Translation

Ask HN: I miss old days of blogging without promotions

A Hacker News user laments the decline of genuine, human-written blogs, arguing that most articles now promote products, personal brands, or ad traffic, and that AI-generated content makes it harder to find authentic knowledge-sharing.

Background

- The user is posting on Hacker News ("Ask HN"), a community on Y Combinator's site where tech workers, founders, and engineers discuss software, startups, and industry trends. A post tagged "Ask HN" is a question posed to the community. - The complaint reflects a widely felt shift in the tech blogosphere: the rise of "content marketing" (articles written to sell a product or build a personal brand) and AI-generated SEO spam, which crowd out the older, non-commercial tradition of engineers writing tutorials or sharing lessons purely for knowledge's sake. - "Signal to noise ratio" is a common tech metaphor: useful content ("signal") is increasingly buried under low-value filler ("noise"). - The poster is nostalgic for the pre-2010s era of "indie web" blogging, when individual developers hosted their own sites and wrote without monetization motives.

The 100,000 whys of AI
3.0
The author describes frustrating arguments with fellow techies about whether it's possible to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text, framing this as one of the most painful recurring debates in tech circles.
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wr...
2.0
Paul Graham notes that many founder emails now use a hard-hitting journalistic style, which he attributes to AI because founders never wrote that way before. He observes that once an email is identified as AI-written, it's difficult not to ignore it.
Quoting Paul Graham
1.5
Paul Graham says he can tell when emails from founders are written by AI, noting a hard-hitting journalistic style that didn't exist before. He states he has never finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI, as it feels like being lied to and makes him think less of the author.
We don’t see it, but we see it every day. The aesthetic of the era is code.
1.0
A tweet argues that the defining aesthetic of the current era is computer code, responding to a comment about the century lacking a distinct artistic movement. It suggests code is an invisible yet omnipresent visual and cultural force shaping modern life.
Another annoying thing about getting emails people have used AIs to write for them is that they're usually longer than they'd have written by themselv...
0.5
Paul Graham complains that emails written with AI assistance tend to be overly long, filled with paragraphs of plausible-sounding but unnecessary text, unlike the more concise versions people would naturally write themselves.

Ask HN: I miss old days of blogging without promotions

Background

Related stories

The 100,000 whys of AI

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wr...

Quoting Paul Graham

We don’t see it, but we see it every day. The aesthetic of the era is code.

Another annoying thing about getting emails people have used AIs to write for them is that they're usually longer than they'd have written by themselv...