HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago

The LLM stuff is tiresome, but how is retro stuff even comparable? Maybe I'm not seeing what you're seeing, but I generally think people tinkering with old Mac OS stuff is cool. Though I'd rather OS X than Classic, as the unix-y bits are part of the cool factor for me. I do like the fonts and visuals of Classic, though.

LLM posts are like when a new meme template comes out and gets run into the ground everywhere you look, but someone tinkering with old computers just seems like normal human hacker interests. Perhaps you could argue that too much nostalgia is a bad thing. I have been hearing "frutiger aero" a disturbing amount the last year or so.

My account is nearly 10 years old (wow). I dont think its more dead afaict. It is more full of AI posts than ever, and AI-built slop show and tells.

When we look when logged-in at https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew (the input pipeline for all ShowHN) at any given time now more than half the page is either dead or flagged (I did the experiment now and it was 18/30 flagged or dead), then the rest of the page (100%) were AI related or claude generated.

Show HN, being used by people to share the cool things they create was an important part of creating of a community, aka always having people which would find interest in what you share.

It was a channel to push novel unpolished ideas to the world. It was one differentiating thing from other places where self-promoting is usually forbidden. Here it was welcoming people to take a more active role and create things.

Now it's just screaming into the void, the only feedback you get are email spam from LLM companies trying to push their solution to help you promote your content.

Sharing projects is also just feeding your competitors and killing the potential of your ideas, now that a clone is less than a prompt away.

I don't know who still look at this page, but then if you want to get past it you now probably need to turn to the dark side with some form of cheating, which is also conveniently easier than before to have bots spam about your product everywhere on the internet.

Show HN are now becoming the reverse, instead of feeling heard, it's even more isolating than before because when you put some effort and if even in the niche market where it's suppose to gather attention it doesn't, so you think you are not welcomed here, don't come back and look elsewhere.

“Thinks have always been getting worse” remind me of entropy and arrow of time :)

I used the HN |Past| feature to go back 15 years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-06-08

There are three articles about Steve Jobs. To me LLM's are a more intellectually interesting cargo-cult than that cult of personality cargo-cult, but YMMV.