The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.

It doesn't remotely hit the same way.

Or in the stone age reading about this "wheel" thing online all the dang time. I bet cave-people just wanted to read about rust in the kernel

Pre-internet there was no way to hear about things "all the time". If someone released a product and a competitor came about it would be months, if not years, before the product existed and the marketing cycle made it to trade magazines.

Now every day there are 200 links to 200 new AI tools. The internet already made the signal:noise ratio tough, with AI it's getting cranked to wondering if there even is a signal among the infinite noise.

It’s like almost yesterday it was CRDTs and Rust!

Hearing people talk about the “information superhighway” was exceptionally tedious.

The biggest difference to me is the tone. The dot-com era was brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. People were getting rich (on paper). The demand for someone who could write html/perl/java (or fake it) was high, and lots of smart or savvy people got pulled into tech.

The thing I hate about all of the HN posts on AI is the underlying doomerism. There’s always someone gleefully proclaiming that white color workers are super screwed and that we’re destined to be sad serfs to our AI overlords.

I miss feeling good about tech.

yeah but everybody liked the internet

Except that there weren't HN or Slashdot yet. By 00s you'd have gotten used to it.

Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…

What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas

Because these products are over hyped and don’t work as reliably as they say on the tin and it’s annoying.

I am pro AI :p

At least there's some measure of substance to some of the posts, unlike the blockchain and big-data hype trains of yore.

I think I saw a lot of blockchain in HN, but I don’t remember seeing NFT that much

Sprinkled with "blazingly fast; written in Rust" each week for the last 10+ years

You 'member Kubernetes and Microservices hype cycle?

You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.

You forgot about React.

There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.

Can you name some of these opportunities? I see people in this thread talking about using agents to manage their budgets, buy fancy cars and houses, contract work on their home. I think a lot of people feel like AI will permanently forclose any avenue they would have had to achieving that level of wealth, so there's a bitter irony

I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.

There needs to be a HN blockchain edition. There needs to be a HN Uber for X edition. There needs to be a HN SaaS edition.

The conversation will always be dominated by the current most hyped trend. This one does seem more hyped then usual.

There's this https://news.ysimulator.run/news and probably more

SlopNews, written by AI, for AI.

I'm surprised hn doesn't have an extremely basic filtering system for this kind of thing.

so... majority of HN now? Perhaps we need a hnews non-AI edition haha