Measured public attention
Is this written by a person?
12 measured threads · about 20,000 points · measured 11 October 2026
What happened
The most upvoted AI thread of 2026 is a rule against machine-written comments (4,229 points).
The supplied measurement groups 12 threads with about 20,000 points and 9,075 comments. These totals measure attention, not whether the linked claims are true.
The timeline brings together 11 source-linked contributions assigned to this question. It preserves their dates, discussion records and original sources.
Complete assigned timeline
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira
Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
How Claude marks AI-generated content
Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK
AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
DiscussionHN post is the source
I'm Tired of Talking to AI
YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
Continue the evidence trail
Method
Attention is measured, not guessed: every Hacker News story from 1 Jan 2026 with more than 300 points and an AI subject (631 stories), read through the public search interface on 11 Oct 2026, grouped by the question behind the story. Survey figures come from published polls with four-digit samples and are linked.