9 ms·

The percentage of Show HN posts is increasing, but their scores are decreasing

237 points by plastic041 8mo ago

ljlolel 8mo ago
More AI projects. Less quality.
- amelius 8mo ago
  Written in Rust, though.
  - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    Nah I prototype in golang because its good enough & I can easily remove all AI slop & rebuild it myself once I get the gist of what works & the project is well recieved by a community. That being said, I sometimes write projects with AI to get feedback fast and prototyping for my own personal use cases and share it here sometimes But since the community doesn't show support in some cases, I move on with anything new which catches my curiosity/troubles me and build it again I open source most of the stuff but I know that its probably gonna get lost in a sea of AI slop & mine might not be better (I just ask LLM bots to create a simple main.go file to solve X and usually much of my simple projects end up being around 600 loc) I do feel like personal computing or making projects in domains you aren't familiar in to prototype just out of curiosity/your own pragramatic use case is probably what I feel like but long term, there should be a focus on actually transitioning from AI slop to something real if anyone plans to monetize something imo
  - hahahahhaah 8mo ago
    No memory bugs then. Just like ... well Node, Ruby, Python, C#, Java...
    - b40d-48b2-979e 8mo ago
      But it's Blazingly Fast!
  - timeon 8mo ago
    You are so last winter.
- Ronsenshi 8mo ago
  Yeah, feels like 80% are AI or AI adjacent things. Agentic this, Claude SKILLS.md that, AI design third and so on. AI DOS practically. Unfortunate for those that have curious projects that end up drowning in slop.
nsoonhui 8mo ago
I turn on the `showdead` option, and at the `New Links` section I can see a lot more "Show HN" posts that are flagged dead.
detectivestory 8mo ago
I tried to share a project on Show HN recently (twice!), and I didn't get a single user interaction (basically no one even visited the project, nevermind responding with a comment). I don't think my title was that bad, its more just that there are so many new projects using AI that people are fatigued from it. Its kind of a shame because I'm sure there are lots of really good ideas that are being completely overlooked because of this.
- aeonfox 8mo ago
  With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new. If you get enough votes, you're supposedly moved from shownew to top stories, but somehow 5 votes wasn't enough for me (though I saw other posts that got there with just 2). I'd like to see someone attempt to persuade me otherwise, but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
  - detectivestory 8mo ago
    I do personally check out shownew quite often, yet I would never really visit new. I might not be a typical user, but I think I am a lot more likely to engage with a shownew post than someone who comes across it on new.
    - aeonfox 8mo ago
      It's a bit like ProductHunt. The only people that look at ProductHunt, are the people that post on ProductHunt—or at least that's its reputation. Though that's an unfair comparison, because I think on HN there is actually genuine engagement by other builders (or perhaps I'm mistaken about PH).
      - cs02rm0 8mo ago
        I don't think it's wildly unfair, it's a genuine problem. Not that I have the answer unfortunately.
keepamovin 8mo ago
I guess the real question is: is the decrease in average score more than just a function of a larger ratio (and its expected long tail score distribution)?
- plastic041 8mo ago
  It's likely long tail. I don't think good Show HNs are gone. They are still there, but they are being overwhelmed by lots of low quality submissions.
  - dang 8mo ago
    I believe that as well.
keiferski 8mo ago
Anecdotally it feels like there aren’t very many Show HNs on the home page. Sadly they seem to be increasingly pushed out by big news stories.
- NedF 8mo ago
  [dead]
yellow_lead 8mo ago
It's hard not to blame LLMs. There was someone on the front page with a Show HN for some LLM-generated calculators recently.
- KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  This was just a few days ago, but IIRC this post got some positive reactions
  - reaperducer 8mo ago
    From other LLMs.
code51 8mo ago
Sooner or later this will hit the VCs. Translated into a mass underfunding.
- heliumtera 8mo ago
  This would require a significant culture change, much bigger then what happened post zero interest era. For now rainmakers are still praising the ability to spew bullshit. See the recent ralph debacle. Theo this week praising someone for running 50 active "projects" with zero users. Tobi Shopify CEO shitting out dummy projects. Linus vibing side projects. The thrill of seeing a project slip into the realm of the incomprehensible is too great. I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality. Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.
eamag 8mo ago
Projects are easier to create, feels like now marketing becomes even more important
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  I feel like a trust factor that A) the person is willing to improve software quality even if it means rewriting it later down the line if it was generated by AI in the first term & B) the project is trying to be sustainable. I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN. I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense. We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part) The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
- tomhow 8mo ago
  Nope - for Show HN, substance is now more important than ever. That’s what we’re thinking about in the moderation team anyway.
  - almusdives 8mo ago
    Funny how in a world of AI, human curation is becoming more important.
  - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    What does substance mean in this case if I may ask? I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least) Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable? Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
krapp 8mo ago
The original goal of Show HN was for people to show off their work in a way that other people could participate in, sharing code and experience to satisfy intellectual curiosity. It's become nothing more than a funnel for landing pages and vibe-coded slop. All of the fun has been sucked out of it.
- detectivestory 8mo ago
  If your home pages looks like this (https://www.ycombinator.com https://www.ycombinator.com), you can expect people to try want to "launch" their startups on your forum. There seems to be a large contingent of HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned! Obviously this can be the case, but its pretty evident that the technology is going nowhere and anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back. The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. For people who are interested in creative web projects, we live in very exciting times, regardless of the negative noise.
  - krapp 8mo ago
    It isn't just the case that AI generated content tends to be slop, it's that it's intellectually uninteresting and provides little worth discussing on a forum whose entire purpose is intellectually curious conversation. Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point. >The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.) Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.
potamic 8mo ago
This is an unfortunate trend we will see across software going ahead. When the bar to make something is low, the market is inevitably flooded by cheap and mediocre stuff that overshadow everything else. Soon there won't be an incentive to make high quality stuff because even if you did, you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention with it because it's all taken away by the endless slop that won't stop.
- criddell 8mo ago
  > you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention Thus the rise of the influencer economy. What better way is there to learn about something than from somebody you trust?
  - ZpJuUuNaQ5 8mo ago
    >from somebody you trust However bad thing are or will be, trusting "influencers" is the last thing you should do.
    - criddell 8mo ago
      If John Carmack mentioned a great new debugger he's been using lately, I'd probably check it out. I trust him when it comes to software discussions. I'm taking a pretty broad definition of influencer. In your family, you may be an influencer if you are the one people come to with tech problems.
      - chuckadams 8mo ago
        I think the judgment applies mostly to people for whom "influencer" is their actual job title.
        reaperducer 8mo ago
        people for whom "influencer" is their actual job title. Whenever I see the word "influencer," my brain automatically substitutes "unemployed."
jharohit 8mo ago
“Also I have no idea why the average score was increased in 2022. A lot of new users?” Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community
flowerthoughts 8mo ago
Edit: this was my fault. I recently saw a Show HN [1] that had no link to anywhere, but it did have a project name. It currently has 13 points. [removed]
- philipwhiuk 8mo ago
  Looks like it has links now. It's weird because it's named similar to a popular Android logging library: https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber
  - flowerthoughts 8mo ago
    You know, it's my bad. I use the Modern for HN Chrome extension, and it apparently hid the entire text there. Lesson learned. Extension uninstalled. Sorry for the noise.
kingkawn 8mo ago
Maybe the ideas…aren’t good?
- cracki 8mo ago
  Heresy!
giacomoforte 8mo ago
The problem is all the AI slop that people are publishing to bolster their CVs.
jcmartinezdev 8mo ago
It's a volume problem, almost feels like people is spamming HN for quick results. I do appreciate some of the projects and conversations that happened from some of those threads, but a lot of it, it's just feels spam.
epolanski 8mo ago
Attention is a very scarce resource, the amount of noise and distraction only increases as time goes on.
- hahahahhaah 8mo ago
  Attention is all you need was very prescient.
  - leohonexus 8mo ago
    As the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says, "Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being"
janlucien 8mo ago
[dead]
shevy-java 8mo ago
He may be on to something; I'd also think something may be odd with the voting situation. Are there voting bots or something? Because the voting situation here is extremely strange in the last few weeks; not even on reddit did I notice this and reddit voting system has tons of issues as well.
- heliumtera 8mo ago
  Definitely
- red-iron-pine 8mo ago
  credible studies suggest 20-40% of posts and interactions on social media are bots. why would it be different here? the struggle is to build consensus in an open and democratic forum and we've solved that problem via LLMs.
- conradfr 8mo ago
  There is on average a new submission every minute on HN. So basically an entry exposure in /newest first page is 30 minutes. How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable. You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).
scalemaxx 8mo ago
It's a mirror of what's happening everywhere. It has become easier than ever to create something whether that's content or an app. But because of that it's harder than ever to get attention. Quantity is drowning out quality and people are becoming desensitized to new creation.
echelon_musk 8mo ago
Eternal September /thread
- hahahahhaah 8mo ago
  Sort of. Eternal September phenomenom was a regualar September cadence. Then AOL came. There was no warning / taster of this. AI just dialed up to 11 real quick.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
  I personally find it very strange that you cannot downvote until 30+ userpoints, but that you CAN immediately post a new HN discussion. Seems like there should be a restriction on greenies (from posting) until they've lurked more, here.
  - lenocinor 8mo ago
    Downvoting needs much more than that actually (is it 500+ these days?) Maybe you mean flagging? Which is similar enough to still make your argument work, but just saying.
    - ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
      Yes, you are correct. I also feel you should be able to downvote before flagging (since flagging is effective just a mega downvote).
  - tliltocatl 8mo ago
    It does makes sense in terms of resulting damage. Make a bot that will post new discussion, it will instantly get flagged to oblivion. Make 10 bots that downvote something - it will take quite some time for the mods to find them.
    - ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
      It just seems to me that you ought'a be able to downvote before making posts (and also flagging). Perhaps good upvoted comment boughts ought be able to make submissions (eventually), too..?
rfarley04 8mo ago
They're also overwhelming AI related posts: https://ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/ https://ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/
- red-iron-pine 8mo ago
  presumably ones in favor, non? AI may be the largest bubble yet in history, and it has the ability to sustain itself directly via online hype-bots. tulips can't specifically target all of your replies and explain why you're a cunt and should buy more
  - heliumtera 8mo ago
    this is an excellent observation. the bubble might be a thing of concern, but the phenomenon behind it is much bigger then most can comprehend. even among hackers, we see a very naive and superficial understanding. most are still thinking in the current framework of the game while the game fundamentally changed. the lemon market will persist regardless of an imminent burst! even if the average tone changes, the fabrics of this game is forever eroded. hacker news current structure makes no sense when consensus can be fabricated (automated karma farming + targeted "collective action" is cheap, people have already realized this and soon will become intolerant). showing a project means nothing, showing the equivalent of a prompt has negative value. people will still urge for care and passion, discovery, interesting ideas. people will urge for a way to separate a vibed nothing-project, valued at 25 Claude sonnet prompts, in response to the latest Simon wilinson new hot take in 35 minutes. people will want a way to separate a good faith idea cultivated with passion from a "look what I did to promote myself while spending 75 cents" idea.
- rsanek 8mo ago
  I'm not sure I'd label 20% as "overwhelming." I'm surprised it's not higher, to be honest.
  - rfarley04 8mo ago
    That's fair actually. I wrote this comment a little off the cuff and rereading the article (it's been a while since I wrote it!) it's more like a strong plurality, so overwhelming was a bit much
heliumtera 8mo ago
It will become a ghost town. It became a gallery of other people prompts. It used to mean something else, one would expect care put into a passion project. Rotten lemons all the way down.
blitzar 8mo ago
Earlier in the week there were probably about 10 posts on the front page that tempted me to post "Ask HN: Why are there so many Show HN & Ask HN posts today" - I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation. Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
- zahlman 8mo ago
  > I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation. Months ago, I didn't refrain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780249
rishabhaiover 8mo ago
I think there should be an ai-assistance badge on every Github project. I don't want to look at Contribution graph and Commit history and then eventually the source code to find out the same information. What are we hiding now?
- heliumtera 8mo ago
  LoL the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first. using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived. it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020. if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately. nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know
lifetimerubyist 8mo ago
Most of it is slop.
iainctduncan 8mo ago
Almost like some strange new technology is increasing the number of people making low quality projects they want to show off....
trollbridge 8mo ago
I fear the day when someone figures out that a well-crafted Show HN post is a great way to get "engagement", and starts marketing to others how to do so or doing it for them.
- theplatman 8mo ago
  that ship has sailed along time ago
- heliumtera 8mo ago
  Already happened: a. this week, someone teaching how to launch a language followed by a few tries (git repository created few hours before I saw it) b. in this thread
- zahlman 8mo ago
  > well-crafted IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit. Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
- pibaker 8mo ago
  I will be very surprised if people are not already optimizing their HN posts for marketing purposes. It's not uncommon to see people showing off their website traffic graph on Twitter after hitting HN. You can also find people asking for advice on how to use HN to market their shitty SaaS on places like reddit. Another kind of marketing you see quite often is people replying with a post that starts off reasonable, until the third paragraph where the commentator says "this is why we built blah" and makes you feel you are staring at an half eaten Apple with half a worm in it.
_alternator_ 8mo ago
My qualitative experience is that, far from lower quality submissions, the Show HN posts that make the front page seem to be increasing in quality. There are likely to be a number of possible explanations for this that offset the lower average score. The obvious one is that the filtering effect of the front page with a higher amount of content. Perhaps we are also seeing higher standards—a project that used to take 6 weeks and a ton of conviction now wraps up in a few hours, and people are resetting their expectations.
- Kinrany 8mo ago
  It's also possible that the average quality is decreasing but the quality of those that reach front page is increasing
  - dahart 8mo ago
    Possible, sure. But likely? Increased submissions with no change in average quality can fully explain an increase in front page quality, as can increasing average quality, of course. And scores aren’t a quality metric, they’re are a popularity metric. The decrease in scores can also be fully explained by increased submissions. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason to suggest quality is decreasing…
- zahlman 8mo ago
  When I use the search function for topics I'm interested in and encounter Show HN that way, it's dominantly slop (and has been for most of the time I've had an account). The actual Show HN page is not much better. The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README. Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works. [1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.
kianN 8mo ago
I actually conducted a similar analysis back in December. I was more focused on discovering the topics that most resonated with the community but ended up digging into this phenomenon as well (specifically focusing on the probability of getting over 100 upvotes) The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10. Analysis here if anyone is interested: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/ https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/
- altairprime 8mo ago
  Please email the mods your shaky evidence; they care about that and have more detailed logs to investigate with!
  - kianN 8mo ago
    I did not conduct a deep dive into the specific examples: this was my takeaway from a slope plot comparing which topics clear a 10 point threshold (eg escape the new page) vs which topics clear a 100 point threshold. > Nearly every AI related topic does worse once it clears the 10 point threshold than any other category. This means that either the people looking through the New and Show sections are disproportionately interested in AI. This is very possible, but from my interaction with this crowd from my posts, these users tend to be more technically minded (think DIY hardware, rather than landing-page builders). Last visual in the following section: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-into-2025 https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-int... It's good to know that this would be helpful. My tendency would be to dig in a bit more into the individual examples that fall into this more suspicious bucket before presenting this evidence formally, but curious if you think these high level results are sufficiently helpful?
    - altairprime 8mo ago
kittikitti 8mo ago
This reflects the sentiment I've seen in the wider industry. AI like ChatGPT has given everyone a Dunning-Kruger effect where people think they're experts at everything in tech. The lack of appreciation is concerning and toxic.
andyjohnson0 8mo ago
I've been noticing a lot of posts tp Ask that are essentially people uaing it as a blogging platform. Sometimes its vapid "thought leader" -type pieces, others are low-value posts or rants, and others are fairly obvious attempts at SEO. With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.

237 points by plastic041 8mo ago

ljlolel 8mo ago

More AI projects. Less quality.

amelius 8mo ago
Written in Rust, though.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  Nah I prototype in golang because its good enough & I can easily remove all AI slop & rebuild it myself once I get the gist of what works & the project is well recieved by a community. That being said, I sometimes write projects with AI to get feedback fast and prototyping for my own personal use cases and share it here sometimes But since the community doesn't show support in some cases, I move on with anything new which catches my curiosity/troubles me and build it again I open source most of the stuff but I know that its probably gonna get lost in a sea of AI slop & mine might not be better (I just ask LLM bots to create a simple main.go file to solve X and usually much of my simple projects end up being around 600 loc) I do feel like personal computing or making projects in domains you aren't familiar in to prototype just out of curiosity/your own pragramatic use case is probably what I feel like but long term, there should be a focus on actually transitioning from AI slop to something real if anyone plans to monetize something imo
- hahahahhaah 8mo ago
  No memory bugs then. Just like ... well Node, Ruby, Python, C#, Java...
  - b40d-48b2-979e 8mo ago
    But it's Blazingly Fast!
- timeon 8mo ago
  You are so last winter.
Ronsenshi 8mo ago
Yeah, feels like 80% are AI or AI adjacent things. Agentic this, Claude SKILLS.md that, AI design third and so on. AI DOS practically. Unfortunate for those that have curious projects that end up drowning in slop.

nsoonhui 8mo ago

I turn on the `showdead` option, and at the `New Links` section I can see a lot more "Show HN" posts that are flagged dead.

detectivestory 8mo ago

I tried to share a project on Show HN recently (twice!), and I didn't get a single user interaction (basically no one even visited the project, nevermind responding with a comment). I don't think my title was that bad, its more just that there are so many new projects using AI that people are fatigued from it. Its kind of a shame because I'm sure there are lots of really good ideas that are being completely overlooked because of this.

aeonfox 8mo ago
With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new. If you get enough votes, you're supposedly moved from shownew to top stories, but somehow 5 votes wasn't enough for me (though I saw other posts that got there with just 2). I'd like to see someone attempt to persuade me otherwise, but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
- detectivestory 8mo ago
  I do personally check out shownew quite often, yet I would never really visit new. I might not be a typical user, but I think I am a lot more likely to engage with a shownew post than someone who comes across it on new.
  - aeonfox 8mo ago
    It's a bit like ProductHunt. The only people that look at ProductHunt, are the people that post on ProductHunt—or at least that's its reputation. Though that's an unfair comparison, because I think on HN there is actually genuine engagement by other builders (or perhaps I'm mistaken about PH).
    - cs02rm0 8mo ago
      I don't think it's wildly unfair, it's a genuine problem. Not that I have the answer unfortunately.

keepamovin 8mo ago

I guess the real question is: is the decrease in average score more than just a function of a larger ratio (and its expected long tail score distribution)?

plastic041 8mo ago
It's likely long tail. I don't think good Show HNs are gone. They are still there, but they are being overwhelmed by lots of low quality submissions.
- dang 8mo ago
  I believe that as well.

keiferski 8mo ago

Anecdotally it feels like there aren’t very many Show HNs on the home page. Sadly they seem to be increasingly pushed out by big news stories.

NedF 8mo ago
[dead]

yellow_lead 8mo ago

It's hard not to blame LLMs. There was someone on the front page with a Show HN for some LLM-generated calculators recently.

KellyCriterion 8mo ago
This was just a few days ago, but IIRC this post got some positive reactions
- reaperducer 8mo ago
  From other LLMs.

code51 8mo ago

Sooner or later this will hit the VCs. Translated into a mass underfunding.

heliumtera 8mo ago
This would require a significant culture change, much bigger then what happened post zero interest era. For now rainmakers are still praising the ability to spew bullshit. See the recent ralph debacle. Theo this week praising someone for running 50 active "projects" with zero users. Tobi Shopify CEO shitting out dummy projects. Linus vibing side projects. The thrill of seeing a project slip into the realm of the incomprehensible is too great. I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality. Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.

eamag 8mo ago

Projects are easier to create, feels like now marketing becomes even more important

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
I feel like a trust factor that A) the person is willing to improve software quality even if it means rewriting it later down the line if it was generated by AI in the first term & B) the project is trying to be sustainable. I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN. I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense. We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part) The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
tomhow 8mo ago
Nope - for Show HN, substance is now more important than ever. That’s what we’re thinking about in the moderation team anyway.
- almusdives 8mo ago
  Funny how in a world of AI, human curation is becoming more important.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  What does substance mean in this case if I may ask? I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least) Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable? Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.

krapp 8mo ago

The original goal of Show HN was for people to show off their work in a way that other people could participate in, sharing code and experience to satisfy intellectual curiosity. It's become nothing more than a funnel for landing pages and vibe-coded slop. All of the fun has been sucked out of it.

detectivestory 8mo ago
If your home pages looks like this (https://www.ycombinator.com https://www.ycombinator.com), you can expect people to try want to "launch" their startups on your forum. There seems to be a large contingent of HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned! Obviously this can be the case, but its pretty evident that the technology is going nowhere and anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back. The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. For people who are interested in creative web projects, we live in very exciting times, regardless of the negative noise.
- krapp 8mo ago
  It isn't just the case that AI generated content tends to be slop, it's that it's intellectually uninteresting and provides little worth discussing on a forum whose entire purpose is intellectually curious conversation. Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point. >The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.) Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.

potamic 8mo ago

This is an unfortunate trend we will see across software going ahead. When the bar to make something is low, the market is inevitably flooded by cheap and mediocre stuff that overshadow everything else. Soon there won't be an incentive to make high quality stuff because even if you did, you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention with it because it's all taken away by the endless slop that won't stop.

criddell 8mo ago
> you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention Thus the rise of the influencer economy. What better way is there to learn about something than from somebody you trust?
- ZpJuUuNaQ5 8mo ago
  >from somebody you trust However bad thing are or will be, trusting "influencers" is the last thing you should do.
  - criddell 8mo ago
    If John Carmack mentioned a great new debugger he's been using lately, I'd probably check it out. I trust him when it comes to software discussions. I'm taking a pretty broad definition of influencer. In your family, you may be an influencer if you are the one people come to with tech problems.
    - chuckadams 8mo ago
      I think the judgment applies mostly to people for whom "influencer" is their actual job title.
      - reaperducer 8mo ago
        people for whom "influencer" is their actual job title. Whenever I see the word "influencer," my brain automatically substitutes "unemployed."

jharohit 8mo ago

“Also I have no idea why the average score was increased in 2022. A lot of new users?” Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community

flowerthoughts 8mo ago

Edit: this was my fault. I recently saw a Show HN [1] that had no link to anywhere, but it did have a project name. It currently has 13 points. [removed]

philipwhiuk 8mo ago
Looks like it has links now. It's weird because it's named similar to a popular Android logging library: https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber
- flowerthoughts 8mo ago
  You know, it's my bad. I use the Modern for HN Chrome extension, and it apparently hid the entire text there. Lesson learned. Extension uninstalled. Sorry for the noise.

kingkawn 8mo ago

Maybe the ideas…aren’t good?

cracki 8mo ago
Heresy!

giacomoforte 8mo ago

The problem is all the AI slop that people are publishing to bolster their CVs.

jcmartinezdev 8mo ago

It's a volume problem, almost feels like people is spamming HN for quick results. I do appreciate some of the projects and conversations that happened from some of those threads, but a lot of it, it's just feels spam.

epolanski 8mo ago

Attention is a very scarce resource, the amount of noise and distraction only increases as time goes on.

hahahahhaah 8mo ago
Attention is all you need was very prescient.
- leohonexus 8mo ago
  As the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says, "Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being"

janlucien 8mo ago

[dead]

shevy-java 8mo ago

He may be on to something; I'd also think something may be odd with the voting situation. Are there voting bots or something? Because the voting situation here is extremely strange in the last few weeks; not even on reddit did I notice this and reddit voting system has tons of issues as well.

heliumtera 8mo ago
Definitely
red-iron-pine 8mo ago
credible studies suggest 20-40% of posts and interactions on social media are bots. why would it be different here? the struggle is to build consensus in an open and democratic forum and we've solved that problem via LLMs.
conradfr 8mo ago
There is on average a new submission every minute on HN. So basically an entry exposure in /newest first page is 30 minutes. How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable. You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).

scalemaxx 8mo ago

It's a mirror of what's happening everywhere. It has become easier than ever to create something whether that's content or an app. But because of that it's harder than ever to get attention. Quantity is drowning out quality and people are becoming desensitized to new creation.

echelon_musk 8mo ago

Eternal September /thread

hahahahhaah 8mo ago
Sort of. Eternal September phenomenom was a regualar September cadence. Then AOL came. There was no warning / taster of this. AI just dialed up to 11 real quick.
ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
I personally find it very strange that you cannot downvote until 30+ userpoints, but that you CAN immediately post a new HN discussion. Seems like there should be a restriction on greenies (from posting) until they've lurked more, here.
- lenocinor 8mo ago
  Downvoting needs much more than that actually (is it 500+ these days?) Maybe you mean flagging? Which is similar enough to still make your argument work, but just saying.
  - ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
    Yes, you are correct. I also feel you should be able to downvote before flagging (since flagging is effective just a mega downvote).
- tliltocatl 8mo ago
  It does makes sense in terms of resulting damage. Make a bot that will post new discussion, it will instantly get flagged to oblivion. Make 10 bots that downvote something - it will take quite some time for the mods to find them.
  - ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
    It just seems to me that you ought'a be able to downvote before making posts (and also flagging). Perhaps good upvoted comment boughts ought be able to make submissions (eventually), too..?

rfarley04 8mo ago

They're also overwhelming AI related posts: https://ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/ https://ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/

red-iron-pine 8mo ago
presumably ones in favor, non? AI may be the largest bubble yet in history, and it has the ability to sustain itself directly via online hype-bots. tulips can't specifically target all of your replies and explain why you're a cunt and should buy more
- heliumtera 8mo ago
  this is an excellent observation. the bubble might be a thing of concern, but the phenomenon behind it is much bigger then most can comprehend. even among hackers, we see a very naive and superficial understanding. most are still thinking in the current framework of the game while the game fundamentally changed. the lemon market will persist regardless of an imminent burst! even if the average tone changes, the fabrics of this game is forever eroded. hacker news current structure makes no sense when consensus can be fabricated (automated karma farming + targeted "collective action" is cheap, people have already realized this and soon will become intolerant). showing a project means nothing, showing the equivalent of a prompt has negative value. people will still urge for care and passion, discovery, interesting ideas. people will urge for a way to separate a vibed nothing-project, valued at 25 Claude sonnet prompts, in response to the latest Simon wilinson new hot take in 35 minutes. people will want a way to separate a good faith idea cultivated with passion from a "look what I did to promote myself while spending 75 cents" idea.
rsanek 8mo ago
I'm not sure I'd label 20% as "overwhelming." I'm surprised it's not higher, to be honest.
- rfarley04 8mo ago
  That's fair actually. I wrote this comment a little off the cuff and rereading the article (it's been a while since I wrote it!) it's more like a strong plurality, so overwhelming was a bit much

heliumtera 8mo ago

It will become a ghost town. It became a gallery of other people prompts. It used to mean something else, one would expect care put into a passion project. Rotten lemons all the way down.

blitzar 8mo ago

Earlier in the week there were probably about 10 posts on the front page that tempted me to post "Ask HN: Why are there so many Show HN & Ask HN posts today" - I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation. Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...

zahlman 8mo ago
> I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation. Months ago, I didn't refrain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780249

rishabhaiover 8mo ago

I think there should be an ai-assistance badge on every Github project. I don't want to look at Contribution graph and Commit history and then eventually the source code to find out the same information. What are we hiding now?

heliumtera 8mo ago
LoL the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first. using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived. it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020. if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately. nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know

lifetimerubyist 8mo ago

Most of it is slop.

iainctduncan 8mo ago

Almost like some strange new technology is increasing the number of people making low quality projects they want to show off....

trollbridge 8mo ago

I fear the day when someone figures out that a well-crafted Show HN post is a great way to get "engagement", and starts marketing to others how to do so or doing it for them.

theplatman 8mo ago
that ship has sailed along time ago
heliumtera 8mo ago
Already happened: a. this week, someone teaching how to launch a language followed by a few tries (git repository created few hours before I saw it) b. in this thread
zahlman 8mo ago
> well-crafted IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit. Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
pibaker 8mo ago
I will be very surprised if people are not already optimizing their HN posts for marketing purposes. It's not uncommon to see people showing off their website traffic graph on Twitter after hitting HN. You can also find people asking for advice on how to use HN to market their shitty SaaS on places like reddit. Another kind of marketing you see quite often is people replying with a post that starts off reasonable, until the third paragraph where the commentator says "this is why we built blah" and makes you feel you are staring at an half eaten Apple with half a worm in it.

_alternator_ 8mo ago

My qualitative experience is that, far from lower quality submissions, the Show HN posts that make the front page seem to be increasing in quality. There are likely to be a number of possible explanations for this that offset the lower average score. The obvious one is that the filtering effect of the front page with a higher amount of content. Perhaps we are also seeing higher standards—a project that used to take 6 weeks and a ton of conviction now wraps up in a few hours, and people are resetting their expectations.

Kinrany 8mo ago
It's also possible that the average quality is decreasing but the quality of those that reach front page is increasing
- dahart 8mo ago
  Possible, sure. But likely? Increased submissions with no change in average quality can fully explain an increase in front page quality, as can increasing average quality, of course. And scores aren’t a quality metric, they’re are a popularity metric. The decrease in scores can also be fully explained by increased submissions. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason to suggest quality is decreasing…
zahlman 8mo ago
When I use the search function for topics I'm interested in and encounter Show HN that way, it's dominantly slop (and has been for most of the time I've had an account). The actual Show HN page is not much better. The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README. Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works. [1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.

kianN 8mo ago

I actually conducted a similar analysis back in December. I was more focused on discovering the topics that most resonated with the community but ended up digging into this phenomenon as well (specifically focusing on the probability of getting over 100 upvotes) The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10. Analysis here if anyone is interested: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/ https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/

altairprime 8mo ago
Please email the mods your shaky evidence; they care about that and have more detailed logs to investigate with!
- kianN 8mo ago
  I did not conduct a deep dive into the specific examples: this was my takeaway from a slope plot comparing which topics clear a 10 point threshold (eg escape the new page) vs which topics clear a 100 point threshold. > Nearly every AI related topic does worse once it clears the 10 point threshold than any other category. This means that either the people looking through the New and Show sections are disproportionately interested in AI. This is very possible, but from my interaction with this crowd from my posts, these users tend to be more technically minded (think DIY hardware, rather than landing-page builders). Last visual in the following section: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-into-2025 https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-int... It's good to know that this would be helpful. My tendency would be to dig in a bit more into the individual examples that fall into this more suspicious bucket before presenting this evidence formally, but curious if you think these high level results are sufficiently helpful?
  - altairprime 8mo ago

kittikitti 8mo ago

This reflects the sentiment I've seen in the wider industry. AI like ChatGPT has given everyone a Dunning-Kruger effect where people think they're experts at everything in tech. The lack of appreciation is concerning and toxic.

andyjohnson0 8mo ago

I've been noticing a lot of posts tp Ask that are essentially people uaing it as a blogging platform. Sometimes its vapid "thought leader" -type pieces, others are low-value posts or rants, and others are fairly obvious attempts at SEO. With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.