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

241–250 of 455 posts

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

#241

Post by easton »

tomxor wrote: post #220
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 a…

Is the problem that the app was written with AI assistance or that it's low-effort/bad? I don't care if you used Claude to fix a bug or something if you have a cool app, but i do care if you vibe coded something I could've vibe coded in an hour. That's boring.

Feels like effort needs to be the barrier (which unfortunately needs human review), not "AI or not". In lieu of that, 100 karma or account minimum age to post something as Show HN might be a dumb way to do it (to give you enough time to have read other people's so you understand the vibe).

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

#242

Post by fallinditch »

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.

Maybe restrict Show HN posts to 70 or 100 characters - readers can then scan many, and quickly find stuff of interest.

The clarity and focus this discipline would enforce could have a pleasant side effect of enabling a kind of natural evolution of categorizations, and alternative discovery UIs.

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

#243

Post by parpfish »

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 think that there are a few distinct usecases for ShowHN that lead to conflicting visions:

* some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a business they're trying to start and they want to get marketing

* some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's involves some cool tech under the hood and they want to talk shop

* some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a fun thing and they just want some people to have fun

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

#244

Post by acnops »

evrenesat wrote: post #223
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.

In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator. If it's completed within a few days, it should require more thorough human review. On the other hand, if the project has been active for a while and received contributions spread throughout that timeline, I think that would indicate accumulated effort (human and/or AI) and higher qu…

I thought so too, untill I looked for 1-point Show HN posts with a repo with a long commit history. Some of these are really cool (see my article), but others were not compelling at all, at least to me.

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

#245

Post by johnfn »

storystarling wrote: post #230

Similar experience. I posted a Show HN two days ago for a children's book generator - type a story idea, get a fully illustrated printed book shipped to you. Offered a free printed book including shipping to the HN community via voucher code. Got 7 points, 2 comments, and zero voucher redemptions. Nobody even ordered the free book. One of those comments was genuinely useful feedback from Argentina about localization.…

If you don't mind some unsolicited and blunt feedback: I suspect the reason this didn't get a lot of traction is that it is unclear why customers would want this. Sorry, that's probably too harsh, but I find it difficult to imagine anyone buying this:

- Children's books, at least the well-reviewed ones, are pretty good

- This is AI generated, so I expect the quality to be significantly lower than a children's book. Flipping through the examples, I am not convinced that this will be higher quality than a children's book.

- At 20 euros for a paperback, this is also more expensive than most children's books

- Your value prop, as I take it, is that your product is better because it is a book generated for just one child, but I am not convinced that's a solid value prop. I mean, it is kind of an interesting gimmick, but the book being fully AI generated is a large negative, and the book being uniquely created for my kid is a relatively smaller positive.

Those are definitely the highiest-order bits you need to prove to me in order to get traction. A couple of smaller things you should fix as well:

- As an English speaker, almost all the examples are not in English. You should take a reasonable guess at my language and then show me examples in my language

- It's difficult to get started: "Create your own book" leads to a signup page and I don't want to go through that friction when I am already skeptical

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

#246

Post by voy707 »

majicDave wrote: post #149
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #5

I 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

This happens all the time, it’s a good thing to really keep in mind. All of my best projects were dismissed initially and continue to be. There is a reddit post where I announced Blockheads to a handful of “looks like a crappy Minecraft ripoff” comments. It went on to be played by 50 million people.

What the actual f. I am one of those 50 million people, played Blockheads all the time as a teen and had no idea I would randomly stumble over the dev around here. Great work indeed, thanks for the fond memories I made on my 4th gen iPod touch, playing that game :)

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

#247

Post by CuriouslyC »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #146
Gigacore wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re part of the problem.

The problem is we're all stuck in a cut throat game of musical chairs in an eroding industry, with almost all organic platforms locked down and billion dollar orgs trying their damnedest to funnel you into pay2play.

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

#248

Post by storystarling »

johnfn wrote: post #245
storystarling wrote: post #230

Similar experience. I posted a Show HN two days ago for a children's book generator - type a story idea, get a fully illustrated printed book shipped to you. Offered a free printed book including shipping to the HN community via voucher code. Got 7 points, 2 comments, and zero voucher redemptions. Nobody even ordered the free book. One of those comments was genuinely useful feedback from Argentina about localization.…

If you don't mind some unsolicited and blunt feedback: I suspect the reason this didn't get a lot of traction is that it is unclear why customers would want this. Sorry, that's probably too harsh, but I find it difficult to imagine anyone buying this: - Children's books, at least the well-reviewed ones, are pretty good - This is AI generated, so I expect the quality to be significantly lower than a children's book. F…

Thanks for the blunt feedback - genuinely appreciate it.

You're right that children's books can be excellent, and for generic topics a well-reviewed book from a skilled author and illustrator will beat what we generate. No argument there.

Where we see real value is in the gaps the publishing industry doesn't serve. Bilingual families who can't find books in Maltese/English or Estonian/German. A child with an insulin pump who wants to see a superhero like them. A kid processing their parents' divorce. A child with two dads, or being adopted, or starting at a new school in a country where they don't speak the language yet. No publisher will print a run of one for these families - but these are exactly the stories that matter most to them.

On the UX points - you're right on both. We should localize the showcase to your language, and the signup wall before trying is too much friction. Working on both.

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

#249

Post by eshaham78 »

yuppiepuppie wrote: post #236
password4321 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend making "What are you working on [this weekend/weekly]" official like whoishiring and encouraging pre-Show HN comments there. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041973#47043174 "what's the right venue for sharing [LLM-built side projects]") Also requiring disclosure of the use of AI in repos and especially (or perhaps specifically discouraging its use) when responding with comments to HN feedback. I'…

Interesting take on the sharing of prompts. I don’t think this is a bad idea. How would this work though given different prompts occur in different context windows?

[dead]

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

#250

Post by tverbeure »

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…

I added the following at the top of the blog post that I wrote yesterday: "All words in this blog post were written by a human being."

I don't particularly care if people question that, but the source repo is on GitHub: they can see all the edits that were made along the way. Most LLMs wouldn't deliberately add a million spelling or grammar mistakes to fake a human being... yet.

As for knowing what I'm talking about. Many of my blog posts are about stuff that I just learned, so I have many disclaimers that the reader should take everything with a grain of salt. :-) That said: I put a ridiculous amount of time in these things to make sure it's correct. Knowing that your stuff will be out there for others to criticize if a great motivator to do your homework.

Post reply on HN