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

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

#261

Post by abcd_f »

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.

It's a tough problem.

Once some users have extra power to push content to the front-page, it will be abused. There will be attempts to gain that privilege in order to monetize, profit from or abuse it in some other way.

The only option along this path would probably be to keep the list of such users very tightly controlled and each vouched for individually.

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Another approach might be to ask random users (above certain karma threshold) rank new submissions. Once in a while stick a showhn post into their front page with up and down arrows, and mark it as a community service. Given HN volume it should be easy to get an average opinion in a matter of minutes.

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

#262

Post by saghm »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #215
ModernMech wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

I'm not sure that incentive is so strong. Is it really that desirable to pay money to be able to showcase a free project?

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

#263

Post by joecool1029 »

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.

> 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.

HN has a vouch system. Make a Show HN pool, allow accounts over some karma/age level to vouch them out to the main site. I recently had a naive colleague submit a Show HN a week or so ago that Tom killed... for good reason. I told the guy to ask me for advice before submitting a FOSS project he released and instead he shit out a long LLM comment nobody wants to read.

The HN guidelines IMO need a (long overdue) update to describe where a Show HN submission needs to go and address LLM comments/submissions. I get that YC probably wants to let some of it be a playground since money is sloshing around for it, but enough is enough.

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

#264

Post by brailsafe »

It's definitely been amplified severely by agent coding, but what's worse is that the most meme hustle-culture part of bringing ideas to life has been the most magnified, because it's the easiest. I started paying less and less attention when the whole "just get yourself a mailing list to test there's a market for your product" meme started gaining popularity, but people were at least constrained by the time it took to cobble together a generic landing page with an email signup. Now there's effectively no limit to how many shadcn boilerplate email collectors can be tossed together in a night. The more of that redundant stuff gets put on Show HN, the less I check it, but also the less I trust the "products" or the potential products, and that doesn't seem like it would be in anyone's best interest.

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

#265

Post by anthonypasq »

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 still have no idea how to signal to people that I actually know what I’m talking about.

presumably if this is true, it should be obvious by the quality of your product. If it isnt, then maybe you need to need to rethink the value of your artisanal hand written code.

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

#266

Post by rglover »

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.

Proposal:

- Min. 90 days account existence in order to submit

- Cap on plain/Show/Ask HN posts per week

Most of the spam I see in /new or /ask is from fresh accounts. This approach is simple and awards long-term engagement/users while discouraging fly-by-night spammers.

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

#267

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

veggiepirate wrote: post #217
foxmoss wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a similar thought way back when. It goes back to what is important to the person reviewing it be it the style, form or just whether it works for their use case. In the case of organic food, I did not even know I was living living a healthy lifestyle until I came to US. But now organic is just another label, played by marketing people just like anything else.

As I may have noted before, humans are the problem.

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

#268

Post by oldestofsports »

pipnonsense wrote: post #104

I 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…

What a great project! Makes me confused as well as to why this received no engagement, but the slop must be drowning out the good signal.

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

#269

Post by veyh »

n_e wrote: post #228
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.

Not sure if it would work for HN / how it could be adapted to HN, but something I noticed on opensource projects, is that once they hit a hurdle, submitters of low quality AI-written PRs don't try to solve it and go elsewhere. For example, in one project, PRs have to be submitted to the "next" branch and not the default branch. This is written in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is linked in the PR template, with the…

Back when I ran a WoW guild, the first sentence in our recruitment post emphasized the importance of reading the whole post (because the way to access the application form was to click the only smiley in the post, and this detail was mentioned in the last paragraph).

Most people did not read the post, which was immediately evident from how they posted their application by copy-pasting and editing an application posted by someone else before them.

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

#270

Post by codegeek »

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.

May be dont show them under "Show HN" unless the post has accumulated a certain number of points/upvotes ? Just like a regular new post comes on front page.
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