Sixteen year trends in AI doom on HN

Name: Sixteen year trends in AI doom on HN
Availability: InStock
Author: easygenes

by easygenes·Apr 2, 2026·3 points·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●●BangerRabbit HoleBig BrainNiche Gem

Scores 16 years of HN comments for AI pessimism, showing a doubling trend since ChatGPT.

Strengths

•Backfilled 300,000+ judgments across 16 years of historical data.
•Live filtering lets you hide or isolate doom content in real-time.
•Concrete metric ("Doom Points") quantifies subjective community sentiment.

Weaknesses

•Limited utility outside the specific Hacker News ecosystem.
•AI judgment consistency over such a long timeframe is hard to verify.

Post Description

As an April Fools' project, I've made this.

I (ironically, depending your penchant) used an AI judge to score every top HN post and its top comments all the way back to 2010 (over 300,000 individual judgments!), and created a nice interface with the historic charts.

The scoring is off of how much disgruntled AI pessimism the post and top comments show. You can use that score to either only show (in Doom Only mode) or hide (in calm mode) all the doom static.

This is part joke and partly to answer my own curiosity about how real my feeling that the comments and posts have grown increasingly overbearingly negative towards and focused on the worst of what results from AI in the past year.

The trends is stark. My intuition was reinforced by the analysis; disgruntled pessimism about AI is at an all time high in the last few weeks and on track to continue doubling annually since ChatGPT released.

Historic charts are at bottom of the page.