Art 19 ↔ Art 1 — Guidelines permit substantive disagreement and viewpoint expression (Article 19) while requiring civil conduct protecting human dignity (Article 1); the content resolves this by distinguishing between regulating form (conduct) and suppressing viewpoints, allowing expression within bounds of dignity.

Art 19 ↔ Art 20 — Free expression rights (Article 19) may conflict with community association values (Article 20) when individual expression disrupts community coherence; guidelines resolve by framing expression as subordinate to 'intellectual curiosity' shared by the community rather than individual maximization.

SoKamil 2026-03-11 19:58 UTC link

Don’t be afraid to make grammar mistakes or misspell stuff. Others will understand. You’re a human after all. That’s okay to make mistakes and feel uncomfortable with that.

abtinf 2026-03-11 20:00 UTC link

Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines.

99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture.

Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.

meiuqer 2026-03-11 20:23 UTC link

I feel a little bit of irony in this post of a company/forum that is asking its users to not use AI while simultaneously trying to fund countless companies that are responsible for ruining the internet as we speak.

nkh 2026-03-11 20:37 UTC link

What a welcome post. The whole reason I come here is to get thoughtful input from smart people, and not what I could get myself from an LLM. While we are at it; Think your own thoughts as well :) I know how easy it is to "let it come up with a first draft" and not spend the real effort of thinking for yourself on questions, but you'll find it's a road to perdition if you let yourself slip into the habit. Thanks to all the humans still here!!

jedberg 2026-03-11 20:54 UTC link

I'm absolutely 100% for this policy.

My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.

So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI.

(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand)

arrsingh 2026-03-11 20:59 UTC link

There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI".

Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI.

That would be cool.

Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature but if someone wrote a client then maybe it could be added there.

dang 2026-03-11 21:00 UTC link

The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). What's new is that we promoted it to the guidelines.

Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter.

---

Edit: here are the bits I cut:

Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.

It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

I hate cutting any of pg's original language, which to me is classic, but as an editor he himself is relentless, and all of those bits—while still rules—no longer reflect risks to the site. I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.

---

Edit 2: ok you guys, I hear you - I've cut a couple of the cuts and will put the text back when I get home later.

abustamam 2026-03-11 21:27 UTC link

Now that it's in the rules, I hope we also see less of "your comment was obviously AI generated so I won't respond" (ironically, in a response comment).

If you suspect it to be a bot, flag it and move on! If it is indeed a bot and you comment that it's a bot, it doesn't care! If it is not a bot and you call it a bot, you may have offended someone. If it's a human using AI, I don't think a comment will make them change their ways. In any case though, I think it's a useless comment.

schopra909 2026-03-11 22:21 UTC link

Honest question, why were folks posting AI generated comments in the first place? There's such a high inertia to comment. I only comment when I have something to contribute OR find something incredibly interesting.

So I'm just baffled, why anyone was using AI to generate comments. Like what was the incentive driving the behavior?

primitivesuave 2026-03-11 22:30 UTC link

The most telling sign of a human commenter is brevity.

Consequently, I hardly ever spend the time to write out long and detailed HN comments like I used to in the pre-LLM era. People nowadays have a much harder time believing that an Internet stranger is meticulously crafting a detailed and grammatically-airtight message to another Internet stranger without AI assistance.

kjuulh 2026-03-11 22:35 UTC link

I am 100% behind this. I've been browsing hackernews since I started in tech, it is the only forum i regularly browse, and partake in. Simply because the quality of submissions and conversations are so high. There has been more AI related articles this part year, and it only seems ramping. I personally haven't found the AI part of the comments as big of a deal but dang and tom might be doing more than I realize on that front.

Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.

At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.

tzs 2026-03-11 22:35 UTC link

How about comments that include AI output if labeled?

Earlier today I remembered that there was a Supreme Court case I'd heard about 35 years ago that was relevant to on an ongoing HN discussion, but I could not remember the name of the case nor could I find it by Googling (Google kept finding later cases involving similar issues that were not relevant to what I was looking for).

I asked Perplexity and given my recollection and when I heard about the case it suggested a candidate and gave a summary. The summary matched my recollection and a quick look at the decision itself verified it had found the right case and did a good job summarizing it--probably better than I would have done.

I posted a cite to the case and a link to decision. I normally would have also linked to the Wikipedia article on the case since those usually have a good summary but there was no Wikipedia article for this one.

I though of pasting in Perplexity's summary, saying it was from Perplexity but that I had checked and it was a good summary.

Would that be OK or would that count as an AI written comment?

I have also considered, but not yet actually tried, running some of my comments through an AI for suggested improvements. I've noticed I have a tendency to do three things that I probably should do less of:

1. Run on sentences. (Maybe that's why of all the people in the 11th-100th spot on the karma list I have the highest ratio of words/karma, with 42+ words per karma point [1]).

2. Use too many commas.

3. Write "server" when I mean "serve". I think I add "r" to some other words ending in "e" too.

I was thinking those would be something an AI might be good at catching and suggesting minimal fixes for.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867167

Supermancho 2026-03-12 02:10 UTC link

I use AI for the elements I feel are weak or unclear in the transcription. Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I cannot always point out why I think they are unclear or jumbled.

I don't feel this is an imposition on others. I think it's the opposite. It enhances signal by reducing nitpicking, spelling/grammar errors that might muddle intent, and reminds me of proper sentence structure.

Many of us are guilty of run-ons, fragments, overly large blocks of text[1] because it's closer to how people often converse, verbally. Posts on the internet are not casual conversation between humans. They are exchanges of ideas.

[1] This is a classic example where I had to go back and edit it to ensure it was readable. As you do self-review with any commit ^^

caditinpiscinam 2026-03-12 03:05 UTC link

We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge".

I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.

uni_baconcat 2026-03-12 03:21 UTC link

For quite a while, I like use LLM to refine and fix my grammar issue, but my colleagues and professors reminds me that it was way too obvious. They said they can tolerate some mistakes in my words, but no tolerance for AI generated content.

mulhoon 2026-03-12 08:28 UTC link

As a type nerd, I was very happy with Grammarly swapping my dashes to em dashes. But now everyone associates em dashes with AI, I can no longer enjoy that luxury.

p0w3n3d 2026-03-12 08:29 UTC link

It's quite funny how native speakers can recognise the AI voice writing or speaking their tongue.

As a Polish man I am repulsed when I hear AI generated Polish voice in a commercial, but can't see problems in AI generated English speech

spzzz 2026-03-12 09:14 UTC link

Me not native speeker. AI help me too get my point front much more cleanly. It hard not look like dummy.

Im of course exaggerating, but it is so easy just to run the text through an AI to make it sound "better" without changing what im trying to express.

---

I’m not a native speaker, so AI helps me get my point across more clearly. It’s hard not to come across like a dummy otherwise.

Of course I’m exaggerating, but it’s really easy to run the text through AI to make it sound better without changing what I’m trying to say.

ontouchstart 2026-03-12 12:14 UTC link

I finished reading the thin book "Systemantics" by John Gall yesterday (thanks @dang).

I realized that the problem of AI generated/edited content flooding everywhere around us is a symptom of something wrong with the System.

It might have something to do with sensory deprivation. Here is a quote from the book caught my attention because of the word "hallucination":

> As we all know, sensory deprivation tends to produce hallucinations.

> FUNCTIONARY’S FAULT: A complex set of malfunctions induced in a Systems-person by the System itself, and primarily attributable to sensory deprivation.

(As I typed the text above on my iPhone, I was fighting auto completion because AI was trying to “correct” the voice of John Gall and mine to conform the patterns in its training data. Every new character is a fight against Gradient Descend.)

All you need is attention but the cost of attention is getting higher and higher when there is little worth our attention.

It takes a lot of efforts to be human.

Freebytes 2026-03-12 16:25 UTC link

Using AI to write content is seen so harshly because it violates the previously held social contract that it takes more effort to write messages than to read messages. If a person goes through the trouble of thinking out and writing an argument or message, then reading is a sufficient donation of time.

However, with the recent chat based AI models, this agreement has been turned around. It is now easier to get a written message than to read it. Reading it now takes more effort. If a person is not going to take the time to express messages based on their own thoughts, then they do not have sufficient respect for the reader, and their comments can be dismissed for that reason.

lifthrasiir 2026-03-11 19:58 UTC link

Others will understand, but won't regard that as worthy. That's a difference.

tayo42 2026-03-11 20:05 UTC link

I make mistakes pretty often thanks to auto complete on my phone and carelessness. I've had threads derail and been attacked by people who freak out over grammar.

Aldipower 2026-03-11 20:12 UTC link

Unfortunately a lot of other do not understand (in the double sense).

jacquesm 2026-03-11 20:30 UTC link

The mods here have quite a bit of leeway in how they run the site, YC funds it but effectively Dan is lord & master here and I suspect if the mods were to call it quits YC would lose their funnel pretty quickly. There is some balance, fortunately.

But yes, there is some irony there.

QQ00 2026-03-11 20:43 UTC link

Totally agree with you. I come here to read comments made by humans. If I need to read comments made by AI Bots I would go to Twitter or reddit, both made me not read the comments section entirely.

gr8tyeah 2026-03-11 20:55 UTC link

This is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree

tenahu 2026-03-11 20:58 UTC link

Yes a bit ironic, but I am glad they can see that there are times to use AI, and times for human interaction.

postalcoder 2026-03-11 21:04 UTC link

I’ve actually been thinking about this exact idea for https://hcker.news/. Stay tuned, I’ve already started rolling out some comment filtering.

tyg13 2026-03-11 21:07 UTC link

I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid.

Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it.

altairprime 2026-03-11 21:09 UTC link

‘Flag’ is an algorithmic flag only, and there are no humans in the flag algorithm’s processing loop. They may monitor and react to the ‘queue’ of flagged articles, and they can do special mod things with flagged posts. But if you want to report a guidelines violation for AI-assisted writing to the mods, just email the mods (contact link in the footer) subject “AI-assisted writing flag” or similar with a link to the post/comment. It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.

dang 2026-03-11 21:12 UTC link

We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.

A nice side effect is that it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem.

dang 2026-03-11 21:17 UTC link

We aren't asking people to not use AI. (We use it ourselves.) What we're asking is not to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News. (We don't do that ourselves.)

By all means make good use of LLMs and other AI. What counts as good use? The world is figuring that out, it will take years, and HN is no exception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We just don't want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.

For example, it has always been a bad idea and against HN's rules when users post things that they didn't write themselves, or do bulk copy-pasting into the threads, or write bots to post things.

As I mentioned, the HN mods (who are also the HN devs) use AI extensively and will be doing so a lot more. The limits on that are not technical; they have to do with (1) how much work we still do manually—the classic "no time to do things that would make the things that take all our time take less of it"; and (2) the amount of psychic rewiring that's required—there's a limit to the RoA (rate of astonishment) that any human can absorb. (It's fascinating how technical people are suffering the most from that this time. Less technical people have longer experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment is somewhat less skull-cracking.)

Getting this right doesn't mean replacing human-to-human interaction, it means we should have more time for that, and do a better job of supporting HN users generally, as well as YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.

abtinf 2026-03-11 21:17 UTC link

FWIW I think “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” is different from the others.

It’s an instruction for how to use the site. It’s helpful to have it in the guidelines for when the flag feature should be used. Without it, the flag link is much more ominous.

Maybe it could be consolidated with the flag-egregious-comments rule?

Edit to add: IMHO it is not at all obvious on this site that flagging stories is meant to be roughly the equivalent of downvoting comments (and that flagging comments doesn’t have a counterpart at the story level).

zahlman 2026-03-11 21:19 UTC link

They look similar. In my experience, they do not read similar at all. You have to pay attention and actually try to appreciate what you're reading. Then, if you try and fail, it might not be your fault.

jasoneckert 2026-03-11 21:27 UTC link

I actually do something similar on my personal site using this note that includes a purposeful typo: https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

I'm hoping people catch that typo after reading "every single word, phrase, and typo (purposeful or not)" and smiled every time I've had someone post a PR with a fix for it (that I subsequently reject ;-)

Wowfunhappy 2026-03-11 21:28 UTC link

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

I don't understand why you cut these, they seem important! (I can understand the others, which feel either implied or too specific.)

vesrah 2026-03-11 21:30 UTC link

This is going to sound nuts, but I've noticed comments lately with multiple misspellings that seem intentional - it's almost like they're trying to signal that they're human, rather than LLM written. I've started to think it makes them even more likely to be LLM written than not.

SegfaultSeagull 2026-03-11 21:37 UTC link

> I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.

Challenge accepted.

semiquaver 2026-03-11 21:43 UTC link

Good writers are often good in recognizably unique ways. To the extent that LLMs produce “good writing,” which I happen to think they mostly do, they tend to overuse specific devices which give their writing a quality that most people are already sick of.

dom96 2026-03-11 21:48 UTC link

I’m really curious how this will go. I have a suspicion that we will see more and more accounts all over the internet being controlled by AI agents and no amount of moderation will be able to stop it.

loeg 2026-03-11 22:09 UTC link

I mostly agree, although we've seen big shifts in the culture towards rule-deviating norms over time. Look at the guidelines for ideological battles or throwaway accounts, for example. And, as always:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

detectivestory 2026-03-11 22:20 UTC link

great idea, but seems a little futile if there is no protection agains llms training on HN comments. ironically, if HN can succefully prevent llm content, it will become one of the best sources available for training data

micromacrofoot 2026-03-11 22:23 UTC link

Same as always: being right about something

unethical_ban 2026-03-11 22:35 UTC link

Some things to think about:

* A comment should be judged on its merits mostly, and if a comment seems to be substantive, interesting, or ask a thoughtful question, it should be acceptable. I think some LLM comments look superficially relevant, but a moment's thought can make me wonder if a comment actually added anything to the discussion, or did it sound like a rephrasing or generalization of a topic?

* Unfortunately for decent new users, account age is one metric on which to judge here.

* People who post here, should want to engage on a subject when they can, and disengage and be quiet when they can't. There is nothing wrong if you're not an expert on something, and it is not desired by the people here to have you alt-tab to an LLM to plug in extra perspective. We can all do that on our own.

topaz0 2026-03-11 22:44 UTC link

It sounds like you already know how to improve your comments, how about just doing those things.

altairprime 2026-03-11 22:44 UTC link

You were correct not to post the summary. HN tends to expect readers to invest time in reading and understanding long form content and for community to step into discussions and offer context and explanations when necessary. One of the most important context statements on this site has been “in mice”, posted as a two word comment, elevated to top comment on the post. An AI summary will miss that context altogether while busily calculating a cliffsnote no one wants to read (and could often get you flagged and potentially banned, even before today’s guideline update). If a reader wants an AI summary, they have the same tools you do to generate it by their own hand.

If you have domain familiarity with it, have some personal insight to offer a lens through, or care about the topic deeply enough to write a summary yourself, then go ahead! I almost never post about AI given my loathing of generative ML, but I posted a critical summary in a recent “underlying shared structure” post because it was a truly exciting mathematical insight and the paper made that difficult to see for some people.

Please don’t use AI to reduce the distinctiveness of your writing style. Run on sentences are how humans speak to each other. Excess commas are only excess when you consider neurotypicals. I’m learning French and I have already started to fuck up some English spelling because of it. None of that matters in the grand scheme of things. Just add -er suffix checks to your mental proofreading list and move on with being you.

computomatic 2026-03-11 22:50 UTC link

> I though of pasting in Perplexity's summary, saying it was from Perplexity but that I had checked and it was a good summary.

> Would that be OK or would that count as an AI written comment?

The rule seems written to answer this directly.

Absolutely nobody cares what Perplexity has to say about the case - summary or otherwise. If you mention what the case is, I can ask claude myself if I’m interested.

Better yet, post a link to an authoritative source on the case (helpful but not required).

At minimum, verify your info via another source. The community deserves that much at least.

An AI-generated summary adds nothing positive and actually detracts from the conversation.

nunez 2026-03-11 23:38 UTC link

I'd be fine with treating this like snippets from Wikipedia with citations back to the article. This way, people can manually verify the sources if they so choose.

nunez 2026-03-11 23:43 UTC link

Most comments on here are really well-written. I can imagine someone for whom English is a second language (or a first language but aren't as good at writing as they'd like to be) using an LLM to "keep up." Of course, this sometimes works until they decide to post something without those tools.

wombatpm 2026-03-12 00:07 UTC link

This discussion reminds me of the Paradigms of Power featured in Adiamante by L E Modisett; about consensus, power, morality and society. It’s a good read.

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