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Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

arthurcnops.blog

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Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#201

Post by stevedonovan »

nobody_r_knows wrote: post #167
anonymous908213 wrote: post #154

The worst part of the death of Show HN is that most of these people are so allergic to putting any effort in that they can't even write the description themselves. The repo's readme, the ShowHN post, and often even their comments will all be fully LLM-generated. This doesn't even take skill! Writing good marketing copy might take skill, but ShowHN isn't (supposed to be) marketing. Just describe the project in your ow…

> I promise it's not that hard. How many non-native English speakers are on HN? If it's more than 30%, why should they have to use a whole new language if they can just let an LLM do it in a natural sounding way.

You could write in the language you are most eloquent in and prompt a bot to do a faithful translation.

Post both versions

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#202

Post by marginalia_nu »

Gigacore wrote: post #131
marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

I 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…

I shared a well-thought vibecoded app on ShowHN last month. It took a few hours to get POC and two weeks to fully develop a product to meet my requirements. Nobody cared.

Sqfty?

I mean it's a real problem, but it's also a solved problem, and also not a problem that comes up a lot unless you're doing the sort of engineering where you're using a CAD tool already.

I don't doubt it's useful, and seems pretty well crafted what little I tried it, but it doesn't really invite much discussion.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#203

Post by tempaccount5050 »

carabiner wrote: post #198
phaser wrote: post #52

I 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…

Your site https://microlandia.city and OP blog https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/ as well as most personal sites posted on HN are almost always inaccessible via my corporate job's firewall. Does anyone know why this is? Something with security certificate? They're not explicitly blocked, because you get a "this is blocked" page in that case. With these sites they just show a "can't connect" error.

They probably have a newly registered domain rule.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#204

Post by PaulHoule »

acnops wrote: post #128
armchairhacker wrote: post #91

Here’s a dumb idea: 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 ov…

Makes me think about Taleb's lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect It's like books. Old but still relevant books are the best books to read. This tech industry is changing so fast though. Maybe a year is too much?

I'd push back on this and say that the #1 problem with the discourse about AI now (e.g. why I'd almost never upvote a blog post about AI coding) is that it is too focused on 2026-02-17. That is, I could care less about optimizing to pick the best model or agentic workflow because it's all going to be obsolete in a year.

I am wary of blogs by celebrity software managers such as DHH, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and Paul Graham because they talk as if there was something about their experience in software development and marketing except... there isn't.

The same is true for the slop posts about "How I vibe coded X", "How I deal with my anxiety about Y" and "Should I develop my own agentic workflow to do Z?" These aren't really interesting because there isn't anything I can take away from them -- doomscrolling X you might do better because little aphorisms like "Once your agent starts going in circles and you find yourself arguing it you should start a new conversation" is much more valuable than "evaluations" of agents where you didn't run enough prompts to keep statistics or a log of a very path-dependent experience you had. At least those celebrity managers developed a product that worked and managed to sell it, the average vibe coder thinks it is sufficient that it almost worked.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#205

Post by PaulHoule »

microflash wrote: post #189
dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. 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.

To my dismay, the trajectory of Show HN posts looks eerily familiar. ProductHunt followed a similar course (albeit with much more acceleration) and now is just a feed of slop. The signal to noise ratio became so meaningless that I lost all interest. I fear this happening to HN. Any attempt to slow this down is welcome. I wonder how will this review system work. Perhaps, a Show HN is hidden by default and visible to o…

Funny a year ago I used to hear from so many people who thought a Product Hunt launch was the same as a marketing plan but it's been a while since I've heard about Product Hunt...

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#206

Post by mentalgear »

dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. 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.

Unfortunately there's now a whole cotton-industry of "vibe-coding classes and marketing" (similar to "life-coaching" on socials) that probably target HN as well. I think HN needs to think a layer of abstraction "higher" and model around some collection of semantics/metrics that allow to filter out "gloss without quality" vaporware or voting ring tactics.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#209

Post by resters »

dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. 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.

Please make the home page show 60 rather than 30 stories by default.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#210

Post by peishang »

dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. 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.

How much would it help cut down if Show HN was prohibited for accounts that were green and/or only had 1 karma?

Meaning you would have to demonstrate that you had or were willing to contribute to the HN community before just promoting your own stuff.

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