biological model is horrible. But it was a nice project, 5/5 would upvote again. Perhaps the important detail is "[I] spent about a month on it."

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snowhale 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]