Is Ask HN Shrinking?

Many of the Ask HN posts are lower quality. Additionally, with LLMs, everyone has access to personal research assistant that can investigate questions for them.

Multi-year web traffic statistics for HN?

There's the uncurated version of Ask HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew if you want to see more of them. (It's listed in the Lists link at the bottom of the page.) But it's mostly low quality submissions, particularly with showdead enabled.

Is Ask HN Shrinking?

I only have anecdotal information so take what you want from it. If one of my silly blog articles ends up on the front page I get a total of about 18K unique IP's that are mostly only humans which is about the same as I received last year. Not many people would be interested in my articles so take that with a grain of salt.

When my articles are only in /newest I get roughly ~20 to ~40 unique human viewers depending on the time of day which is down a little bit from last year. That makes sense to me as a number of regulars are probably tired of the LLM slop fest. If I put on my tinfoil underwear I could imagine some concerted effort to use LLM's to drive people away from independent platforms that are unable to filter the slop and/or attempt to warm up accounts and control the narrative on a number of platforms. I am leaning towards organized crime being behind some of it. Thankfully a number of regulars have stuck around and flag most of it and team dang are doing a great job of automating some of this.