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Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
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Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#12[deleted]
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#13An additional factor missing in the post I think Is AI.
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.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#14I did a Show HN a few years ago on another account. It got no upvotes but that website/app has generated over $6m in revenue in that time (over $4.5m profit). Not sure what my point is but thought I'd share
what channel did you find success in?
Affiliates. They made it blow up overnight with an existing audience
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#15Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#16Sadly, this problem isn't specific to HN either, any reddit sub that is even remotely related to software is absolutely flooded with "look at my slop" posts.
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.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#17Yeah, I don't think that LLM output is appropriate for Shown HNs.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#18I did a Show HN a few years ago on another account. It got no upvotes but that website/app has generated over $6m in revenue in that time (over $4.5m profit). Not sure what my point is but thought I'd share
I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#19Reminds me of the quote: "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded" 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 thi…
> "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes"
HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value.
So I wonder if there's maybe a strong element of picking your moment with Show HN posts in order to gain better visibility through the masses of other submissions.
Or maybe - but I think this goes against the culture a bit - Show HN could be its own category at the top. Or we could have particular days of the week/month where, perhaps by convention rather than enforcement, Show HN posts get more attention.
I'm not sure how workable these thoughts are but it's perhaps worth considering ways that Show HN could get a bit more of the spotlight without turning it into something that's endlessly gamed by purveyors of AI slop and other bottom-feeding content.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#20I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring. They generally don't have a lot of work put into them, and as a result, the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had. The cool part about pre-AI show HN is…
One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.