FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsThe cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective.
I feel like this is what AI has done to the programming discussion. It draws in boring people with boring projects who don't have anything interesting to say about programming.
Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.
It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious.
Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews.
It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it.
One of those comments was genuinely useful feedback from Argentina about localization. That alone made it worth posting. But the post was gone from page 1 in what felt like minutes.
What's interesting is this isn't a weekend vibe-coded project - it involves actual physical production, printing, and shipping. But from the outside it probably looks like "another AI wrapper," which I think is the core problem: the flood of low-effort AI projects has made people reflexively skeptical of anything that mentions generation, even when there's real infrastructure behind it.
When I launched a side project a couple years ago, getting to the front page felt like a real achievement requiring weeks of iteration and genuine problem-solving. Now you can vibe-code something in a weekend and post it. The median Show HN quality has dropped, so people naturally vote less aggressively on the category as a whole.
The 37% stuck at 1 point stat is the real story. The solution is not changing HN mechanics. It is people being more selective about what they post - and the community being more willing to say "this is not ready" in the comments rather than just silently scrolling past.
Give people the ability to submit a “Show HN” one year in advance. Specifically, the user specifies the title and a short summary, then has to wait at least year until they can write the remaining description and submit the post. The user can wait more than a year or not submit at all; the delay (and specifying the title/summary beforehand) is so that only projects that have been worked on for over a year are submit-able.
Alternatively, this can be a special category of “Show HN” instead of replacing the main thing.
Before, projects were more often carefully human crafted.
But nowadays we expect such projects to be "vibe coded" in a day. And so, we don't have the motivation to invest mental energy in something that we expect to be crap underneath and probably a nice show off without future.
Even if the result is not the best in the world, I think that what interest us is to see the effort.
I took a look at the project and it was a 100k+ LoC vibe-coded repository. The project itself looked good, but it seemed quite excessive in terms of what it was solving. It made me think, I wonder if this exists because it is explicitly needed, or simply because it is so easy for it to exist?
It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.
Some of it is "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes". Fare enough, I've seen plenty of things I've found cool not get much attention. That's just the nature of the internet.
The other point is show and share HN stories growing in volume, which makes sense since it's now considerably easier to build things. I don't think that's a bad thing really, although curation makes it more difficult. Now that pure agentic coding has finally arrived IMO, creativity and what to build are significantly more important. They always were but technical ability was often rewarded much more heavily. I guess that sucks for technical people.
I've launched multiple side projects through Show HN over the years. The ones that got traction weren't better products. They hit the front page during a slow news hour and got enough early upvotes to survive the ranking curve. The ones that flopped were arguably more interesting but landed during a busy cycle. That's not a Show HN problem, that's a single-ranking-pool problem.
What would actually help is a separate ranking pool for Show HN with slower time decay. Let projects sit visible for longer so the community can actually try them before they drop off. pg's original vision was about making things people want. Hard to evaluate that in a 90-minute window.
C'est la vie and que sera. I'm sure the artistic industry is feeling the same. Self expression is the computation of input stimuli, emotional or technical, and transforming that into some output. If an infallible AI can replace all human action, would we still theoretically exist if we're no longer observing our own unique universes?
Maybe if people did Show HN for projects that are useful for something? Or at least fun?
There's a disease on HN related with the latest fad:
- (now) "AI" projects
- (now) X but done with "AI"
- (now) X but vibecoded
- (less now, a lot more in the recent past) X but done in Rust
- (none now, quite a few in a more distant past) X but done with blockchain
If the main quality of the project is one of the above, why would it attract interest?
The thing in show HN has to do something to raise interest. If not even the author/marketer thinks it does something, why would anyone look at it?
Trane (good post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069
Pictures Are For Babies (lame post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805
It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding
Show HN: My Project - A description for my vibe coded project [3 weeks]
A lot of the good stuff I see on Show HN are projects that have been worked on for a long time. While I understand that vibe coding is newer trend, I also know that vibe coded projects are less likely to stand the test of time. With this, we don't have to worry about whether a project is AI assisted or not, nor do we ban it. Instead just incentivize longer term projects. If the developer lies about how long they worked on the project, they will get reported and downvoted into oblivion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026263
I attribute it mostly to my own inability to pitch something that is aimed for many audiences at once and needs more UX polishing and maybe a bit on timing.
It's tough when you're not looking to sell a product but moreso engage in a community without going the twitter/bluesky route (which I'll bregudgingly may start using).
Maybe evals is a problem that people don't have yet because they can just build their custom thing or maybe it needs a "hey, you're building agent skills, here's the mental model" (e.g. https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent... ) and once they get to the evals part, we start to interact.
In any case, I still find quite a lot of cool things in SHOW HN but the volume will definitely be a challenge going forward.
The legend says SHNs are getting worse, but surely if the % of SHN posts with 1 point is going DOWN (as per graph) then it's getting better? Either I am dense or the legends are the wrong way round no?
I did 3 ShowHN in 2024 (outside of the scope of this analysis), one with 306 points, another with 126 points and the third with... 2. There's always been some kind of unpredictability in ShowHN.
But I think the number one criteria for visibility is intelligibility: the project has to be easy to understand immediately, and if possible, easy to install/verify. IMHO, none of the three projects that the author complains didn't get through the noise qualify on this criteria. #2 and #3 are super elaborate (and overly specific); #1 is the easiest to understand (Neohabit) but the home page is heavy in examples that go in all directions, and the github has a million graphics that seem quite complex.
Simplify and thou shall be heard.
Show HN: Clawntown – An Evolving Crustacean Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255
Something rapid fire, fun, categorized maybe. Just a showcase to show off what you've done.
Where the vibe coders with their slop cannons aren't present though is in things that require hard won domain knowledge. IE, stuff that requires you to actually create a new idea, off an understanding of actual areas of need.
And that kind of thing probably isn't going to do well on Show HN, because your audience probably isn't on HN.
And the comments should start with the day/month the project was first launched.
I was a skeptic last year, and now... not so much. I am having Claude build me a distributed system from scratch. I designed it last week as I was admitting to myself the huge failure of my big "I love to code" project that I failed to get traction on.
It took me a week to even give the design to claude because I was afraid of what it meant. I started it last night, and my jaw is dropped. There is a new skill being grown right now, and it... is something.
It certainly isn't nothing, and I for one am curious to simply see what people are making with vibes alone. It's fascinating... and horrifying.
But, I have learned to silence that part of me that is horrified since the world never cared for what I find beautiful (i.e. terrible languages like JavaScript)...
Vibe coding is not helping either, I guess. Now it is even cheaper to create assets for the distribution channel.
I think same thing happened with product hunt.
You could argue it's dead in the sense of "dead internet theory". Yes, more projects than ever are being submitted, but they were not created by humans. Maybe they are being submitted by humans, for now.
The market is saturated with superficial solutions that look amazing at a glance but don't work at all in the medium or long term yet it doesn't matter at all; they don't even have an incentive to improve, ever, because the founder cashes out/exits before they need to worry about the stuff under the hood. Customer support is replaced by AI agents so nobody can feel the customer's pain anymore. Then investors find ways to financialize the product so that it doesn't depend on consumers anymore and can just tap into big contracts from big institutions... And yet they still spend big on ads, just to prevent new entrants from entering the market.
It reminds me of my time in crypto; the coins were sold as one thing but all the big well known projects barely had less than half of the features implemented (compared to what was advertised)... And 10 years in, most of those projects cashed out big time and still don't have the features promised. Many shut down completely. Doesn't matter. The whole thing existed and succeeded as a pure shell project.
Horrible industry. Do not participate.
I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.
It is a comeback from a post that stayed for a few hours in the front page a few years ago. Also, it is a useful, non-AI slop, free product. So when it got none upvotes it made me think how I don’t understand HN community anymore how I used to think I did.
Here is the post for the curious
Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email
Yet most of the time, if I spend five minutes a day on Show HN, I’ll find something new that I find interesting. I wouldn’t say that Show HN is drowning, but creativity should be on life support. I’m sure that’s somewhat a generative AI problem, but they’re pretty good rubber ducks and so I’m surprised by how acute the issue has gotten so quickly.
If this effect is noticeable on an obscure tech forum, one can only imagine the effect on popular source code forges, the internet at large, and ultimately on people. Who/what is using all this new software? What are the motivations of their authors? Is a human even involved in the creation anymore? The ramifications of all this are mind-boggling.
It feels like the age of creating some cool new software on your own to solve a problem you had, sharing it and finding other people who had the same problem, and eventually building a small community around it is coming to a close. The death of open source, basically.
Having said that, it used to feel part of an exclusive club to have the skills and motivation to put a finished project on HN. For me, posting a Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development - remember that - when development of something worthwhile took years and was written entirely by hand?
I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.
