Earlier in the week there were probably about 10 posts on the front page that tempted me to post "Ask HN: Why are there so many Show HN & Ask HN posts today" - I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation.
Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
I actually conducted a similar analysis back in December. I was more focused on discovering the topics that most resonated with the community but ended up digging into this phenomenon as well (specifically focusing on the probability of getting over 100 upvotes)
The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10.
I did not conduct a deep dive into the specific examples: this was my takeaway from a slope plot comparing which topics clear a 10 point threshold (eg escape the new page) vs which topics clear a 100 point threshold.
> Nearly every AI related topic does worse once it clears the 10 point threshold than any other category. This means that either the people looking through the New and Show sections are disproportionately interested in AI. This is very possible, but from my interaction with this crowd from my posts, these users tend to be more technically minded (think DIY hardware, rather than landing-page builders).
It's good to know that this would be helpful. My tendency would be to dig in a bit more into the individual examples that fall into this more suspicious bucket before presenting this evidence formally, but curious if you think these high level results are sufficiently helpful?
No, seriously, you should find out by emailing the mods. Footer contact link. They’re not going to be upset at you bringing tentative concerns about voting rings with shaky evidence, so long as you aren’t knocking down the door with overconfidence and denying how shaky the evidence is — which you clearly aren’t.
I’m not even remotely equipped to judge the veracity of your work, but they are, and that you care at all is, like, 0.000001%. Take the plunge and write them a note (or simply link them your comment thread here with a one sentence FYI email!). It’ll be fine :)
It will become a ghost town.
It became a gallery of other people prompts.
It used to mean something else, one would expect care put into a passion project.
I think there should be an ai-assistance badge on every Github project. I don't want to look at Contribution graph and Commit history and then eventually the source code to find out the same information. What are we hiding now?
the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first.
using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived.
it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020.
if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately.
nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know
My qualitative experience is that, far from lower quality submissions, the Show HN posts that make the front page seem to be increasing in quality.
There are likely to be a number of possible explanations for this that offset the lower average score. The obvious one is that the filtering effect of the front page with a higher amount of content. Perhaps we are also seeing higher standards—a project that used to take 6 weeks and a ton of conviction now wraps up in a few hours, and people are resetting their expectations.
I’ve seen a few submissions recently that look great - convincing landing page, complex app, modern design - but are almost unusable due to JavaScript bugs. I’m guessing it’s the power of AI.
When I use the search function for topics I'm interested in and encounter Show HN that way, it's dominantly slop (and has been for most of the time I've had an account). The actual Show HN page is not much better.
The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README.
Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works.
[1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.
Possible, sure. But likely? Increased submissions with no change in average quality can fully explain an increase in front page quality, as can increasing average quality, of course. And scores aren’t a quality metric, they’re are a popularity metric. The decrease in scores can also be fully explained by increased submissions. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason to suggest quality is decreasing…
I fear the day when someone figures out that a well-crafted Show HN post is a great way to get "engagement", and starts marketing to others how to do so or doing it for them.
I will be very surprised if people are not already optimizing their HN posts for marketing purposes.
It's not uncommon to see people showing off their website traffic graph on Twitter after hitting HN. You can also find people asking for advice on how to use HN to market their shitty SaaS on places like reddit.
Another kind of marketing you see quite often is people replying with a post that starts off reasonable, until the third paragraph where the commentator says "this is why we built blah" and makes you feel you are staring at an half eaten Apple with half a worm in it.
IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit.
Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
This is an unfortunate trend we will see across software going ahead. When the bar to make something is low, the market is inevitably flooded by cheap and mediocre stuff that overshadow everything else. Soon there won't be an incentive to make high quality stuff because even if you did, you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention with it because it's all taken away by the endless slop that won't stop.
Basically, serving a small business whose key app they use got sold to private equity, has been turned into a subscription, support is now tickets they never get fixed, and the subscription goes up 20% a year.
The original goal of Show HN was for people to show off their work in a way that other people could participate in, sharing code and experience to satisfy intellectual curiosity. It's become nothing more than a funnel for landing pages and vibe-coded slop.
We’re trying to push things back towards the original goal. Something I’m now telling people who ask for help or SCP inclusion is that Show HN isn’t Product Hunt; it’s not for launching your product and capturing signups, it’s for showcasing interesting/deep innovation that others can learn from. Of course we can’t stop anything being submitted but we can avoid promoting projects that lack substance and we can downrank posts that are not worthy of the front page or a high place on the Show page.
If your home pages looks like this (https://www.ycombinator.com), you can expect people to try want to "launch" their startups on your forum. There seems to be a large contingent of HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned! Obviously this can be the case, but its pretty evident that the technology is going nowhere and anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back. The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. For people who are interested in creative web projects, we live in very exciting times, regardless of the negative noise.
I think I agree with you & I follow a similar trend but the creative part is doing a lot of heavy work.
Like, If we are using AI to build yet another next.js App, then perhaps its me but I personally find it doesn't satisfy my curiosity.
I want to see projects be written in niche languages and new languages and AI can be perfect for that. See which language you like the most and each language/idea has their own tradeoffs but just follow what you want and now you are less likely to be stuck.
Of course though sometimes I create a python script first (I recently made a code where your png's/jpg's can automatically be updated in a slideshow like thing which I built with a custom youtube screenshot and I watched some lectures, pressed shift A and it can now have slides and I compile them to pdf and built another where I can have a pdf and then I can have a laser tool on pdf's because I love to study with notes where I can draw random things on page like whiteboard and erase them without hurting the text below for understanding._
I think converted that python tkinkter gui to fyne golang out of curiosity yesterday and I feel both tools are great fwiw
I think my point here is I'd much rather be willing to see some niche projects for ourselves and have it first meaningfully improve our lives & just experiment. I don't know not much for monetary gains but out of curiosity and seeing how far you can and cannot go.
Just build things you like/want to exist in any way that you like till AI's so damn subsidized (I don't use any agents, just claude web's free version or aistudio for free, my projects are usually around 600-700locs so I can ask it to regenerate it completely and I am fine with much of it, Perhaps I just follow KISS to its core)
You would find it funny but the problem's not in code generation but dependency management etc. atleast to me which is why I love uv scripts a lot but sometimes especially chatgpt doesn't know about uv script feature or hallucinates it hard on their web version so If I am building python applets I would paste uv script's complete docs to the LLM website I would be using.
It isn't just the case that AI generated content tends to be slop, it's that it's intellectually uninteresting and provides little worth discussing on a forum whose entire purpose is intellectually curious conversation.
Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point.
>The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion.
They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.)
Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.
I do feel like its much more so the art of cooking than birdwatching (atleast imo)
Some people do want their food to be made by a chef sometimes even in front of them explaining them everything and the journey to them makes it worth it
For some people, it can be that the food that they buy from a shop nearby in front of them is good
For some, they want the cooking to be done out of their visible range and just want the food served
And the last categories probably the ones who will go to supermarkets to get some chips with 3 months expiry date created in a large factory
Hackernews to me feels like its 1 & 2 for me. What you describe as birdwatching is much rather only 1st category to me.
Like, in the 1st category people want to eat the special dish created by the trials of countless nights and passion
On the 2nd category, you are still witnessing a person but they are probably following a much more experience and in the start by say following tutorials or watching recipes. But they are much more democratized
I don't know, I don't go in hotels that much so I don't know the 1st part and how possible it is but I do go to 2nd category and I go around my local shops and see people make french fries and chat with them and ask how long have they been here and making french fries etc., they are willing to tell you everything.
I do feel like "AI slop" is kind of the 2nd category because like I am not only just interested in whether or not this recipe's entirely unique but I am rather interested in everything around it, what infrastructure choices they make and what coding tech stack they used & are they passionate about the project or what did they end up creating the prototype for.
the 3rd part is what I despise where think burger king or mcdonald etc. where the recipes come from franchise and everything comes and the person just serves you. All decisions are bland (think yet another nextjs app).
I don't think much of us want HN to be a supermarket or another macD but do we want this to be a cooking show where chefs build the whole recipes to serve us or do we want it to be a lot of neighbourly shops who have friendly people working who will chat with us and we can eat the french fries they make :)
(I love the french fries my neighbourhood makes, they are really spicy combine them with spring rolls and some drink or a good yogurt and it feels soo good lol, plus all of this costs less a 1$ or 2$ at most 3$ where I live, I can go and eat without worrying at all about the cost of eating outside usually if picked from the right shops)
Although I have never had the opportunity of seeing a chef cook his own dish in such sense but I can imagine that its great & I would like them as well but to me hackiness includes both, them hacking around with recipes to build something nice and the other hacking around with infrastructure like what logo and how close they are to me and even things like pricing imo.
I consider the latter to be like much more reachable than the former and to me I don't know how to explain but the idea of hackiness isn't just some clean final product, its also like just building something and gluing things and its messy too. And I love both of them both clean and messy hacking, I just want to know how much an human has been in the loop, where'd they get the idea and what they implemented in etc.
I don't know I live in a small city connected to a large city and I feel like I enjoy much more the messy aspects whereas people from large cities are much more likely to want to go to a large hotel for a dine or have a more artisanal taste.
So I have seen my fair share of people who want both.
Right now, I feel like it honestly depends on how large or small community you feel HN is.
If you consider HN to be too large aka you find it less likely to trust projects who get to here in the first place, you would want an artisanal person to build things for hand for you to enjoy
But if you consider HN to be small and there is just this idea of treating each person more individually and just this unwritten rule of law which generates more trust and faith in trying out new options even if they are hacky as long as I can sort of trust them decently and they are still involved in the loop and not completely 100% detached unlike say a large conglomerate franchise imo
Honestly I want HN to be a small place and not a large place but I feel like even HN is a large place for me but the problem with completely small places or building one's own is that you don't get visitors at all. We probably need something in between HN and no social media promotions (only via word of mouth) imo.
I have been trying to replace HN for quite a while now for something more nicher but still well connected place as well. Honestly have thought multiple times to create an HN alternative with the same UI and everything and same rules but just smaller and probably federated (ironically Gonna have it be vibe coded in single main.go golang :) hosting on a cheap recurring deal netcup server I got) but moderation of >0 people is hard and getting >0 people interested in a new website is hard as well which is precisely what the main post is about.
If you want a chef to explain and show his recipe and then you find out he asked chat gpt or got it from a recipe website, would you still be interested in hearing about the 'journey' he took?
If that chef then also ordered the food from a catering service by forwarding that recipe to them, does it make sense to interview him about his craft and listen to him?
It's the same with creative things. Sure, you can ask a musician or a painter about their inspiration/process etc., because they went through the process and made something. You could learn something from them, other than 'here's how i asked someone else to make this'.
So, going to an art forum and displaying your AI generated art there, ready to answer questions about the process is pretty much completely pointless and also cheapens every actual artist that came there to display and talk about something they actually made.
It also has a psychological effect on the people that use it. I know some people that get immense feelings of accomplishment out of using AI to generate art and music. They feel like they made something and are proud about it. For a lot of people like that, any incentive to learn about things is gone, because they get the exact same feeling by using AI to make it.
On the other hand: If you are an artist making things and there are a million people generating things every 5 minutes and showing it around everywhere, it dilutes recognition of what you made. You show it to your friends and they're like: Oh yeah, i made like 5 of those yesterday.
Yes I agree with what you are saying. And this is why I am saying that if this place is a place for chef's then I agree that even a minor use of AI can be disheartening.
Once again if HN is solely for the 1st sector of chefs 100%, then AI use should be completely restricted against
But if HN falls into what I call the 2nd category too then does it really matter if the local chef's using a recipe built by chatgpt?
I completely understand what you are saying man and the psychological effects are real.
And this is why I feel like if Hackernews is targetted for people in the 1st category or the 2nd
Because if there is a forum where both local shops who say makes fries which are built in less time and there is also the chef which takes hours building teh perfect food and both of them are on the same forum & they probably get the same space in it then a conflict between them is sort of meant to occur with all the effects which you mention and feels to me like a prisoners dilemma because if artisanal chefs are impacted by local normal cooks lets say then just being a local cook would get stigmatized in a forum. Overall its a net negative for both.
But it honestly depends on how negative if the eyeballs come on both, sure they can split and create different forums but neither wants to leave the large one and the large forum owner has had incentives in both artisanal and local cooks (YC funding AI companies and hackernews once being so damn creative that I hear stories about when one day the moderator decided to have the front page be all about erlang/elixir from a story I remember from a HN "veteran")
I mean I love em both. It's not an or condition but honestly what I hear in HN is the path of least resistance ie. if you don't like moderation, then make your own place but I do feel like the moderation's atleast a bit confused about their interests too.
Probably another reason why I am interested in fediverse because I want it to be like a street where we can have both artisanal chef clubs and the local shops fair while on the same road but a bit of problem with fediverse atleast in this context of HN alike is that lemmy's c/technology can probably replace HN in some contexts but the streets of lemmy are empty because everybody's still here on HN.
I don't disagree with what you are expressing but I think you are overgeneralising.
Sometimes the idea itself can be interesting. If AI is used to manifest the idea then so be it!
Secondly, I think it is almost unavoidable to use some ai generated content (code, design etc) when developing these days. Its just a tool and it can be used well or used poorly.
Lastly, I agree that there does exist a lot of what can truly be labelled "AI slop" where it is just lazy regurgitated content, and that is annoying.
I think there are a few people out there with great ideas, that might benefit from having access to tools to make these real. I'm all for those and would love to see them.
But i also think the majority of these cases will be bad ideas that don't need to be made at all. Or even ideas that are AI generated by asking a LLM for ideas.
I don't care if they are made or not, but i would rather not have those on the internet and especially on 'show and tell' places like ShowHN etc.
I'm also not opposed to using AI as a tool in development or similar.
But there are more and more examples of purely vibe-coded or generated things and those fall in a different category in my opinion.
I am much more interested in infrastructure related things and price optimizing. I've spent hours and days looking at all the options compiling resources and building scrapers to scrape information of servers and having them be made via LLM :) just to get the idea of context.
I don't know but like what i possess isn't a deep knowledge within the domain itself (one of the reasons why I love golang is that all the tradeoffs of it are okay with me and it's complexity just feels linear to me and I would have this simplicity in code where if I ever wanted to, I just feel so much more confident about tweaking LLM generated golang code than say rust)
A lot of what I love is the hacking around the project. Ooh so you used golang to make it cross compatible easier? Are you using the modernc driver? What servers are you gonna use? (hetzner,ovh,netcup etc.) while the code being completely open source and I will be transparent about how much the servers cost and how much I make in the middle and just some sustainable ideals so that it can be day one profitable but without ripping anyone off.
Y'know mixing and matching different services. I think I am really frugal so like this is like the deepest intersection of like all of my hobbies combined.
I face any problem -> use free llm from web -> python/golang code -> deploy it on my web server -> use cloudflare tunnels and custom scripts + zed/others and micro to deploy servers great (I prefer using tmux as well with zed terminal)
But even with all of this, I wouldn't say that the code isn't slop but I do feel like its pretty much reasonable and I have been vocal about how if I ever create something and a community actually occurs out of it & they want me to recreate it from scratch without any LLM assistance, I actually would even if that means reading documentations of all the libraries used in such golang project etc.
But like the reason why I still do things is because I do it for myself and I am pretty impatient. I build things which trouble me first and foremost to fix issues I have & that's kind of source of joy I have.
I don't know man, like I hate AI for all the psychological issues its gonna cause but I still want to build things without having to spend say days in a project when I would be facing the problem right now.
I think I have always imagined myself as some consultant who wants to give the best option out there and have the code back and manage it or similar.
It's just that writing the code part myself isn't the most exciting part to me. seeing computers go work the way I want to in the decision choices that I make and can justify is the most exciting part to me.
Like does this make sense? I am not exactly pro AI either, I have written so extensively about it here on how AI is a bubble and the psychological and social impact it has.
In a way, I don't think I fit in the two boxes of pro AI or completely anti AI. I just am in the middle and I don't know if there's a term for it but like, I don't know if someone knows a term for what I feel about AI it will be brilliant but even if there isn't a mainstream word for it. I just don't really want to change myself to fit in any box. I have my nuanced opinion and I have thought about joining either of these boxes but being honest neither fits my worldview.
> HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned!
Honestly, I used to be one of them. I recently saw a great library (atcute) that changed my opinion. I think most AI sceptics haven't had this experience. They saw AI slops and set their opinion: AI-generated codes are bad. I can't really blame them, though, because there are so many of AI slops.
> anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back.
It's true. However, I think people who create AI slops are worse than those who don't use it. They are diligently making this world a worse place.
There's also a very simple reality of AI vibecoded projects:
If you were able to get an LLM to vibecode a project for you, so could any of us, so why even share the project as if you are showing off? It takes very little effort for anyone else to prompt an agent and get a similar result.
That means the only thing left in a shared vibecoded project is the original idea, and well, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone has them and idea spread has never really been a limiting factor.
So what are you really sharing at that point?
Noise.
"Look at this code I got an LLM to generate" is inherently uninteresting.
That's fair actually. I wrote this comment a little off the cuff and rereading the article (it's been a while since I wrote it!) it's more like a strong plurality, so overwhelming was a bit much
This is also kinda funny and ironic: 'This is not, as I have labeled it, a flood, deluge, or avalanche. It's an earthquake. A rupture. Quiet in 2022, five-alarm fire in 2023.' (ibid)
the bubble might be a thing of concern, but the phenomenon behind it is much bigger then most can comprehend. even among hackers, we see a very naive and superficial understanding. most are still thinking in the current framework of the game while the game fundamentally changed. the lemon market will persist regardless of an imminent burst!
even if the average tone changes, the fabrics of this game is forever eroded. hacker news current structure makes no sense when consensus can be fabricated (automated karma farming + targeted "collective action" is cheap, people have already realized this and soon will become intolerant).
showing a project means nothing, showing the equivalent of a prompt has negative value.
people will still urge for care and passion, discovery, interesting ideas. people will urge for a way to separate a vibed nothing-project, valued at 25 Claude sonnet prompts, in response to the latest Simon wilinson new hot take in 35 minutes.
people will want a way to separate a good faith idea cultivated with passion from a "look what I did to promote myself while spending 75 cents" idea.
It does makes sense in terms of resulting damage. Make a bot that will post new discussion, it will instantly get flagged to oblivion. Make 10 bots that downvote something - it will take quite some time for the mods to find them.
It just seems to me that you ought'a be able to downvote before making posts (and also flagging). Perhaps good upvoted comment boughts ought be able to make submissions (eventually), too..?
Downvoting needs much more than that actually (is it 500+ these days?) Maybe you mean flagging? Which is similar enough to still make your argument work, but just saying.
I tried to share a project on Show HN recently (twice!), and I didn't get a single user interaction (basically no one even visited the project, nevermind responding with a comment). I don't think my title was that bad, its more just that there are so many new projects using AI that people are fatigued from it. Its kind of a shame because I'm sure there are lots of really good ideas that are being completely overlooked because of this.
Everyone is always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and we can advise on whether a project and its intro post are a good fit for HN. Plenty of good projects get missed by the audience, but we can always put things in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.
The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).
> If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which interest the community) would get karma along with the original submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.
I am a Show HN expert. You need to just keep trying until you get traction. Sometimes it's title. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's more substantial - a chance to rethink, redo, rebrand, rewrite, etc.
Also, mods can help. They are friendly and generous. Reach out to them via email and ask them about your post. Often they have something to say and it's useful.
The challenge you encountered is nothing to do with the recent spike. I've been doing Show HN for 10 years. It's always been this way. It's never "easy" to get the attention of the community. But there are some things that can help, such as the time you post.
I mean no offense by this, but intuition literally means acquiring knowledge without an explanation. Did you mean experience or are you telling GP that you cannot explain how you do it?
No that is not what it means. I did not mean experience; I did not mean that I cannot explain how I do it; I meant what I said: intuition. I can explain how I do it; I can even explain how it works (as far as I think), but I don't really know how it works, and I don't care. I just care that I can do it, and that it works.
They mean to distinguish intuition, which draws on experience and can only be reflected on, from experience, which deals in actionable heuristics. Any appeal to intuition you make will fall on experiential advice when pressed. Intuition _works_ here, but if you mean to share your wisdom, you must translate it through experience, which is the actual concept we communicate through.
Essentially yes, thanks. I was focused on the difference between “I used my intuition (which you cannot be taught because I cannot explain it)” and “I can explain how you can develop a skill”.
Not possible, you're likely using the wrong words here. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition which does mention the modern misuse to mean intuition and reasoning combined. Anything that uses conscious reasoning (and thus can be taught or acquired as a skill) is not intuition.
I'm curious, how do you explain the frequency of stuff that rockets to the front page only to get lambasted in the comments for being a total shitshow? Are there really that many oblivious upvoters in /new who fire off upvotes based on title alone?
I have experienced this before (almost universally negative comments, but still many upvotes). In those cases, some people have reached out to me personally to tell me they enjoyed whatever it was and didn't agree with the negative feedback. They didn't comment because they didn't think it was worth engaging with people who clearly didn't get it, and it's fine that not all people get it.
A whole bunch of dynamics. Efficient markets require liquidity to measure quality, so expect reactions and counter-reactions. Psychology means people respond to perception over reality, so expect herd action. Ego means success challenges personality, so expect defenses. Probably lots more, too
I just hopped into the show page - of 30 items perhaps half a dozen are mildly interesting to me. There's a lot of "Something zomething agentic zzzzz..." that may well hide something good. A bunch of things that are perhaps good but not of interest to me personally (your submission would be in this category). Those half dozen that might pique my interest have all been on the front page.
I'd posit that HN is only a good place to promote things that will interest the HN crowd. Ok, not a great insight, but I don't think dropping the submission in Show HN is the problem here.
This. And also a lack of respect for people commenting about it.
I used to randomly evaluate and give honest feedback on invisible projects when I had the time. Most times I was completely ignored, even when I was the only person who really cared enough to answer. Eventually, I got bored.
There have been 203 Show HNs in the last 24 hours. This is not a bad thing but nobody can open all of them, so we look at the title and if it matches something we care about we might open it or at least upvote it.
With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new. If you get enough votes, you're supposedly moved from shownew to top stories, but somehow 5 votes wasn't enough for me (though I saw other posts that got there with just 2). I'd like to see someone attempt to persuade me otherwise, but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
> With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new
I don't think that's right, it's visible in both places, it's not "either or". Currently /new shows 5 "Show HN"s, which are also visible on /shownew.
> but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time, but best of all, the users who engage with you are in a different mindset for the "Show HN" posts.
On a normal submission, you get a whole range of top-level posts that are mostly tangible related to the topic at hand. It's basically a free-for-all, as long as it's at least a bit related to the submission's theme and topic.
On "Show HN" posts you get users who view it and comment about it as a way of providing feedback what they think of the idea itself, and its implementation. Completely different mood and input, that is much more about what you're actually sharing, than a submission.
Yeah I corrected myself in another comment. But I find with submissions to `shownew` they don't enter `top` straight away, or at all.
> You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time
With a regular submission, it gets on `top` for at least a short period of time as well as `new`, whereas that doesn't seem to always be the case for a Show HN. And certainly not in my case. That said, many Show HNs do make it to top with less votes than the tiny few I got organically, so maybe I tripped some HN's filters? Or maybe it was bad timing? But if I post again, it'll be without the Show HN.
The long trail of visits for Show HNs come because they stay on /show a lot longer than it'd stay on the frontpage. So while it can be featured on the frontpage for an hour or two, that same submission could stay 2-3 days on the Show HN frontpage, even as it dropped of from the actual frontpage.
I think the frontpage is both a lot harder to get into, faster to get dropped from there, but obviously also has a lot more traffic. But the traffic from Show HN frontpage seems to engage more (again probably because of the mindset) and it stays there for a lot longer.
Personally, when I want feedback about the idea and implementation, I'd go for Show HN, because you're out after comments and discussions then, not just traffic and views. But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".
> But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".
Traffic and views can lead to comments and discussion. I was definitely looking for feedback. I think there's a minimum threshold of interest that's required before people start engaging. But it could also be that my submission was super boring, or there was something else off-putting about it – I'd be surprised if it was the latter, because the HN audience isn't known for holding back on criticism.
I do personally check out shownew quite often, yet I would never really visit new. I might not be a typical user, but I think I am a lot more likely to engage with a shownew post than someone who comes across it on new.
It's a bit like ProductHunt. The only people that look at ProductHunt, are the people that post on ProductHunt—or at least that's its reputation. Though that's an unfair comparison, because I think on HN there is actually genuine engagement by other builders (or perhaps I'm mistaken about PH).
Not quite as bad, but I do think the ShowHN posts suffer a form of the same issue where most posts seem to get very little attention and the little there is, probably comes from other people who post to it, rather than receiving the attention of the wider community (which, at least HN has).
I might have been mistaken, I think if you post to Show HN, it puts you on both shownew and new. I think in my case I saw Show HNs with less points and engagement on the top list, and somehow mine never appeared and I wonder if maybe there's some cherry picking there.
Just opened it, interesting idea but there was not much to go on after I got the feedback for my description. On it's own I think it's not enough to hook somebody in, but could be useful as part of a bigger learning tool. And it clearly supports way more languages than Spanish so you were selling yourself short with these titles I think.
thanks for checking it out! I have been considering various flows to keep people more engaged (there are currently challenges, smart flash cards, and achievements) but at the moment the app promotes "active" learning, and I want to be careful not to introduce anything introduces "passive" learning learning paths like you might find on other apps where you don't really need to think or fully engage. My thinking at the moment is that I'd rather a user just learn something once and never come back than return every day and learn nothing..
I'm also learning a language and decided to use that as a pretext to see what I can get out of agents without coding[1].
It all depends on your goals but I've had similar thoughts and I decided I'm just making opinionated tool for myself that I'm perfectly fine with never making public. Since deciding on such path I think I actually moved closer to something that may be useful to others (but I'm still staying on that path for now).
I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed (testing along all those which does not quite fit, which I did), than creating a version custom tailored for myself. It's... interesting times.
>I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed.
That is a pretty interesting point. I've been running into that problem quite often recently.
Exact same here; not that I was expecting otherwise, but publishing on HN was a personal milestone.
Seeing the flood of low ambition projects led me to think about the issue. I was wondering if we needed a kind of "proof of work" to help sort the entries.
For instance counting a project number of contributors, number of commits, age of the project... Not that any of those metrics are good indicators or are hard to game, of course, but that could help triage good faith attempts from shallow LLM vomit.
For the record, nobody's denying how useful LLMs are, but let's also acknowledge that they excel at things that have a lot of prior art, so by definition not really a good fit for show HN any more (in the past it may have been; But what was interresting in vibe coding has never been the end result but that it was possible at all, like a dancing bear.)
But if everyone follows this advice, then everything just gets overwhelmed by "hustlers" (and their "shameless spam"), and collectively we're now all worse off because of it. It just turns into yet another tragedy of the commons situation.
I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).
Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise. But we should be aware of what we're giving up when we overall tend to behave in such a way, even if it's the inevitable outcome.
i looked at the Snapalabra webapp and... i don't even know where to start commenting on it: as someone who started vibecoding, i see how the UX, images, translations, everything feels like when the slop gets horribly wrong ; of course i could read explanations in the about section but it's a 404
thanks for having a look... Did you look at the actual app or just the landing page? You ask why would I post it even though it is not perfect. Well, I personally find it useful (thats why I made it). It helps me with bridging the gap between comprehension and expression. And I am curious to see if others also find it useful. I am in contact with professional translators etc but that is probably not something I would be wise to invest too heavily in if the idea itself is not interesting to other people.
I gave it a try, my impression is this: I’m looking at an AI generated image, and describing it based on AI generated hints, and my description is judged by an AI. The UI is fairly janky on my phone and not very appealing, though I like how it places the hints over the picture.
The fact that it’s all genAI stuff puts me off, but that might not be the same for everyone.
I think crucially, if I wanted to do this kind of challenge, I would have a better experience just using an LLM chat directly, like “Generate me an image, then judge my description of it in <language>, and give me useful language learning hints according to my level of <level>”
Thanks for the feedback. The images come from pixabay, pexels, and my own camera, some will be AI generated, most aren't - they are selected for their suitability in learning certain vocabulary. The hints are all manually added. AI is used for translations (although I am in the process of replacing most translations for the non-beta languages with professional translations) and feedback. If you found the web app UI to be "janky" maybe you could try install the native app for your device.
I see, thanks for explaining the image and hint selection process. I guess I got unlucky then, as today's image is an AI one, and my impression that the hints were generated came from the fact that there is that 'refresh' button that seems to bring up slight variations of the hints, which I assumed came straight from an LLM.
I'll admit, "janky" is not very useful feedback. The first thing that gave me that impression was a couple of seconds of loading time showing just the background color, then the whole page background flashing white every time after clicking/tapping something in the onboarding. I get this both on iOS Safari and macOS Firefox. On iOS, the page also crashed at some point with the 'a problem repeatedly occured on <url>' message.
Looking at it closer, seems like it's a Flutter web app, so I suppose this is to be expected and the experience is probably indeed better on the iOS/android builds, might be that I was judging too quickly.
ok maybe i've been too harsh, one thing i like is the "sa" flag for afrikaans language, this one really shows attention to the details, i'll try restarting my router to see if it persists
i went in it with good faith, started the webapp with a couple languages and clicking wherever my mouse landed, quickly enough it appeared to me this was not produced in good faith and i became very critic of it ; at best i would look at it like a proof of concept you send to a team of real dev and designers to get done properly, but in the current state i would never sign in
Not disagreeing on that, but often this can be explained when someone lacks time. For some articles I can only skim over the top some comments; articles with like +30 comments I can barely read all and the article, so I focus just on the first page or so.
> using AI that people are fatigued from it
I think some accounts here are actually AI accounts. I have no data to prove this, but just the voting situation is very, very odd; I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it, before retiring due to crazy moderators.
I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it
It was ever present. I'm afraid there is no solution to botting without excluding most of the Internet from a given website. HN has an even lower entry to barrier by not requiring an email as well.
I guess the real question is: is the decrease in average score more than just a function of a larger ratio (and its expected long tail score distribution)?
It's a mirror of what's happening everywhere. It has become easier than ever to create something whether that's content or an app. But because of that it's harder than ever to get attention. Quantity is drowning out quality and people are becoming desensitized to new creation.
“Also I have no idea why the average score was increased in 2022. A lot of new users?”
Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community
It's a volume problem, almost feels like people is spamming HN for quick results. I do appreciate some of the projects and conversations that happened from some of those threads, but a lot of it, it's just feels spam.
I've been noticing a lot of posts tp Ask that are essentially people uaing it as a blogging platform. Sometimes its vapid "thought leader" -type pieces, others are low-value posts or rants, and others are fairly obvious attempts at SEO.
With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.
Nah I prototype in golang because its good enough & I can easily remove all AI slop & rebuild it myself once I get the gist of what works & the project is well recieved by a community.
That being said, I sometimes write projects with AI to get feedback fast and prototyping for my own personal use cases and share it here sometimes
But since the community doesn't show support in some cases, I move on with anything new which catches my curiosity/troubles me and build it again
I open source most of the stuff but I know that its probably gonna get lost in a sea of AI slop & mine might not be better (I just ask LLM bots to create a simple main.go file to solve X and usually much of my simple projects end up being around 600 loc)
I do feel like personal computing or making projects in domains you aren't familiar in to prototype just out of curiosity/your own pragramatic use case is probably what I feel like but long term, there should be a focus on actually transitioning from AI slop to something real if anyone plans to monetize something imo
I feel like a trust factor that A) the person is willing to improve software quality even if it means rewriting it later down the line if it was generated by AI in the first term & B) the project is trying to be sustainable.
I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.
I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.
We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle
It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too
So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)
The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
What does substance mean in this case if I may ask?
I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish
Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code
Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least)
Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable?
Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
When we say we're looking for "substance" or "depth", we mean we're looking for projects that have had some significant thought and effort put into them. We're looking for a backstory, a real world problem that was causing real costs or difficulties for people, which set the developer on a journey of discovery and led them to an "a-ha" moment, where they figured out how the software should or could work, then built it in a way that's impressive (it needn't be polished just proven to work). That's the ideal.
At the other (low-substance) end of the spectrum is "lead generation tool" or "resume generator" that was built in 3 hours (and not much works other than a signup page and a link to Product Hunt). Not much of that kind of stuff makes the front page, but we see plenty of it submitted.
Most things getting 1000+ upvotes and hundreds of comments are high-substance, in that they have a back-story, some kind of deep work and/or ingenuity, and they make a great platform for curious conversation, which is, after all, what HN is for.
Thanks for your response sir! and I have had such a project where I feel like such depth can be provided.
Much of what I try to build is for my own difficulties/curiosities so this works perfectly for me!
I do have a question and I am interested if you can answer but does there have to be a single aha moment or can there be a multiple of aha moment which can build something enjoyable (atleast to me)
I don't know if it counts as promotion and sorry about that but in this comment here but like how I first went from building a yt extension for screenshot (I watch youtube lectures for studies and slides can change and I wanted to make a screenshot tool which can take photo of 2s or x seconds ago) store it in a folder and have a tool which can auto generate a slideshow of sorts with all new pictures and pdf/laser tool as well.
A lot of these were just when I had created the snapshot tool, I went into deeper and deeper because of curiosity.
Now firstly I am not sure if this is a unified tool, its 3 different products and much of the code was actually generated in less than 3 hours individually but let's say I had to connect the dots and build on them on what I feel like I can do better and better about it & added like this.
Now I don't know if this is worth a show hn given its 3 different products mashed together for my own use case. but supposing if it was one product with continuous aha-s but the original prototype was built in 3 hours as you mention, would it still be considered depth/substance (supposing that they actually give the product after multiple aha's and not just after one because at that point even to me it does feel like there is virtually no difference between that and the resume idea you mentioned)
Would Hackernews be more interested in something like this? Because I sometimes show HN when my project's the 3 hour thing but I still use it myself and build upon it and continue doing so and if I feel like I can have multiple aha's in my project, do you feel like it passes the substance test that HN is looking out for?
If so that's the case, So the feeling I get from this is that I can deploy it in a more tightknit community first (thinking a discord server) /personal use/friends, then slowly build it and once the project has had a decent bit of thought put into it, I can add a show HN article?
Because I just prototype and keep on growing what I feel like I would personally want but in most cases, there really isn't a single aha but continuous of small aha's :)
Most projects contain multiple small "a-ha" moments, but many (most?) also contain one big breakthrough, in the sense that the project didn't/couldn't work until that breakthrough happened, and after the breakthrough happened everything else flowed naturally. That breakthrough and the learnings that emerged in discovering it are always what's most interesting to learn about. If there's no big breakthrough like that, then it's probably not a very novel or impressive project.
But it's hard to answer these kinds of specific questions in the hypothetical. The HN audience prizes originality, and sometimes the thing that gives a project substance is different to much of what's come before. Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".
Thanks, I do feel like though as such one has to create their own standard of what a good show HN means if they don't want to flood show HN or are more interested in having a snowball effect in first place.
Like, not every project should be a show HN and that's okay. One can always create an interesting takeaway from any project and create an article about it and publish it on Hackernews as well.
I think what I get the feeling is to find out how original your idea is. If your idea is really original, you can greatly benefit from SHOW HN. But if not, which is okay as well, creating a normal article might be more correct (if a key takeaway from a project can be established?)
Or would you recommend a seperate place for such instead of Hackernews in this particular context?
> Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".
Yes but isn't this also causing the issue where people think that their projects are great and upload show HN and just with AI the amount of projects have grown so large and the signal ratio has just been shrinked impacting real projects as well
I feel as if the people who Submit show Hn needs to ask themselves internally what they would feel about the project without any bias if the project was randomly viewed by them with 0 upvotes, would they ignore or click and read me or upvote and comment and if the project doesn't fit the sense then to not fill SHOW HN with complete garbage AI slop deployed on lovable or something.
He may be on to something; I'd also think something may be odd with the voting situation. Are there voting bots or something? Because the voting situation here is extremely strange in the last few weeks; not even on reddit did I notice this and reddit voting system has tons of issues as well.
There is on average a new submission every minute on HN. So basically an entry exposure in /newest first page is 30 minutes.
How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable.
You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).
This reflects the sentiment I've seen in the wider industry. AI like ChatGPT has given everyone a Dunning-Kruger effect where people think they're experts at everything in tech. The lack of appreciation is concerning and toxic.
This would require a significant culture change, much bigger then what happened post zero interest era.
For now rainmakers are still praising the ability to spew bullshit.
See the recent ralph debacle. Theo this week praising someone for running 50 active "projects" with zero users.
Tobi Shopify CEO shitting out dummy projects.
Linus vibing side projects.
The thrill of seeing a project slip into the realm of the incomprehensible is too great.
I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality.
Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.
Earlier in the week there were probably about 10 posts on the front page that tempted me to post "Ask HN: Why are there so many Show HN & Ask HN posts today" - I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation.
Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
> I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation.
Months ago, I didn't refrain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780249
I actually conducted a similar analysis back in December. I was more focused on discovering the topics that most resonated with the community but ended up digging into this phenomenon as well (specifically focusing on the probability of getting over 100 upvotes)
The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10.
Analysis here if anyone is interested: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/
Please email the mods your shaky evidence; they care about that and have more detailed logs to investigate with!
I did not conduct a deep dive into the specific examples: this was my takeaway from a slope plot comparing which topics clear a 10 point threshold (eg escape the new page) vs which topics clear a 100 point threshold.
> Nearly every AI related topic does worse once it clears the 10 point threshold than any other category. This means that either the people looking through the New and Show sections are disproportionately interested in AI. This is very possible, but from my interaction with this crowd from my posts, these users tend to be more technically minded (think DIY hardware, rather than landing-page builders).
Last visual in the following section: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-int...
It's good to know that this would be helpful. My tendency would be to dig in a bit more into the individual examples that fall into this more suspicious bucket before presenting this evidence formally, but curious if you think these high level results are sufficiently helpful?
No, seriously, you should find out by emailing the mods. Footer contact link. They’re not going to be upset at you bringing tentative concerns about voting rings with shaky evidence, so long as you aren’t knocking down the door with overconfidence and denying how shaky the evidence is — which you clearly aren’t.
I’m not even remotely equipped to judge the veracity of your work, but they are, and that you care at all is, like, 0.000001%. Take the plunge and write them a note (or simply link them your comment thread here with a one sentence FYI email!). It’ll be fine :)
I just sent an email. Thank you for the push!
I don't believe it is possible to prove fraud base on just votes count. But data of which user upvote which post could generate very strong evidence.
The onus isn’t on us to prove; it’s to report concerns for assessment by the team responsible.
I turn on the `showdead` option, and at the `New Links` section I can see a lot more "Show HN" posts that are flagged dead.
It will become a ghost town. It became a gallery of other people prompts. It used to mean something else, one would expect care put into a passion project.
Rotten lemons all the way down.
Attention is a very scarce resource, the amount of noise and distraction only increases as time goes on.
Attention is all you need was very prescient.
As the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says, "Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being"
I think there should be an ai-assistance badge on every Github project. I don't want to look at Contribution graph and Commit history and then eventually the source code to find out the same information. What are we hiding now?
LoL
the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first. using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived. it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020.
if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately.
nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know
My qualitative experience is that, far from lower quality submissions, the Show HN posts that make the front page seem to be increasing in quality.
There are likely to be a number of possible explanations for this that offset the lower average score. The obvious one is that the filtering effect of the front page with a higher amount of content. Perhaps we are also seeing higher standards—a project that used to take 6 weeks and a ton of conviction now wraps up in a few hours, and people are resetting their expectations.
I’ve seen a few submissions recently that look great - convincing landing page, complex app, modern design - but are almost unusable due to JavaScript bugs. I’m guessing it’s the power of AI.
When I use the search function for topics I'm interested in and encounter Show HN that way, it's dominantly slop (and has been for most of the time I've had an account). The actual Show HN page is not much better.
The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README.
Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works.
[1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.
It's also possible that the average quality is decreasing but the quality of those that reach front page is increasing
Possible, sure. But likely? Increased submissions with no change in average quality can fully explain an increase in front page quality, as can increasing average quality, of course. And scores aren’t a quality metric, they’re are a popularity metric. The decrease in scores can also be fully explained by increased submissions. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason to suggest quality is decreasing…
I fear the day when someone figures out that a well-crafted Show HN post is a great way to get "engagement", and starts marketing to others how to do so or doing it for them.
I will be very surprised if people are not already optimizing their HN posts for marketing purposes.
It's not uncommon to see people showing off their website traffic graph on Twitter after hitting HN. You can also find people asking for advice on how to use HN to market their shitty SaaS on places like reddit.
Another kind of marketing you see quite often is people replying with a post that starts off reasonable, until the third paragraph where the commentator says "this is why we built blah" and makes you feel you are staring at an half eaten Apple with half a worm in it.
that ship has sailed along time ago
Already happened:
a. this week, someone teaching how to launch a language followed by a few tries (git repository created few hours before I saw it)
b. in this thread
> well-crafted
IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit.
Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
This is an unfortunate trend we will see across software going ahead. When the bar to make something is low, the market is inevitably flooded by cheap and mediocre stuff that overshadow everything else. Soon there won't be an incentive to make high quality stuff because even if you did, you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention with it because it's all taken away by the endless slop that won't stop.
> you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention
Thus the rise of the influencer economy. What better way is there to learn about something than from somebody you trust?
>from somebody you trust
However bad thing are or will be, trusting "influencers" is the last thing you should do.
If John Carmack mentioned a great new debugger he's been using lately, I'd probably check it out. I trust him when it comes to software discussions.
I'm taking a pretty broad definition of influencer. In your family, you may be an influencer if you are the one people come to with tech problems.
I think the judgment applies mostly to people for whom "influencer" is their actual job title.
people for whom "influencer" is their actual job title.
Whenever I see the word "influencer," my brain automatically substitutes "unemployed."
The word "Maven" comes to mind. In my circles, there are many different Mavens that I lean on depending on the categorical niche that I'm evaluating.
Interestingly, the tidal wave of poor quality business software for small businesses is what's made it possible for my own business to exist at all.
That does sound interesting; what is your business (or at least the category if you don't want to disclose)?
Basically, serving a small business whose key app they use got sold to private equity, has been turned into a subscription, support is now tickets they never get fixed, and the subscription goes up 20% a year.
The original goal of Show HN was for people to show off their work in a way that other people could participate in, sharing code and experience to satisfy intellectual curiosity. It's become nothing more than a funnel for landing pages and vibe-coded slop.
All of the fun has been sucked out of it.
We’re trying to push things back towards the original goal. Something I’m now telling people who ask for help or SCP inclusion is that Show HN isn’t Product Hunt; it’s not for launching your product and capturing signups, it’s for showcasing interesting/deep innovation that others can learn from. Of course we can’t stop anything being submitted but we can avoid promoting projects that lack substance and we can downrank posts that are not worthy of the front page or a high place on the Show page.
If your home pages looks like this (https://www.ycombinator.com), you can expect people to try want to "launch" their startups on your forum. There seems to be a large contingent of HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned! Obviously this can be the case, but its pretty evident that the technology is going nowhere and anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back. The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. For people who are interested in creative web projects, we live in very exciting times, regardless of the negative noise.
I think I agree with you & I follow a similar trend but the creative part is doing a lot of heavy work.
Like, If we are using AI to build yet another next.js App, then perhaps its me but I personally find it doesn't satisfy my curiosity.
I want to see projects be written in niche languages and new languages and AI can be perfect for that. See which language you like the most and each language/idea has their own tradeoffs but just follow what you want and now you are less likely to be stuck.
Of course though sometimes I create a python script first (I recently made a code where your png's/jpg's can automatically be updated in a slideshow like thing which I built with a custom youtube screenshot and I watched some lectures, pressed shift A and it can now have slides and I compile them to pdf and built another where I can have a pdf and then I can have a laser tool on pdf's because I love to study with notes where I can draw random things on page like whiteboard and erase them without hurting the text below for understanding._
I think converted that python tkinkter gui to fyne golang out of curiosity yesterday and I feel both tools are great fwiw
I think my point here is I'd much rather be willing to see some niche projects for ourselves and have it first meaningfully improve our lives & just experiment. I don't know not much for monetary gains but out of curiosity and seeing how far you can and cannot go.
Just build things you like/want to exist in any way that you like till AI's so damn subsidized (I don't use any agents, just claude web's free version or aistudio for free, my projects are usually around 600-700locs so I can ask it to regenerate it completely and I am fine with much of it, Perhaps I just follow KISS to its core)
You would find it funny but the problem's not in code generation but dependency management etc. atleast to me which is why I love uv scripts a lot but sometimes especially chatgpt doesn't know about uv script feature or hallucinates it hard on their web version so If I am building python applets I would paste uv script's complete docs to the LLM website I would be using.
It isn't just the case that AI generated content tends to be slop, it's that it's intellectually uninteresting and provides little worth discussing on a forum whose entire purpose is intellectually curious conversation.
Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point.
>The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion.
They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.)
Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.
I do feel like its much more so the art of cooking than birdwatching (atleast imo)
Some people do want their food to be made by a chef sometimes even in front of them explaining them everything and the journey to them makes it worth it
For some people, it can be that the food that they buy from a shop nearby in front of them is good
For some, they want the cooking to be done out of their visible range and just want the food served
And the last categories probably the ones who will go to supermarkets to get some chips with 3 months expiry date created in a large factory
Hackernews to me feels like its 1 & 2 for me. What you describe as birdwatching is much rather only 1st category to me.
Like, in the 1st category people want to eat the special dish created by the trials of countless nights and passion
On the 2nd category, you are still witnessing a person but they are probably following a much more experience and in the start by say following tutorials or watching recipes. But they are much more democratized
I don't know, I don't go in hotels that much so I don't know the 1st part and how possible it is but I do go to 2nd category and I go around my local shops and see people make french fries and chat with them and ask how long have they been here and making french fries etc., they are willing to tell you everything.
I do feel like "AI slop" is kind of the 2nd category because like I am not only just interested in whether or not this recipe's entirely unique but I am rather interested in everything around it, what infrastructure choices they make and what coding tech stack they used & are they passionate about the project or what did they end up creating the prototype for.
the 3rd part is what I despise where think burger king or mcdonald etc. where the recipes come from franchise and everything comes and the person just serves you. All decisions are bland (think yet another nextjs app).
I don't think much of us want HN to be a supermarket or another macD but do we want this to be a cooking show where chefs build the whole recipes to serve us or do we want it to be a lot of neighbourly shops who have friendly people working who will chat with us and we can eat the french fries they make :)
(I love the french fries my neighbourhood makes, they are really spicy combine them with spring rolls and some drink or a good yogurt and it feels soo good lol, plus all of this costs less a 1$ or 2$ at most 3$ where I live, I can go and eat without worrying at all about the cost of eating outside usually if picked from the right shops)
Although I have never had the opportunity of seeing a chef cook his own dish in such sense but I can imagine that its great & I would like them as well but to me hackiness includes both, them hacking around with recipes to build something nice and the other hacking around with infrastructure like what logo and how close they are to me and even things like pricing imo.
I consider the latter to be like much more reachable than the former and to me I don't know how to explain but the idea of hackiness isn't just some clean final product, its also like just building something and gluing things and its messy too. And I love both of them both clean and messy hacking, I just want to know how much an human has been in the loop, where'd they get the idea and what they implemented in etc.
I don't know I live in a small city connected to a large city and I feel like I enjoy much more the messy aspects whereas people from large cities are much more likely to want to go to a large hotel for a dine or have a more artisanal taste.
So I have seen my fair share of people who want both.
Right now, I feel like it honestly depends on how large or small community you feel HN is.
If you consider HN to be too large aka you find it less likely to trust projects who get to here in the first place, you would want an artisanal person to build things for hand for you to enjoy
But if you consider HN to be small and there is just this idea of treating each person more individually and just this unwritten rule of law which generates more trust and faith in trying out new options even if they are hacky as long as I can sort of trust them decently and they are still involved in the loop and not completely 100% detached unlike say a large conglomerate franchise imo
Honestly I want HN to be a small place and not a large place but I feel like even HN is a large place for me but the problem with completely small places or building one's own is that you don't get visitors at all. We probably need something in between HN and no social media promotions (only via word of mouth) imo.
I have been trying to replace HN for quite a while now for something more nicher but still well connected place as well. Honestly have thought multiple times to create an HN alternative with the same UI and everything and same rules but just smaller and probably federated (ironically Gonna have it be vibe coded in single main.go golang :) hosting on a cheap recurring deal netcup server I got) but moderation of >0 people is hard and getting >0 people interested in a new website is hard as well which is precisely what the main post is about.
The point is the following:
If you want a chef to explain and show his recipe and then you find out he asked chat gpt or got it from a recipe website, would you still be interested in hearing about the 'journey' he took?
If that chef then also ordered the food from a catering service by forwarding that recipe to them, does it make sense to interview him about his craft and listen to him?
It's the same with creative things. Sure, you can ask a musician or a painter about their inspiration/process etc., because they went through the process and made something. You could learn something from them, other than 'here's how i asked someone else to make this'.
So, going to an art forum and displaying your AI generated art there, ready to answer questions about the process is pretty much completely pointless and also cheapens every actual artist that came there to display and talk about something they actually made.
It also has a psychological effect on the people that use it. I know some people that get immense feelings of accomplishment out of using AI to generate art and music. They feel like they made something and are proud about it. For a lot of people like that, any incentive to learn about things is gone, because they get the exact same feeling by using AI to make it.
On the other hand: If you are an artist making things and there are a million people generating things every 5 minutes and showing it around everywhere, it dilutes recognition of what you made. You show it to your friends and they're like: Oh yeah, i made like 5 of those yesterday.
True: AI-art wont have a "storyline" (-:
Yes I agree with what you are saying. And this is why I am saying that if this place is a place for chef's then I agree that even a minor use of AI can be disheartening.
Once again if HN is solely for the 1st sector of chefs 100%, then AI use should be completely restricted against
But if HN falls into what I call the 2nd category too then does it really matter if the local chef's using a recipe built by chatgpt?
I completely understand what you are saying man and the psychological effects are real.
And this is why I feel like if Hackernews is targetted for people in the 1st category or the 2nd
Because if there is a forum where both local shops who say makes fries which are built in less time and there is also the chef which takes hours building teh perfect food and both of them are on the same forum & they probably get the same space in it then a conflict between them is sort of meant to occur with all the effects which you mention and feels to me like a prisoners dilemma because if artisanal chefs are impacted by local normal cooks lets say then just being a local cook would get stigmatized in a forum. Overall its a net negative for both.
But it honestly depends on how negative if the eyeballs come on both, sure they can split and create different forums but neither wants to leave the large one and the large forum owner has had incentives in both artisanal and local cooks (YC funding AI companies and hackernews once being so damn creative that I hear stories about when one day the moderator decided to have the front page be all about erlang/elixir from a story I remember from a HN "veteran")
I mean I love em both. It's not an or condition but honestly what I hear in HN is the path of least resistance ie. if you don't like moderation, then make your own place but I do feel like the moderation's atleast a bit confused about their interests too.
Probably another reason why I am interested in fediverse because I want it to be like a street where we can have both artisanal chef clubs and the local shops fair while on the same road but a bit of problem with fediverse atleast in this context of HN alike is that lemmy's c/technology can probably replace HN in some contexts but the streets of lemmy are empty because everybody's still here on HN.
I don't disagree with what you are expressing but I think you are overgeneralising.
Sometimes the idea itself can be interesting. If AI is used to manifest the idea then so be it!
Secondly, I think it is almost unavoidable to use some ai generated content (code, design etc) when developing these days. Its just a tool and it can be used well or used poorly.
Lastly, I agree that there does exist a lot of what can truly be labelled "AI slop" where it is just lazy regurgitated content, and that is annoying.
I think there are a few people out there with great ideas, that might benefit from having access to tools to make these real. I'm all for those and would love to see them.
But i also think the majority of these cases will be bad ideas that don't need to be made at all. Or even ideas that are AI generated by asking a LLM for ideas. I don't care if they are made or not, but i would rather not have those on the internet and especially on 'show and tell' places like ShowHN etc.
I'm also not opposed to using AI as a tool in development or similar. But there are more and more examples of purely vibe-coded or generated things and those fall in a different category in my opinion.
I completely agree man, this is my sentiment too.
I am much more interested in infrastructure related things and price optimizing. I've spent hours and days looking at all the options compiling resources and building scrapers to scrape information of servers and having them be made via LLM :) just to get the idea of context.
I don't know but like what i possess isn't a deep knowledge within the domain itself (one of the reasons why I love golang is that all the tradeoffs of it are okay with me and it's complexity just feels linear to me and I would have this simplicity in code where if I ever wanted to, I just feel so much more confident about tweaking LLM generated golang code than say rust)
A lot of what I love is the hacking around the project. Ooh so you used golang to make it cross compatible easier? Are you using the modernc driver? What servers are you gonna use? (hetzner,ovh,netcup etc.) while the code being completely open source and I will be transparent about how much the servers cost and how much I make in the middle and just some sustainable ideals so that it can be day one profitable but without ripping anyone off.
Y'know mixing and matching different services. I think I am really frugal so like this is like the deepest intersection of like all of my hobbies combined.
I face any problem -> use free llm from web -> python/golang code -> deploy it on my web server -> use cloudflare tunnels and custom scripts + zed/others and micro to deploy servers great (I prefer using tmux as well with zed terminal)
But even with all of this, I wouldn't say that the code isn't slop but I do feel like its pretty much reasonable and I have been vocal about how if I ever create something and a community actually occurs out of it & they want me to recreate it from scratch without any LLM assistance, I actually would even if that means reading documentations of all the libraries used in such golang project etc.
But like the reason why I still do things is because I do it for myself and I am pretty impatient. I build things which trouble me first and foremost to fix issues I have & that's kind of source of joy I have.
I don't know man, like I hate AI for all the psychological issues its gonna cause but I still want to build things without having to spend say days in a project when I would be facing the problem right now.
I think I have always imagined myself as some consultant who wants to give the best option out there and have the code back and manage it or similar.
It's just that writing the code part myself isn't the most exciting part to me. seeing computers go work the way I want to in the decision choices that I make and can justify is the most exciting part to me.
Like does this make sense? I am not exactly pro AI either, I have written so extensively about it here on how AI is a bubble and the psychological and social impact it has.
In a way, I don't think I fit in the two boxes of pro AI or completely anti AI. I just am in the middle and I don't know if there's a term for it but like, I don't know if someone knows a term for what I feel about AI it will be brilliant but even if there isn't a mainstream word for it. I just don't really want to change myself to fit in any box. I have my nuanced opinion and I have thought about joining either of these boxes but being honest neither fits my worldview.
Does this make sense?
> HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned!
Honestly, I used to be one of them. I recently saw a great library (atcute) that changed my opinion. I think most AI sceptics haven't had this experience. They saw AI slops and set their opinion: AI-generated codes are bad. I can't really blame them, though, because there are so many of AI slops.
> anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back.
It's true. However, I think people who create AI slops are worse than those who don't use it. They are diligently making this world a worse place.
> Obviously this can be the case
More often than not that is the case.
There's also a very simple reality of AI vibecoded projects:
If you were able to get an LLM to vibecode a project for you, so could any of us, so why even share the project as if you are showing off? It takes very little effort for anyone else to prompt an agent and get a similar result.
That means the only thing left in a shared vibecoded project is the original idea, and well, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone has them and idea spread has never really been a limiting factor.
So what are you really sharing at that point?
Noise.
"Look at this code I got an LLM to generate" is inherently uninteresting.
Maybe the ideas…aren’t good?
Heresy!
They're also overwhelming AI related posts: https://ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/
I'm not sure I'd label 20% as "overwhelming." I'm surprised it's not higher, to be honest.
That's fair actually. I wrote this comment a little off the cuff and rereading the article (it's been a while since I wrote it!) it's more like a strong plurality, so overwhelming was a bit much
This is also kinda funny and ironic: 'This is not, as I have labeled it, a flood, deluge, or avalanche. It's an earthquake. A rupture. Quiet in 2022, five-alarm fire in 2023.' (ibid)
presumably ones in favor, non?
AI may be the largest bubble yet in history, and it has the ability to sustain itself directly via online hype-bots.
tulips can't specifically target all of your replies and explain why you're a cunt and should buy more
this is an excellent observation.
the bubble might be a thing of concern, but the phenomenon behind it is much bigger then most can comprehend. even among hackers, we see a very naive and superficial understanding. most are still thinking in the current framework of the game while the game fundamentally changed. the lemon market will persist regardless of an imminent burst!
even if the average tone changes, the fabrics of this game is forever eroded. hacker news current structure makes no sense when consensus can be fabricated (automated karma farming + targeted "collective action" is cheap, people have already realized this and soon will become intolerant). showing a project means nothing, showing the equivalent of a prompt has negative value. people will still urge for care and passion, discovery, interesting ideas. people will urge for a way to separate a vibed nothing-project, valued at 25 Claude sonnet prompts, in response to the latest Simon wilinson new hot take in 35 minutes. people will want a way to separate a good faith idea cultivated with passion from a "look what I did to promote myself while spending 75 cents" idea.
Eternal September /thread
Sort of. Eternal September phenomenom was a regualar September cadence. Then AOL came.
There was no warning / taster of this. AI just dialed up to 11 real quick.
I personally find it very strange that you cannot downvote until 30+ userpoints, but that you CAN immediately post a new HN discussion.
Seems like there should be a restriction on greenies (from posting) until they've lurked more, here.
It does makes sense in terms of resulting damage. Make a bot that will post new discussion, it will instantly get flagged to oblivion. Make 10 bots that downvote something - it will take quite some time for the mods to find them.
It just seems to me that you ought'a be able to downvote before making posts (and also flagging). Perhaps good upvoted comment boughts ought be able to make submissions (eventually), too..?
Downvoting needs much more than that actually (is it 500+ these days?) Maybe you mean flagging? Which is similar enough to still make your argument work, but just saying.
Yes, you are correct. I also feel you should be able to downvote before flagging (since flagging is effective just a mega downvote).
I tried to share a project on Show HN recently (twice!), and I didn't get a single user interaction (basically no one even visited the project, nevermind responding with a comment). I don't think my title was that bad, its more just that there are so many new projects using AI that people are fatigued from it. Its kind of a shame because I'm sure there are lots of really good ideas that are being completely overlooked because of this.
Everyone is always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and we can advise on whether a project and its intro post are a good fit for HN. Plenty of good projects get missed by the audience, but we can always put things in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.
The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).
> If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which interest the community) would get karma along with the original submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.
Did this happen?
[flagged]
I am a Show HN expert. You need to just keep trying until you get traction. Sometimes it's title. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's more substantial - a chance to rethink, redo, rebrand, rewrite, etc.
Also, mods can help. They are friendly and generous. Reach out to them via email and ask them about your post. Often they have something to say and it's useful.
The challenge you encountered is nothing to do with the recent spike. I've been doing Show HN for 10 years. It's always been this way. It's never "easy" to get the attention of the community. But there are some things that can help, such as the time you post.
Check out these heatmaps of the average/mean post score versus hour/day of post and you can see the trends: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=archive
> You need to just keep trying until you get traction
is this a violation of rules, and you simply take attention by spamming from those who follow rules?
> Sometimes it's title. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's more substantial - a chance to rethink, redo, rebrand, rewrite, etc.
How do you choose what to change? No interaction means no feedback.
Intuition. Trial and error. Rejection gives you a chance to rethink. Experiment!
Don’t overthink it. Don’t get obstructed by choice.
> Intuition
I mean no offense by this, but intuition literally means acquiring knowledge without an explanation. Did you mean experience or are you telling GP that you cannot explain how you do it?
No that is not what it means. I did not mean experience; I did not mean that I cannot explain how I do it; I meant what I said: intuition. I can explain how I do it; I can even explain how it works (as far as I think), but I don't really know how it works, and I don't care. I just care that I can do it, and that it works.
They mean to distinguish intuition, which draws on experience and can only be reflected on, from experience, which deals in actionable heuristics. Any appeal to intuition you make will fall on experiential advice when pressed. Intuition _works_ here, but if you mean to share your wisdom, you must translate it through experience, which is the actual concept we communicate through.
Essentially yes, thanks. I was focused on the difference between “I used my intuition (which you cannot be taught because I cannot explain it)” and “I can explain how you can develop a skill”.
I can explain how to develop the skill of intuition
Not possible, you're likely using the wrong words here. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition which does mention the modern misuse to mean intuition and reasoning combined. Anything that uses conscious reasoning (and thus can be taught or acquired as a skill) is not intuition.
I differ on the “definition” of intuition
What is the meaning of quotations here?
I'm curious, how do you explain the frequency of stuff that rockets to the front page only to get lambasted in the comments for being a total shitshow? Are there really that many oblivious upvoters in /new who fire off upvotes based on title alone?
I have experienced this before (almost universally negative comments, but still many upvotes). In those cases, some people have reached out to me personally to tell me they enjoyed whatever it was and didn't agree with the negative feedback. They didn't comment because they didn't think it was worth engaging with people who clearly didn't get it, and it's fine that not all people get it.
A whole bunch of dynamics. Efficient markets require liquidity to measure quality, so expect reactions and counter-reactions. Psychology means people respond to perception over reality, so expect herd action. Ego means success challenges personality, so expect defenses. Probably lots more, too
I just hopped into the show page - of 30 items perhaps half a dozen are mildly interesting to me. There's a lot of "Something zomething agentic zzzzz..." that may well hide something good. A bunch of things that are perhaps good but not of interest to me personally (your submission would be in this category). Those half dozen that might pique my interest have all been on the front page.
I'd posit that HN is only a good place to promote things that will interest the HN crowd. Ok, not a great insight, but I don't think dropping the submission in Show HN is the problem here.
This. And also a lack of respect for people commenting about it.
I used to randomly evaluate and give honest feedback on invisible projects when I had the time. Most times I was completely ignored, even when I was the only person who really cared enough to answer. Eventually, I got bored.
I've had similar experiences, but also good experiences where the person reached out/replied and we had a conversation.
I suspect for some of the non-engaging posts it's just throwing it out there, inexperience or part of the product hunt playbook
There have been 203 Show HNs in the last 24 hours. This is not a bad thing but nobody can open all of them, so we look at the title and if it matches something we care about we might open it or at least upvote it.
I'm actually surprised that its only 203!
With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new. If you get enough votes, you're supposedly moved from shownew to top stories, but somehow 5 votes wasn't enough for me (though I saw other posts that got there with just 2). I'd like to see someone attempt to persuade me otherwise, but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
> With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new
I don't think that's right, it's visible in both places, it's not "either or". Currently /new shows 5 "Show HN"s, which are also visible on /shownew.
> but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time, but best of all, the users who engage with you are in a different mindset for the "Show HN" posts.
On a normal submission, you get a whole range of top-level posts that are mostly tangible related to the topic at hand. It's basically a free-for-all, as long as it's at least a bit related to the submission's theme and topic.
On "Show HN" posts you get users who view it and comment about it as a way of providing feedback what they think of the idea itself, and its implementation. Completely different mood and input, that is much more about what you're actually sharing, than a submission.
That's my experience of "Show HN" at least, YMMV.
> it's visible in both places
Yeah I corrected myself in another comment. But I find with submissions to `shownew` they don't enter `top` straight away, or at all.
> You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time
With a regular submission, it gets on `top` for at least a short period of time as well as `new`, whereas that doesn't seem to always be the case for a Show HN. And certainly not in my case. That said, many Show HNs do make it to top with less votes than the tiny few I got organically, so maybe I tripped some HN's filters? Or maybe it was bad timing? But if I post again, it'll be without the Show HN.
The long trail of visits for Show HNs come because they stay on /show a lot longer than it'd stay on the frontpage. So while it can be featured on the frontpage for an hour or two, that same submission could stay 2-3 days on the Show HN frontpage, even as it dropped of from the actual frontpage.
I think the frontpage is both a lot harder to get into, faster to get dropped from there, but obviously also has a lot more traffic. But the traffic from Show HN frontpage seems to engage more (again probably because of the mindset) and it stays there for a lot longer.
Personally, when I want feedback about the idea and implementation, I'd go for Show HN, because you're out after comments and discussions then, not just traffic and views. But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".
> But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".
Traffic and views can lead to comments and discussion. I was definitely looking for feedback. I think there's a minimum threshold of interest that's required before people start engaging. But it could also be that my submission was super boring, or there was something else off-putting about it – I'd be surprised if it was the latter, because the HN audience isn't known for holding back on criticism.
I do personally check out shownew quite often, yet I would never really visit new. I might not be a typical user, but I think I am a lot more likely to engage with a shownew post than someone who comes across it on new.
It's a bit like ProductHunt. The only people that look at ProductHunt, are the people that post on ProductHunt—or at least that's its reputation. Though that's an unfair comparison, because I think on HN there is actually genuine engagement by other builders (or perhaps I'm mistaken about PH).
I don't think it's wildly unfair, it's a genuine problem.
Not that I have the answer unfortunately.
As in you think it's as bad on HN as it is on PH? From what I've heard PH is basically dead internet.
Not quite as bad, but I do think the ShowHN posts suffer a form of the same issue where most posts seem to get very little attention and the little there is, probably comes from other people who post to it, rather than receiving the attention of the wider community (which, at least HN has).
Huh, didn’t know about shownew. But looking at it now, wow. That’s a *lot* of AI slop. Probably makes it even harder to get into new.
I might have been mistaken, I think if you post to Show HN, it puts you on both shownew and new. I think in my case I saw Show HNs with less points and engagement on the top list, and somehow mine never appeared and I wonder if maybe there's some cherry picking there.
Just opened it, interesting idea but there was not much to go on after I got the feedback for my description. On it's own I think it's not enough to hook somebody in, but could be useful as part of a bigger learning tool. And it clearly supports way more languages than Spanish so you were selling yourself short with these titles I think.
thanks for checking it out! I have been considering various flows to keep people more engaged (there are currently challenges, smart flash cards, and achievements) but at the moment the app promotes "active" learning, and I want to be careful not to introduce anything introduces "passive" learning learning paths like you might find on other apps where you don't really need to think or fully engage. My thinking at the moment is that I'd rather a user just learn something once and never come back than return every day and learn nothing..
I'm also learning a language and decided to use that as a pretext to see what I can get out of agents without coding[1].
It all depends on your goals but I've had similar thoughts and I decided I'm just making opinionated tool for myself that I'm perfectly fine with never making public. Since deciding on such path I think I actually moved closer to something that may be useful to others (but I'm still staying on that path for now).
I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed (testing along all those which does not quite fit, which I did), than creating a version custom tailored for myself. It's... interesting times.
1. https://imgur.com/a/73sBI7G
>I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed.
That is a pretty interesting point. I've been running into that problem quite often recently.
Exact same here; not that I was expecting otherwise, but publishing on HN was a personal milestone.
Seeing the flood of low ambition projects led me to think about the issue. I was wondering if we needed a kind of "proof of work" to help sort the entries. For instance counting a project number of contributors, number of commits, age of the project... Not that any of those metrics are good indicators or are hard to game, of course, but that could help triage good faith attempts from shallow LLM vomit.
For the record, nobody's denying how useful LLMs are, but let's also acknowledge that they excel at things that have a lot of prior art, so by definition not really a good fit for show HN any more (in the past it may have been; But what was interresting in vibe coding has never been the end result but that it was possible at all, like a dancing bear.)
> twice
Right here. The problem is right here.
Unfortunately, the internet is a race to the bottom. You need to hustle (euphemism for "shamelessly spam") for attention.
But if everyone follows this advice, then everything just gets overwhelmed by "hustlers" (and their "shameless spam"), and collectively we're now all worse off because of it. It just turns into yet another tragedy of the commons situation.
I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).
Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise. But we should be aware of what we're giving up when we overall tend to behave in such a way, even if it's the inevitable outcome.
Yes, this is why it's called a race to the bottom. If everyone does what is best for themselves then everyone's result will be worse.
i looked at the Snapalabra webapp and... i don't even know where to start commenting on it: as someone who started vibecoding, i see how the UX, images, translations, everything feels like when the slop gets horribly wrong ; of course i could read explanations in the about section but it's a 404
why even post that?
thanks for having a look... Did you look at the actual app or just the landing page? You ask why would I post it even though it is not perfect. Well, I personally find it useful (thats why I made it). It helps me with bridging the gap between comprehension and expression. And I am curious to see if others also find it useful. I am in contact with professional translators etc but that is probably not something I would be wise to invest too heavily in if the idea itself is not interesting to other people.
I gave it a try, my impression is this: I’m looking at an AI generated image, and describing it based on AI generated hints, and my description is judged by an AI. The UI is fairly janky on my phone and not very appealing, though I like how it places the hints over the picture.
The fact that it’s all genAI stuff puts me off, but that might not be the same for everyone.
I think crucially, if I wanted to do this kind of challenge, I would have a better experience just using an LLM chat directly, like “Generate me an image, then judge my description of it in <language>, and give me useful language learning hints according to my level of <level>”
Thanks for the feedback. The images come from pixabay, pexels, and my own camera, some will be AI generated, most aren't - they are selected for their suitability in learning certain vocabulary. The hints are all manually added. AI is used for translations (although I am in the process of replacing most translations for the non-beta languages with professional translations) and feedback. If you found the web app UI to be "janky" maybe you could try install the native app for your device.
I see, thanks for explaining the image and hint selection process. I guess I got unlucky then, as today's image is an AI one, and my impression that the hints were generated came from the fact that there is that 'refresh' button that seems to bring up slight variations of the hints, which I assumed came straight from an LLM.
I'll admit, "janky" is not very useful feedback. The first thing that gave me that impression was a couple of seconds of loading time showing just the background color, then the whole page background flashing white every time after clicking/tapping something in the onboarding. I get this both on iOS Safari and macOS Firefox. On iOS, the page also crashed at some point with the 'a problem repeatedly occured on <url>' message.
Looking at it closer, seems like it's a Flutter web app, so I suppose this is to be expected and the experience is probably indeed better on the iOS/android builds, might be that I was judging too quickly.
ok maybe i've been too harsh, one thing i like is the "sa" flag for afrikaans language, this one really shows attention to the details, i'll try restarting my router to see if it persists
i went in it with good faith, started the webapp with a couple languages and clicking wherever my mouse landed, quickly enough it appeared to me this was not produced in good faith and i became very critic of it ; at best i would look at it like a proof of concept you send to a team of real dev and designers to get done properly, but in the current state i would never sign in
> nevermind responding with a comment
Not disagreeing on that, but often this can be explained when someone lacks time. For some articles I can only skim over the top some comments; articles with like +30 comments I can barely read all and the article, so I focus just on the first page or so.
> using AI that people are fatigued from it
I think some accounts here are actually AI accounts. I have no data to prove this, but just the voting situation is very, very odd; I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it, before retiring due to crazy moderators.
same here
I guess the real question is: is the decrease in average score more than just a function of a larger ratio (and its expected long tail score distribution)?
It's likely long tail. I don't think good Show HNs are gone. They are still there, but they are being overwhelmed by lots of low quality submissions.
I believe that as well.
Anecdotally it feels like there aren’t very many Show HNs on the home page. Sadly they seem to be increasingly pushed out by big news stories.
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It's hard not to blame LLMs. There was someone on the front page with a Show HN for some LLM-generated calculators recently.
This was just a few days ago, but IIRC this post got some positive reactions
From other LLMs.
It's a mirror of what's happening everywhere. It has become easier than ever to create something whether that's content or an app. But because of that it's harder than ever to get attention. Quantity is drowning out quality and people are becoming desensitized to new creation.
“Also I have no idea why the average score was increased in 2022. A lot of new users?”
Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community
It's a volume problem, almost feels like people is spamming HN for quick results. I do appreciate some of the projects and conversations that happened from some of those threads, but a lot of it, it's just feels spam.
I've been noticing a lot of posts tp Ask that are essentially people uaing it as a blogging platform. Sometimes its vapid "thought leader" -type pieces, others are low-value posts or rants, and others are fairly obvious attempts at SEO.
With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.
More AI projects. Less quality.
Yeah, feels like 80% are AI or AI adjacent things. Agentic this, Claude SKILLS.md that, AI design third and so on.
AI DOS practically. Unfortunate for those that have curious projects that end up drowning in slop.
Written in Rust, though.
No memory bugs then. Just like ... well Node, Ruby, Python, C#, Java...
But it's Blazingly Fast!
Nah I prototype in golang because its good enough & I can easily remove all AI slop & rebuild it myself once I get the gist of what works & the project is well recieved by a community.
That being said, I sometimes write projects with AI to get feedback fast and prototyping for my own personal use cases and share it here sometimes
But since the community doesn't show support in some cases, I move on with anything new which catches my curiosity/troubles me and build it again
I open source most of the stuff but I know that its probably gonna get lost in a sea of AI slop & mine might not be better (I just ask LLM bots to create a simple main.go file to solve X and usually much of my simple projects end up being around 600 loc)
I do feel like personal computing or making projects in domains you aren't familiar in to prototype just out of curiosity/your own pragramatic use case is probably what I feel like but long term, there should be a focus on actually transitioning from AI slop to something real if anyone plans to monetize something imo
You are so last winter.
The problem is all the AI slop that people are publishing to bolster their CVs.
Projects are easier to create, feels like now marketing becomes even more important
I feel like a trust factor that A) the person is willing to improve software quality even if it means rewriting it later down the line if it was generated by AI in the first term & B) the project is trying to be sustainable.
I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.
I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.
We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle
It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too
So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)
The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
Nope - for Show HN, substance is now more important than ever. That’s what we’re thinking about in the moderation team anyway.
What does substance mean in this case if I may ask?
I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish
Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code
Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least)
Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable?
Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
When we say we're looking for "substance" or "depth", we mean we're looking for projects that have had some significant thought and effort put into them. We're looking for a backstory, a real world problem that was causing real costs or difficulties for people, which set the developer on a journey of discovery and led them to an "a-ha" moment, where they figured out how the software should or could work, then built it in a way that's impressive (it needn't be polished just proven to work). That's the ideal.
At the other (low-substance) end of the spectrum is "lead generation tool" or "resume generator" that was built in 3 hours (and not much works other than a signup page and a link to Product Hunt). Not much of that kind of stuff makes the front page, but we see plenty of it submitted.
You can look down the list of most highly-ever upvoted Show HNs here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Most things getting 1000+ upvotes and hundreds of comments are high-substance, in that they have a back-story, some kind of deep work and/or ingenuity, and they make a great platform for curious conversation, which is, after all, what HN is for.
Thanks for your response sir! and I have had such a project where I feel like such depth can be provided.
Much of what I try to build is for my own difficulties/curiosities so this works perfectly for me!
I do have a question and I am interested if you can answer but does there have to be a single aha moment or can there be a multiple of aha moment which can build something enjoyable (atleast to me)
I don't know if it counts as promotion and sorry about that but in this comment here but like how I first went from building a yt extension for screenshot (I watch youtube lectures for studies and slides can change and I wanted to make a screenshot tool which can take photo of 2s or x seconds ago) store it in a folder and have a tool which can auto generate a slideshow of sorts with all new pictures and pdf/laser tool as well.
A lot of these were just when I had created the snapshot tool, I went into deeper and deeper because of curiosity.
Now firstly I am not sure if this is a unified tool, its 3 different products and much of the code was actually generated in less than 3 hours individually but let's say I had to connect the dots and build on them on what I feel like I can do better and better about it & added like this.
Now I don't know if this is worth a show hn given its 3 different products mashed together for my own use case. but supposing if it was one product with continuous aha-s but the original prototype was built in 3 hours as you mention, would it still be considered depth/substance (supposing that they actually give the product after multiple aha's and not just after one because at that point even to me it does feel like there is virtually no difference between that and the resume idea you mentioned)
Would Hackernews be more interested in something like this? Because I sometimes show HN when my project's the 3 hour thing but I still use it myself and build upon it and continue doing so and if I feel like I can have multiple aha's in my project, do you feel like it passes the substance test that HN is looking out for?
If so that's the case, So the feeling I get from this is that I can deploy it in a more tightknit community first (thinking a discord server) /personal use/friends, then slowly build it and once the project has had a decent bit of thought put into it, I can add a show HN article?
Because I just prototype and keep on growing what I feel like I would personally want but in most cases, there really isn't a single aha but continuous of small aha's :)
(for context about the other message) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099#46703977]
Most projects contain multiple small "a-ha" moments, but many (most?) also contain one big breakthrough, in the sense that the project didn't/couldn't work until that breakthrough happened, and after the breakthrough happened everything else flowed naturally. That breakthrough and the learnings that emerged in discovering it are always what's most interesting to learn about. If there's no big breakthrough like that, then it's probably not a very novel or impressive project.
But it's hard to answer these kinds of specific questions in the hypothetical. The HN audience prizes originality, and sometimes the thing that gives a project substance is different to much of what's come before. Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".
Thanks, I do feel like though as such one has to create their own standard of what a good show HN means if they don't want to flood show HN or are more interested in having a snowball effect in first place.
Like, not every project should be a show HN and that's okay. One can always create an interesting takeaway from any project and create an article about it and publish it on Hackernews as well.
I think what I get the feeling is to find out how original your idea is. If your idea is really original, you can greatly benefit from SHOW HN. But if not, which is okay as well, creating a normal article might be more correct (if a key takeaway from a project can be established?)
Or would you recommend a seperate place for such instead of Hackernews in this particular context?
> Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".
Yes but isn't this also causing the issue where people think that their projects are great and upload show HN and just with AI the amount of projects have grown so large and the signal ratio has just been shrinked impacting real projects as well
I feel as if the people who Submit show Hn needs to ask themselves internally what they would feel about the project without any bias if the project was randomly viewed by them with 0 upvotes, would they ignore or click and read me or upvote and comment and if the project doesn't fit the sense then to not fill SHOW HN with complete garbage AI slop deployed on lovable or something.
Funny how in a world of AI, human curation is becoming more important.
He may be on to something; I'd also think something may be odd with the voting situation. Are there voting bots or something? Because the voting situation here is extremely strange in the last few weeks; not even on reddit did I notice this and reddit voting system has tons of issues as well.
credible studies suggest 20-40% of posts and interactions on social media are bots.
why would it be different here?
the struggle is to build consensus in an open and democratic forum and we've solved that problem via LLMs.
There is on average a new submission every minute on HN. So basically an entry exposure in /newest first page is 30 minutes.
How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable.
You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).
Definitely
Almost like some strange new technology is increasing the number of people making low quality projects they want to show off....
Edit: this was my fault.
I recently saw a Show HN [1] that had no link to anywhere, but it did have a project name. It currently has 13 points.
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Looks like it has links now.
It's weird because it's named similar to a popular Android logging library: https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber
You know, it's my bad. I use the Modern for HN Chrome extension, and it apparently hid the entire text there.
Lesson learned. Extension uninstalled. Sorry for the noise.
This reflects the sentiment I've seen in the wider industry. AI like ChatGPT has given everyone a Dunning-Kruger effect where people think they're experts at everything in tech. The lack of appreciation is concerning and toxic.
Most of it is slop.
Sooner or later this will hit the VCs. Translated into a mass underfunding.
This would require a significant culture change, much bigger then what happened post zero interest era. For now rainmakers are still praising the ability to spew bullshit. See the recent ralph debacle. Theo this week praising someone for running 50 active "projects" with zero users. Tobi Shopify CEO shitting out dummy projects. Linus vibing side projects. The thrill of seeing a project slip into the realm of the incomprehensible is too great.
I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality. Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.
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