Hacker News bans AI-edited comments

This is a small moderation rule with outsized symbolic weight: one of the internet’s core developer communities is explicitly saying AI assistance can degrade discourse, not just scale it.

• –HN is treating comment quality as a social problem, not a model-quality problem: even polished AI text can flatten personality and context
• –Dang’s clarification in the thread makes the position narrower than “anti-AI” — use AI freely, just don’t let it replace human-to-human exchange on HN
• –The hard part will be enforcement, especially around gray areas like translation, grammar cleanup, and accessibility use cases
• –Expect this rule to influence other technical communities weighing whether authenticity matters as much as informational value