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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

#411

Post by storystarling »

johnfn wrote: post #401
storystarling wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have to be honest with you: I am the biggest AI booster alive, and even I would never buy a book fully written by AI. Maybe ask me again in 5 years, but I just don't think the quality is there. That being said, I think you might be on to something with the bilingual book idea - it might be worth exploring there. But if you want to keep the AI angle, you'd have to come up with a pretty clever twist.

Appreciate the honesty. On bilingual - that's actually our strongest use case already. A surprising number of our orders are from multilingual families who simply can't find children's books in their language combination. That's a gap no publisher will fill because the print runs are too small.

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

#412

Post by redbell »

dang wrote: post #373
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.

As it happens, a great counterexample has been on the frontpage for hours: Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852 - Feb 2026 (34 comments) What a bummer it would be to lose excellent posts by new users. They do happen!

My favorite example for a new user is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33566924

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

#413

Post by cyberrock »

storystarling wrote: post #407
cyberrock wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it's not just the delivery? If I want a storybook I don't want to wait 2 business days for it to print, ship, and deliver, and I'm sure most parents/guardians don't think that far ahead. The physical delivery factor turns your product into a mental burden. If you (or Disney or Hasbro) shipped ebooks that unfolded when you tell it a prompt (in the format of "bibbidi bobbity boop tell me a story about an e…

That's a fair point about friction, but we're intentionally focused on physical books - the whole idea is to get away from screens. Most parents we talk to have the opposite problem: too much digital content, not enough tangible things. A printed book that lives on the shelf, gets read at bedtime, gets dog-eared and carried around - that's the product. You're ordering it for a birthday, a holiday, a first day of scho…

I'd be a little surprised that parents who want physical storybooks would actually buy AI generated ones, instead of hoping that you dig up lost manuscripts from Hans Christian Andersen or the Disney golden age. That just seems like a contradictory audience.

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

#414

Post by dougiejones »

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…

As an example, I don't know if this person/machine read this thread or was reached out to by the moderators but they seemingly first had an empty post and reacted to feedback and generated a useless "backstory" to their show hn post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036610

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

#415

Post by lelanthran »

veyh wrote: post #269
n_e wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poste…

> 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).

I mentioned the "no brown M&Ms rule" in a recent comment, and someone pointed out to me that this is more likely to by adhered to by an LLM - humans might miss a single line in a three pages of text, but the LLM won't.

I am starting to think that a better approach might be to move to mailing lists; this means that valuable drive-by PRs (like I did in the past) are going to be unintended victims by preventing all drive-by PRs, because the friction is too high. Submitted needs to have an email address, make sure it isn't marked as spam, sign up to the mailing list, email their PR, wait for a response, etc.

The upside is that projects can start marking that email address as spam if it submits AI slop. The downside is that actually valuable drive-by PRs will be a thing of the past.

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

#416

Post by lelanthran »

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…

Not a good bar - I develop projects privately, and make public only when I am good and ready.

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

#417

Post by vrighter »

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?

If a year is too much, then that implicitly also implies that the project was never interesting enough to be posted anyway. The interesting projects are interesting because of the projects themselves, not the tools used to build them.

If the software is not as exciting because the tools have changed, then it wasn't exciting in itself in the first place.

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

#418

Post by ch4s3 »

ehnto wrote: post #376
ch4s3 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that, and mostly agree but some people will really have the cutest kitten the most beautiful sunset photo. Hopefully we figure out how to discern as fast as we can churn.

You get diminishing returns up there though, the cutest cat photo in the world would look remarkably similar to the next 2,000 photos of cats in the cutest cat photos leaderboard. I feel we should filter on diverse topics rather than best by metrics, perhaps we'll want to discern on concern.

I for one am happy to live in a world awash in the cutest kittens.

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

#419

Post by gethly »

When I posted my project, gethly.com, I got zero engagement here. Then, any link to a blog post was automatically blocked by HN. So real things get buried like this and AI slop is being promoted to front pages. Market saturation at its worse.

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

#420

Post by aalam »

Naive take but I feel the only way to combat this problem is with AI. Any manual queuing, or separate threads could be overrun all the same. The only difference being there is a dam of sorts before we let some of the projects out.

Any manual efforts to combat AI won't scale as models get better and better. Show HN is a place to show-case cool projects, I don't see why a 100% AI generated project can't be shown. AI has allowed many to rob themselves of their retirement projects and the uptick reflects that. My hunch is once we settle into the new shift, we can perhaps tweak the parameters around decay of Show HN posts.

Or we could allow upstanding members to signal-boost Show HN posts. Something along the lines of "Hey guys I _really_ want you to see this post so here is it (again)".

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