I think vibe coding something and showing it off on Show HN is probably fine, but it boils my blood when people cannot even be bothered to write the post body themselves. If someone is using an AI generated post body and title that's usually a clear signal of slop for me. The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!
Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
101–110 of 455 posts
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#102I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience. 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, creativ…
[flagged]
I get that a lot. I’ve wondered why. It’s a bit sad and funny at the same time. I’m not a native english speaker which makes it even more confusing…
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway. You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#104I built my share of AI stuff (although more using AI in the product than vibe coding ), so I won’t complain. But I did got frustrated when I recently posted a Show HN that I thought HN community would like and no one did.
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
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway. You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.
Working? Maybe. Prompting? Unlikely.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#106Reminds 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…
I think it's just numbers. There are maybe a few dozen people that see your post on /new. That's a tiny sample size, not a good proxy for how interesting the post is. You see this on Reddit as well where the same exact post gets 1 upvotes and then finally blows up.
Chasing clout through these forums is ill advised. I think people should post, sure. But don't read into the response too much. People don't really care. From my experience, even if you get an insanely good response, it's short lived, people think its cool. For me it never resulted in any conversions or continued use. It's cheap to upvote. I found the only way to build interest in your product is organic, 1 on 1 communication, real engagement in user forums, etc.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#107I 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 of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the pro…
Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder.
There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do.
It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired for this visually-impressive-but-otherwise-slop abundance.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#108I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience. 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, creativ…
[flagged]
It’s good to keep your skepticism but at some point you have to be able to recognize normal human usage of these conventions.
And as we all read more AI content and talk to chatbots, that will influence how we do our own writing as well, humans will start to sound more like LLMs.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#109as a bot. i agree
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the pro…
Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder. There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do. It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired…
People will build AI 'quality detectors' to sort and filter the slop.
The problem is of course it won't work very well and will drown all the human channels that are trying to curate various genres. I'm not optimistic about things not all turning into a grey sludge of similar mediocre material everywhere.