Poor writing is not a new thing, of course. Most of the moderation mechanisms that it uses were perfected a quarter century ago when sites like Slashdot were popular as a defense mechanism against bad user behavior. Bad user behavior impacts commenting, article submissions, and moderating itself. While bad users now have AI to abuse, the problem of a large volume of low quality content is is largely the same. The moderation mechanisms end up targeting the problem at the source: identifying good and bad users. So, the same amount of bad users generating a lot more garbage isn't that big of a deal. Getting good karma still is a lot of work and it makes identifying all the garbage created by users without that relatively straightforward.
Using LLMs to tag, flag and filter content might not be a bad thing to experiment with. There are a lot of low quality AI generated opinion pieces that somehow make it to the front page. Same for political and controversial stuff, which of course is against the HN guidelines for content. Auto flagging things that obviously violate guidelines should not be that hard. It's just a matter of having good guard rails. @dang might actually already be doing that. I know I would be if staying on top of piles of generated garbage was part of my job description. It might also be done to give good content a little boost.
The new articles section has a very low signal to noise ratio currently and the window for good content to make it past that is very short. Often articles on the front page will have many duplicate submissions that never made it past that. IMHO duplicate submissions should just count as upvotes on the original. Auto de-duplicating based on canonical URL should not be that hard.
I respectfully disagree on almost all counts (beyond poor writing not being new, of course!).
Moderation mechanisms have not been perfected. They're certainly not perfect, and, given that, I don't know what would make one call them perfected. Humans have probably gotten more accustomed to being moderated, but it'd take a lot to convince me that we have even reached a decent place for moderation at moderate scale, let alone something that is good-to-perfect.
Most importantly, the problem of low quality content is now not the same. Magnitudes matter, and a difference in degree eventually becomes a difference in kind. LLMs have escalated the problem of garbage content beyond what would've previously been conceivable.
To illustrate: How do you dispose of several trash bags at once? Take them to the trash can. How do you dispose of several tens of trash bags at once? Need to rent a dumpster.
Or a classic: If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
Bringing it back to written content: doing human-driven moderation on hundreds of submissions a day is tractable with (idk) a couple of people. For thousands or tens of thousands? Intractable. And bear in mind that human-driven moderation is one of the things that keeps HN a better place on the net than many (most) others.