Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arthurcnops.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 455 posts

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

#211

Post by password4321 »

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…

> often even their comments will all be fully LLM-generated

This really bothers me, coming here asking for human feedback (basically: strangers spending time on their behalf) then dumping it into the slop generator pretending it is even slightly appreciated. It wouldn't even be that much more work to prompt the LLM to hide its tone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393992#46396486) but even that is too much.

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

#212

Post by ModernMech »

peishang wrote: post #210
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.

Honestly I would support only allowing Show HN for accounts that can downvote. It's really not such a high threshold.

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

#214

Post by bigthymer »

ModernMech wrote: post #212
peishang wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I would support only allowing Show HN for accounts that can downvote. It's really not such a high threshold.

We would have to prepare for a deluge of accounts posting\commenting just for the sake of accumulating karma to be able to downvote.

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

#215

Post by anonymous908213 »

ModernMech wrote: post #212
peishang wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I would support only allowing Show HN for accounts that can downvote. It's really not such a high threshold.

It would filter out some people who lurk but still have interesting things to contribute, but despite the drawbacks that threshold is probably the most immediately impactful solution. Of course, it strongly incentivizes the purchase/selling of accounts, and karma farming, but that problem is perhaps less of a problem than all high-effort human content getting completely drowned out. There are already a plethora of spambots making comments getting upvoted, so it's not like that problem doesn't already exist either.

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

#216

Post by Retr0id »

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.

I wonder if some kind of voluntary tagging system could help?

e.g. [20h/2d/$10] could indicate "I spent 20 human-hours over 2 days and burned $10 worth of tokens" (it's hard to put a single-dimensional number on LLM usage and not everyone keeps track, but dollars seem like a reasonable approximation)

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

#217

Post by veggiepirate »

foxmoss wrote: post #152
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…

As someone who posts blogs and projects out of my own enjoyment, no AI for code generation, handed edited blog, I still have no idea how to signal to people that I actually know what I’m talking about. Every step of the process could’ve been done by an LLM, albeit worse, so I don’t have a way of signifying my projects as something different. Considering putting a “No LLMs used in this project” tag at the start but th…

"This repository contains only [Organic] and [Hand-Made] ingredients."

It seems silly, but I know I'm more likely to review an implementation if can learn more about the author's state of mind by their style.

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

#218

Post by ungreased0675 »

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 had a light bulb come on reading your comment. Yes! When I read Show HN posts that are clearly missing key information, it makes me care less because the author didn’t care to learn the space they’d like to play in.

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

#220

Post by tomxor »

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 about inverting the issue, highlight posts with an opt in label. e.g

  Show HN [NOAI]:
Since it's too controversial to ban LLM posts, and would be too easy for submitters to omit an [LLM] label... Having an opt in [NOAI] label allows people to highlight their posts, and LLM posts would be easy to flag to disincentivise polluting the label.

This wouldn't necessarily need to be a technical change, just an intuitive agreement that posts containing LLM or vibe coded content are not allowed to lie by using the tag, or will be flagged... Then again it could also be used to elevate their rank above other show HN content to give us humanoids some edge if deemed necessary, or a segregated [NOAI] page.

[edit]

The label might need more thought, although "NOAI" is short and intelligible, it might be seen as a bit ironic to have to add a tag containing "AI" into your title. [HUMAN]?

Post reply on HN