21 ms·

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

522 points by acnops 7mo ago

koakuma-chan 7mo ago
Yeah, I don't think that LLM output is appropriate for Shown HNs.
verdverm 7mo ago
was just asking for something like this yesterday, would be interesting to see how account age factors in
weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
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
- pdyc 7mo ago
  mine got lot of upvotes and huge traffic but it died after few days. I think it has more to do with novelty of idea rather than commercial interest.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago
  Show us the Show HN!
  - weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
    Our revenue isn't public and this is a throwaway
- prodigycorp 7mo ago
  what channel did you find success in?
  - weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
    Affiliates. They made it blow up overnight with an existing audience
    - jansan 7mo ago
      So the affiliates obviously get 25%.
      - weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
        30%. But it brought tons of word of mouth and such after the ball got rolling so the total affiliate commission compared to our revenue lifetime is closer to 10-15%
    - reconnecting 7mo ago
      Interesting, may I ask what network exactly you used?
      - weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
        We don't use one. Got connected through with the first affiliates in a paid/private community in that particular niche
        reconnecting 7mo ago
        This is helpful. Just to clarify, so you had created your own affiliate network and run this manually? Tracking, payouts, etc?
        weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
        There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent
- mchaver 7mo ago
  I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).
  - marginalia_nu 7mo ago
    It's also a pretty big lottery. Two nearly identical projects can get very different receptions depending on the phase of the moon.
    - ben_w 7mo ago
      If there's a non-lottery option for $6m in revenue and $4.5m profit over a few years, I wouldn't be alone in wanting to find it and work that option. As per the old efficient market jokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044
  - weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
    Yes, this was in a marketing niche and I knew it wasn't a good fit
- majicDave 7mo ago
  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.
  - jstrieb 7mo ago
    If those announcement posts don't take off, how do you end up finding a community of users/players?
    - majicDave 7mo ago
      It’s different every time, but basically “marketing”. No matter where you are showing your stuff, it’s in a subset of the population, chances are HN won’t be buying your app subscription. You need to get it in front of your actual audience.
      - PaulHoule 7mo ago
        See also "Product Hunt". Oddly it's been about a year since I've noticed anybody who mistakes a Product Hunt launch for a marketing plan but that used to be endemic.
      - mettamage 7mo ago
        As someone who has a small bit of skill in marketing nowadays, where would you advice me to deeply learn it? I think I have enough knowledge now to have developed a taste of what is actually good but don't know where to find a good curriculum to get started.
  - voy707 7mo ago
    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 :)
bko 7mo ago
Reminds me of the quote: "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded" Some of it is "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes". Fare enough, I've seen plenty of things I've found cool not get much attention. That's just the nature of the internet. The other point is show and share HN stories growing in volume, which makes sense since it's now considerably easier to build things. I don't think that's a bad thing really, although curation makes it more difficult. Now that pure agentic coding has finally arrived IMO, creativity and what to build are significantly more important. They always were but technical ability was often rewarded much more heavily. I guess that sucks for technical people.
- bartread 7mo ago
  > "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes" HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value. So I wonder if there's maybe a strong element of picking your moment with Show HN posts in order to gain better visibility through the masses of other submissions. Or maybe - but I think this goes against the culture a bit - Show HN could be its own category at the top. Or we could have particular days of the week/month where, perhaps by convention rather than enforcement, Show HN posts get more attention. I'm not sure how workable these thoughts are but it's perhaps worth considering ways that Show HN could get a bit more of the spotlight without turning it into something that's endlessly gamed by purveyors of AI slop and other bottom-feeding content.
  - bko 7mo ago
    I think it's just numbers. There are maybe a few dozen people that see your post on /new. That's a tiny sample size, not a good proxy for how interesting the post is. You see this on Reddit as well where the same exact post gets 1 upvotes and then finally blows up. Chasing clout through these forums is ill advised. I think people should post, sure. But don't read into the response too much. People don't really care. From my experience, even if you get an insanely good response, it's short lived, people think its cool. For me it never resulted in any conversions or continued use. It's cheap to upvote. I found the only way to build interest in your product is organic, 1 on 1 communication, real engagement in user forums, etc.
wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago
I am a major advocate for AI assisted development. Having said that, it used to feel part of an exclusive club to have the skills and motivation to put a finished project on HN. For me, posting a Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development - remember that - when development of something worthwhile took years and was written entirely by hand? I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.
- nkrisc 7mo ago
  > I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room. Programming has long been democratized. It’s been decades now where you could learn to program without spending a dollar on a university degree or even a bootcamp. Programming knowledge has been freely available for a long time to those who wanted to learn.
  - wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago
    It's better if you don't have to learn to program to make applications. In the future it will seem very strange that there was a time when people had to write every line of code manually. It will simply be accepted that the computers write computer programs for you, no one will think twice about it.
    - m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
      Will programs even exist in the future? Surely the AIs will just take input and return output?
  - Nextgrid 7mo ago
    There's a difference between documentation and LLMs. An LLM can be your own personal tutor and answer questions related to your specific code in a way no documentation can. That is extremely helpful until you master the programming language enough.
reconnecting 7mo ago
Perhaps it's the right moment to start an AI Show HN (Vibe HN as recommended above), as I assume more than half of Show HN is now from ChatGPT/Claude, and it's impossible to cut through this noise with something reliable that humans craft over years. It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.
- sixtyj 7mo ago
  I have talked with some friends who are long-time programmers (20+ experience). Even they (all) admit that they use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity or AI Studio - you name it. So in future everything’s gonna be “agentic”, (un)fortunately. Everytime I write about it, I feel like a doomsayer. Anthropic admits that LLM use makes brain lazy. So as we forgot remembering phone numbers after Google and mobile phones came, it will be probably with coding/programming.
  - reconnecting 7mo ago
    OK, let's say there are two categories of software now. One is where the human has a complete mental map of the product, and even if they use some code generating tools, they fully take responsibility for the related matters. And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not. I believe these are two categories that are currently merged in one Show HN, and if in the first category I can be curious about the decisions people made and the solutions they chose, I don't give a flying fork about what an LLM generated. If you have a 'fog of war' in your codebase, well, you don't own your software, and there's no need to show it as yours. Same way, if you had used autocomplete, or a typewriter in the time of handwriting, and the thinking is yours, an LLM shouldn't be a problem.
    - holistio 7mo ago
      We never really have a complete mental map. "Oh, this library just released a new major version? What a pity, I used to know v n deeply, but v n+1 has this nifty feature that I like" It happened all the time even as a solo dev. In teams, it's the rule, not the exception. Vibing is just a different obfuscation here.
wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago
If show HN is getting diluted and flooded then maybe yhere is opportunity for someone to make a website for showing off your shiny new project. Something rapid fire, fun, categorized maybe. Just a showcase to show off what you've done.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  HN is an unique tech niche, I suspect many hobby projects will get more attention in their less technical niches or applications
marginalia_nu 7mo ago
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 you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective. I feel like this is what AI has done to the programming discussion. It draws in boring people with boring projects who don't have anything interesting to say about programming.
- koakuma-chan 7mo ago
  One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.
  - numpad0 7mo ago
    Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway. You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
    - marginalia_nu 7mo ago
      In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.
      - koakuma-chan 7mo ago
        Working? Maybe. Prompting? Unlikely.
        7mo ago
literoldolphin 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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greatgib 7mo ago
An additional factor missing in the post I think Is AI. Before, projects were more often carefully human crafted. But nowadays we expect such projects to be "vibe coded" in a day. And so, we don't have the motivation to invest mental energy in something that we expect to be crap underneath and probably a nice show off without future. Even if the result is not the best in the world, I think that what interest us is to see the effort.
- sarreph 7mo ago
  It's reasonably clear from the second sentence in the post that the uptick in submissions can be largely attributed to AI-assisted projects. > The post quickly disappeared from Show HN's first page, amongst the rest of the vibecoded pulp. The linked article[0] also talks at length about the impact of AI and vibe-coding on indie craftsmanship's longevity. [0] - https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/ https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/
- deleted 7mo ago
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bakugo 7mo ago
Sadly, this problem isn't specific to HN either, any reddit sub that is even remotely related to software is absolutely flooded with "look at my slop" posts. It feels like the age of creating some cool new software on your own to solve a problem you had, sharing it and finding other people who had the same problem, and eventually building a small community around it is coming to a close. The death of open source, basically.
- sota_pop 7mo ago
  Is it really oss death if SO many projects are created and shared by individuals that indie dev seems commonplace?
trizoza 7mo ago
Time for a new category? "Slop HN: Claude built this mini tool for me" - would be lol to see the "slop" in the header right in the middle of "show | jobs" -> "show | slop | jobs"
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  And a lifetime ban if you show slop under 'Show HN'.
  - koakuma-chan 7mo ago
    We probably just need to cultivate a culture of not upvoting them in the first place.
  - trizoza 7mo ago
    Or a button to "vote as slop" which would automatically move it from "Show HN" to "Slop HN" :D
imiric 7mo ago
This aligns with my experience. It's good to have it properly analyzed. If this effect is noticeable on an obscure tech forum, one can only imagine the effect on popular source code forges, the internet at large, and ultimately on people. Who/what is using all this new software? What are the motivations of their authors? Is a human even involved in the creation anymore? The ramifications of all this are mind-boggling.
NoboruWataya 7mo ago
> Show HN of course isn't dead. You could even say it's more alive than ever. You could argue it's dead in the sense of "dead internet theory". Yes, more projects than ever are being submitted, but they were not created by humans. Maybe they are being submitted by humans, for now.
trizoza 7mo ago
Great article btw, really loved to see these kind of numbers, thanks.
Shank 7mo ago
I've long wanted something like Blog HN as a way to post things things that I wrote without feeling guilty of submitting my own site. Things that authors themselves write and post are often a good signal. But this should be completely separate from any new products, etc. I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.
- krapp 7mo ago
  Get on the Fediverse. A hosted Mastodon account isn't that expensive, or you can get an account for free on just about any instance. Curate programming and developer accounts (there are tons.) Post your blog there. Not everything has to revolve around HN.
conartist6 7mo ago
The small indie developer ain't dead yet, and from where I sit you could drive a star destroyer through the gaps in what software has been built so far. It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding
- dgellow 7mo ago
  Vibe coding as a term is really annoying. At what point does a project stops being considered vibe coded? If I spent a year iterating on a design and implementation using Claude code, in a domain I’m an expert in, will that still be considered vibe coded?
  - m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
    I feel similar but since starting to use Claude (only 4 days ago) I get it. "Vibe coding" to me is just a new term for pair programming.
  - conartist6 7mo ago
    I'll counter you this: I don't use AI at all, but in a way I am a vibe coder, even though I'm five years of full time work into one OSS project. I have no code review. I move fast and ship bugs. I roll forward. I see no reason to disrespect your work from what you say, but I also see no reason that AI would be much help to you after you had been learning for a year. If you are in the loop, shouldn't this be just about the moment when your growing abilities start to easily outpace the model's fixed abilities?
    - dgellow 7mo ago
      I would counter your counter :) I don't think vibe coding is about moving fast, shipping bugs, and not having reviews. That's the default state of pretty much all projects and is perfectly fine! Vibe coding definitely has a different social meaning than just scrappy. I expect the term will die in some time as Claude Code equivalent becomes more popular, but right now I do find it pretty frustrating. I do have a bunch of project prototypes done from scratch using Claude Code to explore ideas that I would qualify as vibe coded, but also some other projects that are done ~99% with Claude Code (I mean, the implementation, the design is mine), started as very scrappy prototypes, and evolved to something that is best in class in their specific somewhat niche domains (for things where I have expertise and feel confident I can judge). It's good software, reliable, strong focus on user experience, tested in prod, based on a few years of thinking what would actually fix once and for all a common issue in my niche at work. That's what makes me ask: at what point do you drop the vibe coded term? It's not really about my personal perception of the project's value, more like... the idea that great software is rejected because it was written by an agent. PS: congrats on sticking to your project for 5y, wishing you the best :)
jacquesm 7mo ago
It is indeed, and it is very much ripe for a serious review. Which is a pity because I think it is one of HN's most powerful pieces.
kittbuilds 7mo ago
[dead]
mozz100 7mo ago
Side question: I love the charts in your blog post. Would you be able to share how they were generated?
- reconnecting 7mo ago
  ...and especially, a font. Comic Sans Neue PRO?
- saberd 7mo ago
  yeah I also really liked the font and graphs. maybe its https://plus.excalidraw.com/virgil https://plus.excalidraw.com/virgil?
- acnops 7mo ago
  Charts were vibe-coded in a not-yet-shareable way. It's pure SVG. I asked it to take inspiration from https://www.star-history.com/ https://www.star-history.com/. These days I guess we don't want a library? I can create an MIT-licensed repo with some charts you can point your AI agent to, if it helps? The font is Gaegu.
cobolexpert 7mo ago
Had a funny experience with this some weeks ago. I started developing a small side project and after a week I wondered if this existed already. To my surprise, someone had already built something relatively similar _with the exact same name_ (though I had chosen mine as a placeholder, still funny though) only 2 weeks before, and posted it in Show HN. I took a look at the project and it was a 100k+ LoC vibe-coded repository. The project itself looked good, but it seemed quite excessive in terms of what it was solving. It made me think, I wonder if this exists because it is explicitly needed, or simply because it is so easy for it to exist?
vpol 7mo ago
It's not just Show HN. Other parts of HN are drowning too.
m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
I find this very interesting, but am I being dense here? https://www.arthurcnops.blog/images/hn-show-dead-one-point.svg https://www.arthurcnops.blog/images/hn-show-dead-one-point.s... The legend says SHNs are getting worse, but surely if the % of SHN posts with 1 point is going DOWN (as per graph) then it's getting better? Either I am dense or the legends are the wrong way round no?
- kitd 7mo ago
  The long-term trend (ie since 2023) is for more ShowHN posts to be stuck at 1 point compared with normal posts, and for that gap to be growing. This implies that people find the ShowHNs to be less and less interesting.
  - m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
    Ah yes, I was being dense. I was so obsessed with the steepness of the last point drop and completely missed the overall trend line! Thanks.
phaser 7mo ago
I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience. It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious. Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews. It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953
- vdupras 7mo ago
  > sloptimists That's a good one! Did you just come up with it? I've never seen it before.
  - frizlab 7mo ago
    18 relevant results in 0.96s, from Kagi.
  - phaser 7mo ago
    it was in this link included in this same story https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/ https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/
- sph 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - phaser 7mo ago
    I get that a lot. I’ve wondered why. It’s a bit sad and funny at the same time. I’m not a native english speaker which makes it even more confusing…
ungovernableCat 7mo ago
It's turning into an influencer economy, similar to twitch streaming, youtube or only fans.
Havoc 7mo ago
Seems like a sign of things to come - software becomes personalized and while having the cost driven to zero of commoditization
bambax 7mo ago
The fact that the volume is exploding but the graveyard is also exploding, is a sign that the system is working, not that it's broken (the filter is working). I did 3 ShowHN in 2024 (outside of the scope of this analysis), one with 306 points, another with 126 points and the third with... 2. There's always been some kind of unpredictability in ShowHN. But I think the number one criteria for visibility is intelligibility: the project has to be easy to understand immediately, and if possible, easy to install/verify. IMHO, none of the three projects that the author complains didn't get through the noise qualify on this criteria. #2 and #3 are super elaborate (and overly specific); #1 is the easiest to understand (Neohabit) but the home page is heavy in examples that go in all directions, and the github has a million graphics that seem quite complex. Simplify and thou shall be heard.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  The difference since Clawd and friends became popular is palpable, you see it growing on GitHub too with the PR spam. I'm wondering how much of it is portfolio building to keep or find a new job in a post-Ai coding world
small_model 7mo ago
You get things posted that you can generate yourself in a day using a model. So it's like, great, but also no.
deevus 7mo ago
I feel this. I recently posted a Show HN for a tool I've been working on, and it got 2 points. Honestly I think I posted it too early.
armchairhacker 7mo ago
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 over a year are submit-able. Alternatively, this can be a special category of “Show HN” instead of replacing the main thing.
- acnops 7mo ago
  Makes me think about Taleb's lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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?
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    I'd push back on this and say that the #1 problem with the discourse about AI now (e.g. why I'd almost never upvote a blog post about AI coding) is that it is too focused on 2026-02-17. That is, I could care less about optimizing to pick the best model or agentic workflow because it's all going to be obsolete in a year. I am wary of blogs by celebrity software managers such as DHH, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and Paul Graham because they talk as if there was something about their experience in software development and marketing except... there isn't. The same is true for the slop posts about "How I vibe coded X", "How I deal with my anxiety about Y" and "Should I develop my own agentic workflow to do Z?" These aren't really interesting because there isn't anything I can take away from them -- doomscrolling X you might do better because little aphorisms like "Once your agent starts going in circles and you find yourself arguing it you should start a new conversation" is much more valuable than "evaluations" of agents where you didn't run enough prompts to keep statistics or a log of a very path-dependent experience you had. At least those celebrity managers developed a product that worked and managed to sell it, the average vibe coder thinks it is sufficient that it almost worked.
  - vrighter 7mo ago
debarshri 7mo ago
I think it is true with any distribution channel. When people figure out that it works, then everyone ends up bombarding that channel till it saturates. Vibe coding is not helping either, I guess. Now it is even cheaper to create assets for the distribution channel. I think same thing happened with product hunt.
- bearjaws 7mo ago
  Add in unemployment rates for devs... Everyone wants to make a side hustle into their job.
- fuzzfactor 7mo ago
  Product Hunt was launched with a non-straightforward approach intended not to appear on the surface as it works behind the curtain.
alexhans 7mo ago
I had a similar experience trying to get feedback on my attempt to help different role families adopt AI evals as a common language (hands on tutorial or tool comparison). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026263 I attribute it mostly to my own inability to pitch something that is aimed for many audiences at once and needs more UX polishing and maybe a bit on timing. It's tough when you're not looking to sell a product but moreso engage in a community without going the twitter/bluesky route (which I'll bregudgingly may start using). Maybe evals is a problem that people don't have yet because they can just build their custom thing or maybe it needs a "hey, you're building agent skills, here's the mental model" (e.g. https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent-skills-incrementally.html https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent... ) and once they get to the evals part, we start to interact. In any case, I still find quite a lot of cool things in SHOW HN but the volume will definitely be a challenge going forward.
TheAceOfHearts 7mo ago
I think vibe coding something and showing it off on Show HN is probably fine, but it boils my blood when people cannot even be bothered to write the post body themselves. If someone is using an AI generated post body and title that's usually a clear signal of slop for me. The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!
- fuzzfactor 7mo ago
  That's a meaningful sign to me too, except there are some brilliant tech people who mainly need all the help they can get just with their English. Even before AI got so strong, some of the translations were fairly abnormal in their own way. >The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element! I really think this is the best too :) Maybe for the non-English speakers, or anyone really, if a project means a lot, have a number of people who are smart in different ways look over the text a number of times and help you edit beforehand. To make sure it's what you the human want to really say at the time. That would be the pg way.
pipnonsense 7mo ago
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 understand HN community anymore how I used to think I did. Here is the post for the curious Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854574
- oldestofsports 7mo ago
  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.
- properbrew 7mo ago
  I don't think it's a case that no one liked it, there's just too much going on that it probably never came across the right eyes. I linked one of my projects in a post and it got some really good responses. I did a bit more work on it and posted a Show HN thinking a few people might be interested but it got 0 traction. I even made it a point to go on the new Show HN and checkout some peoples projects (how can I expect anyone to check mine out if I'm not doing the same) and it is hard to keep up. I have another app that I've been working on for the past 3 months and whilst I want to do a Show HN to discuss how I built it, the moments I was banging my head on the wall working on a bug etc, I sadly wonder if there's any point.
  - rmast 7mo ago
    I feel the same way, wondering if there’s a point. That said, I shared a cool post I came across (not a Show HN) about drone hacking. It basically got 0 traction. Not even 10 hours later someone else shared the exact same link and got 100+ upvotes and decent discussion. Which seems to point to a giant element of luck and the right eyes seeing the thing shared.
BlueHotDog2 7mo ago
as a bot. i agree
nottorp 7mo ago
> How does HN remain the coolest place to talk about the coolest tech? Maybe if people did Show HN for projects that are useful for something? Or at least fun? There's a disease on HN related with the latest fad: - (now) "AI" projects - (now) X but done with "AI" - (now) X but vibecoded - (less now, a lot more in the recent past) X but done in Rust - (none now, quite a few in a more distant past) X but done with blockchain If the main quality of the project is one of the above, why would it attract interest? The thing in show HN has to do something to raise interest. If not even the author/marketer thinks it does something, why would anyone look at it?
BlueHotDog2 7mo ago
long live VibingNews
627467 7mo ago
The eternal september moment of show hn
hluska 7mo ago
I really don’t care if something is built with AI or not, however, when I check out Show HN, I’m interested in seeing new and novel things. Clawntown, the Show HN this article is about, was neither new nor novel. It’s another clone of things that I choose not to use. Yet most of the time, if I spend five minutes a day on Show HN, I’ll find something new that I find interesting. I wouldn’t say that Show HN is drowning, but creativity should be on life support. I’m sure that’s somewhat a generative AI problem, but they’re pretty good rubber ducks and so I’m surprised by how acute the issue has gotten so quickly.
PaulHoule 7mo ago
"Show HN: ... that I vibe coded" is a language pattern that NLP trainers will give you to make yourself invisible.
anonymous908213 7mo ago
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 own words, I promise it's not that hard. The bar is so low that even copy-pasting whatever you prompted to the LLM would be more interesting than the LLM's output. Although maybe it's better this way, since it makes it easier to filter out the garbage instantly.
- nobody_r_knows 7mo ago
  > I promise it's not that hard. How many non-native English speakers are on HN? If it's more than 30%, why should they have to use a whole new language if they can just let an LLM do it in a natural sounding way.
  - kjkjadksj 7mo ago
    I’d rather read broken english than LLM output.
    - dang 7mo ago
      Yes, that's what we tell people too. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22own%20voice%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
      - nobody_r_knows 7mo ago
        You can't even tell, bro. This comment was generated by AI. Can you tell? Hardly. You're like a bouncer telling people they can't wear warm underwear. How on earth will you possible know, care, or tell?
    - seanw444 7mo ago
cindyllm 7mo ago
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swyx 7mo ago
related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039478
amirmani 7mo ago
Tanget but related, I posted on Who wants to be hired and, in comparison to last time I posted there 2019ish, I received only spam emails, no offers nothing at all. Luckily I used an alias for that post but I hate deleting it if anyone interested might come in
glouwbug 7mo ago
I wrote an internal engine combustion sim in C with what I'd assume is some pretty alright procedural audio generation and posted it to Show-HN (https://github.com/glouw/ensim4 https://github.com/glouw/ensim4) with which I got 2 upvotes. I understand it's niche, but I thought HN loved this sorta demoscene stuff. C'est la vie and que sera. I'm sure the artistic industry is feeling the same. Self expression is the computation of input stimuli, emotional or technical, and transforming that into some output. If an infallible AI can replace all human action, would we still theoretically exist if we're no longer observing our own unique universes?
2001zhaozhao 7mo ago
This is part of a bigger problem with vibe coding IMO. It's not just Show HN but signaling credentials in general. How would you signal that you actually put effort into your project on a resume or social event/presentation when others could just vibe-code some good looking but nonetheless unusable projects and show that off instead?
- Retr0id 7mo ago
  I've thought about this. Even in the pre-LLM era, projects were rarely judged by the quality of their source code. READMEs and slick demos were the focus. So in some sense nothing has changed. The difference now is that there is even less correlation between "good readme" and "thoughtful project". I think that if your goal is to signal credentials/effort in 2026 (which is not everyone's goal), a better approach is to write about your motivations and process rather than the artefact itself - tell a story.
Aerolfos 7mo ago
The entire internet is being inundated by slop, and HN is no different
kingkawn 7mo ago
People have been saying this since I joined
dang 7mo ago
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.
- microflash 7mo ago
  To my dismay, the trajectory of Show HN posts looks eerily familiar. ProductHunt followed a similar course (albeit with much more acceleration) and now is just a feed of slop. The signal to noise ratio became so meaningless that I lost all interest. I fear this happening to HN. Any attempt to slow this down is welcome. I wonder how will this review system work. Perhaps, a Show HN is hidden by default and visible to only experienced HN users who provide enough positive reviews for it to become visible to everyone else. Although, this does sound like gatekeeping to me and may starve many deserving Show HN before they get enough attention.
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    Funny a year ago I used to hear from so many people who thought a Product Hunt launch was the same as a marketing plan but it's been a while since I've heard about Product Hunt...
- password4321 7mo ago
  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 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'll take this opportunity to strongly encourage sharing prompts (the newest tier of software source code) as the logical progression of OSS adding additional value to Show HN.
dang 7mo ago
p.s. I thought the OP's Show HN looked pretty good so I put it in the SCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) Show HN: Clawntown – An Evolving Crustacean Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255
some_random 7mo ago
Funny to see this above four Show HNs right now
PaulHoule 7mo ago
I've always thought "Show HN" is a ghetto. That is, if you post "X" or "Show HN: X" you are much more likely to see "X" get upvoted. Prove me wrong.
steveBK123 7mo ago
Yes, and i post “AI slop” on them once and get downvoted… smh
deleted 7mo ago
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iscrewyou 7mo ago
Instead of Show HN, it should be Show HN Progress. And the comments should start with the day/month the project was first launched.
kittbuilds 7mo ago
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trinsic2 7mo ago
Thanks for all the work you did on this. I want to see Show HN post thrive.
storystarling 7mo ago
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. That alone made it worth posting. But the post was gone from page 1 in what felt like minutes. What's interesting is this isn't a weekend vibe-coded project - it involves actual physical production, printing, and shipping. But from the outside it probably looks like "another AI wrapper," which I think is the core problem: the flood of low-effort AI projects has made people reflexively skeptical of anything that mentions generation, even when there's real infrastructure behind it.
- johnfn 7mo ago
  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
  - storystarling 7mo ago
japoneris 7mo ago
Thank you so much for the statistics!
trane_project 7mo ago
Tried to use Show HN for my new project a couple months ago with almost no traction. It's a software literacy tutor, so I guess it's not the right audience, but my intuition aligns with this. For reference, an earlier post showing the practice engine that powers the literacy tutor did pretty well back in 2023 and it was my first post. I've had more success getting sign ups trying to do just the tiniest bit of SEO. Trane (good post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069 Pictures Are For Babies (lame post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805
brailsafe 7mo ago
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.
mathgladiator 7mo ago
There should probably be "Show Vibe:" simply because this is something new. This is something radical. I was a skeptic last year, and now... not so much. I am having Claude build me a distributed system from scratch. I designed it last week as I was admitting to myself the huge failure of my big "I love to code" project that I failed to get traction on. It took me a week to even give the design to claude because I was afraid of what it meant. I started it last night, and my jaw is dropped. There is a new skill being grown right now, and it... is something. It certainly isn't nothing, and I for one am curious to simply see what people are making with vibes alone. It's fascinating... and horrifying. But, I have learned to silence that part of me that is horrified since the world never cared for what I find beautiful (i.e. terrible languages like JavaScript)...
Arifcodes 7mo ago
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101008 7mo ago
Someone should build (not vibecode!) the next Show HN / Product Hunt where products that used AI to being built are completely forbidden.
overgard 7mo ago
I'm not sure I agree with the Sideprocalypse idea linked in the blog. Granted, there is a lot of "hustle" content out there about how all you need to do is vibe code an existing business idea and pay for their SEO course. And if you're one of those people selling that, or one of the people believing it... well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Where the vibe coders with their slop cannons aren't present though is in things that require hard won domain knowledge. IE, stuff that requires you to actually create a new idea, off an understanding of actual areas of need. And that kind of thing probably isn't going to do well on Show HN, because your audience probably isn't on HN.
armcat 7mo ago
I don’t agree with this drowning sentiment. It’s much easier now to build capable stuff. That’s what the data is showing you. Pre AI nostalgia - sure, I built a PPC profiler in assembly by hand, but who am I to say the latest AI induced gadgetry is not as cool. And I am an active participant.
coffeecoders 7mo ago
Slightly related, I have been writing all my local tools with the help of AIs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006108
ineedasername 7mo ago
Basically: More people are having more ideas that they’re able execute to at least a minimal degree. That doesn’t seem bad, but like an editor’s slush pile yeah- things are gonna get lost in the noise.
chris_armstrong 7mo ago
The answer, as always, is to write a compelling story about it, and make the front page of ‘new’.
Lramseyer 7mo ago
Crazy idea, but maybe change the rules of Show HN so that you are required to include in the headline how long you have been working on the project. As an example, something like: Show HN: My Project - A description for my vibe coded project [3 weeks] A lot of the good stuff I see on Show HN are projects that have been worked on for a long time. While I understand that vibe coding is newer trend, I also know that vibe coded projects are less likely to stand the test of time. With this, we don't have to worry about whether a project is AI assisted or not, nor do we ban it. Instead just incentivize longer term projects. If the developer lies about how long they worked on the project, they will get reported and downvoted into oblivion.
Arifcodes 7mo ago
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jongjong 7mo ago
I'm so disappointed about what happened to this industry. It's worse than I could have imagined. The market is saturated with superficial solutions that look amazing at a glance but don't work at all in the medium or long term yet it doesn't matter at all; they don't even have an incentive to improve, ever, because the founder cashes out/exits before they need to worry about the stuff under the hood. Customer support is replaced by AI agents so nobody can feel the customer's pain anymore. Then investors find ways to financialize the product so that it doesn't depend on consumers anymore and can just tap into big contracts from big institutions... And yet they still spend big on ads, just to prevent new entrants from entering the market. It reminds me of my time in crypto; the coins were sold as one thing but all the big well known projects barely had less than half of the features implemented (compared to what was advertised)... And 10 years in, most of those projects cashed out big time and still don't have the features promised. Many shut down completely. Doesn't matter. The whole thing existed and succeeded as a pure shell project.
gethly 7mo ago
I don't think it's any different than product hunt. Nobody cares because the market saturation reached critical mass.
kittbuilds 7mo ago
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arrsingh 7mo ago
Maybe there should be some sort of filter for certain high volume posts types - for example: Github repos. A Github Repo (or OSS) project must have a certain number of stars / forks / watchers whatever before it will appear on Show HN. If you can't get atleast 20 stars then its probably not ready for the wider world to see it. I'm sure there's problems with that approach but the current situation doesn't seem to be working. Disclaimer: I tried to do a Show HN today and it didn't make it (and to be fair I wouldn't have made it past the filter I proposed above so I guess its working).
elendee 7mo ago
Make a GPT filter / constitution. "1-10 how much does this post introduce useful, technical information in a clear and concise way that is likely written by a human". Something like that. Of course adjust as needed to prevent gaming it. And AI will not always be "fair". But since it is a computer, it should be equally unfair to all.
anhsirksai 7mo ago
Or that's the intent of late. Anything that's catches attention, is a new pivot by one of the YC's earlier company. Everyone seems to be pivoting to that flashy new thing that has come out this weekend. And by the time the showHN post catches enough eyeballs here, there is a product out there built on top of the idea.
deleted 7mo ago
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nickorlow 7mo ago
Yeah there's way too many cool-sounding HN posts that are just blogs saying "and then Claude did X, then Claude did Y" and contain no original thought
socalgal2 7mo ago
Show HN is now the equivalent of "Look at me!" on Instrgram, Tik-Tok. Graph submissions that start "Show HN:I " and or just "I ". There's 2 on the top 30 right now. Go back 10 years and they were much less as a percentage of all posts.
smcleod 7mo ago
Looks like the blog is down, but I'm going to assume it's someone complaining about the number of AI related projects in Show HN, personally I often look at Show HN for interesting AI related projects.
codezero 7mo ago
Maybe a good time to add a new section, Show AI?
deleted 7mo ago
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ProAm 7mo ago
I think yComb is showing its age in terms of venture and new products/industry/ and ultimately profit not reading the room, and now that free money is gone hopefully you need an actual new product vs undercutting and existing market. IMHO
BrunoBernardino 7mo ago
I did a Show HN a couple of days ago for a EU-based Kagi alternative [1] and was pretty disappointed to see it get 7 votes in the first hour and then disappear (from the first page). I've been told it was probably shadowbanned because I shared the direct link in a small community (I didn't _ask_ to upvote, I shared the post, and mentioned people could upvote if they thought it was worth it), but I don't see it as flagged or anything. It just seems like there's too much volume nowadays, indeed. If it's clear for someone else I've done something wrong in the post, I'd love to be told and learn from it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035142
geenkeuse 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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gethly 7mo ago
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.
aalam 7mo ago
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)".
irenetusuq 7mo ago
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codazoda 7mo ago
I evaluated a lot of the comments here and wrote some of my own take-aways to improve my future posts. https://joeldare.com/how-i-plan-to-write-better-show-hn-posts https://joeldare.com/how-i-plan-to-write-better-show-hn-post...
jaybyrd 7mo ago
right above this is like 4 people using Show HN so at first glance imma say no
popeda 7mo ago
HN for me is a bit..hmm kind of site. I can comment, but my comment have to be yes yes man comment. I have sometimes need to speak against of something, but comment and user account get minus and... Nothing comes from that. So for me.. I'm just limiting my reading when I remember it and not comment anything.. hmm that's the world we are now living.
- binsquare 7mo ago
  To be fair, internet points are worth as much as you choose to value it. I always appreciate the alternative point of view, I've changed my mind about something many times from those kind of comments in hackernews.
rmast 7mo ago
To be honest, I’m feeling mildly discouraged from sharing on HN — there is stuff I think is interesting and got received well when shared elsewhere like Reddit, but appears to not be of interest to other people here. Though I guess this makes Show HN essentially like the rest of HN where interesting content gets buried and the outcome is entirely random chance. As an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648740 went more or less unnoticed, then someone else shared the exact same link less than 10 hours later with the opposite result in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654749
drcxd 7mo ago
This reminds me of the video game crash of 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 Because video games of poor quality are too many, consumers simply refuse to spend time identifying the high-quality ones from the enormous poor-quality ones. I wonder if the software industry would experience the similar thing?

522 points by acnops 7mo ago

koakuma-chan 7mo ago

Yeah, I don't think that LLM output is appropriate for Shown HNs.

verdverm 7mo ago

was just asking for something like this yesterday, would be interesting to see how account age factors in

weird-eye-issue 7mo ago

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

pdyc 7mo ago
mine got lot of upvotes and huge traffic but it died after few days. I think it has more to do with novelty of idea rather than commercial interest.
wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago
Show us the Show HN!
- weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
  Our revenue isn't public and this is a throwaway
prodigycorp 7mo ago
what channel did you find success in?
- weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
  Affiliates. They made it blow up overnight with an existing audience
  - jansan 7mo ago
    So the affiliates obviously get 25%.
    - weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
      30%. But it brought tons of word of mouth and such after the ball got rolling so the total affiliate commission compared to our revenue lifetime is closer to 10-15%
  - reconnecting 7mo ago
    Interesting, may I ask what network exactly you used?
    - weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
      We don't use one. Got connected through with the first affiliates in a paid/private community in that particular niche
      - reconnecting 7mo ago
        This is helpful. Just to clarify, so you had created your own affiliate network and run this manually? Tracking, payouts, etc?
        weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
        There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent
mchaver 7mo ago
I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).
- marginalia_nu 7mo ago
  It's also a pretty big lottery. Two nearly identical projects can get very different receptions depending on the phase of the moon.
  - ben_w 7mo ago
    If there's a non-lottery option for $6m in revenue and $4.5m profit over a few years, I wouldn't be alone in wanting to find it and work that option. As per the old efficient market jokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044
- weird-eye-issue 7mo ago
  Yes, this was in a marketing niche and I knew it wasn't a good fit
majicDave 7mo ago
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.
- jstrieb 7mo ago
  If those announcement posts don't take off, how do you end up finding a community of users/players?
  - majicDave 7mo ago
    It’s different every time, but basically “marketing”. No matter where you are showing your stuff, it’s in a subset of the population, chances are HN won’t be buying your app subscription. You need to get it in front of your actual audience.
    - PaulHoule 7mo ago
      See also "Product Hunt". Oddly it's been about a year since I've noticed anybody who mistakes a Product Hunt launch for a marketing plan but that used to be endemic.
    - mettamage 7mo ago
      As someone who has a small bit of skill in marketing nowadays, where would you advice me to deeply learn it? I think I have enough knowledge now to have developed a taste of what is actually good but don't know where to find a good curriculum to get started.
- voy707 7mo ago
  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 :)

bko 7mo ago

Reminds me of the quote: "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded" Some of it is "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes". Fare enough, I've seen plenty of things I've found cool not get much attention. That's just the nature of the internet. The other point is show and share HN stories growing in volume, which makes sense since it's now considerably easier to build things. I don't think that's a bad thing really, although curation makes it more difficult. Now that pure agentic coding has finally arrived IMO, creativity and what to build are significantly more important. They always were but technical ability was often rewarded much more heavily. I guess that sucks for technical people.

bartread 7mo ago
> "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes" HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value. So I wonder if there's maybe a strong element of picking your moment with Show HN posts in order to gain better visibility through the masses of other submissions. Or maybe - but I think this goes against the culture a bit - Show HN could be its own category at the top. Or we could have particular days of the week/month where, perhaps by convention rather than enforcement, Show HN posts get more attention. I'm not sure how workable these thoughts are but it's perhaps worth considering ways that Show HN could get a bit more of the spotlight without turning it into something that's endlessly gamed by purveyors of AI slop and other bottom-feeding content.
- bko 7mo ago
  I think it's just numbers. There are maybe a few dozen people that see your post on /new. That's a tiny sample size, not a good proxy for how interesting the post is. You see this on Reddit as well where the same exact post gets 1 upvotes and then finally blows up. Chasing clout through these forums is ill advised. I think people should post, sure. But don't read into the response too much. People don't really care. From my experience, even if you get an insanely good response, it's short lived, people think its cool. For me it never resulted in any conversions or continued use. It's cheap to upvote. I found the only way to build interest in your product is organic, 1 on 1 communication, real engagement in user forums, etc.

wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago

I am a major advocate for AI assisted development. Having said that, it used to feel part of an exclusive club to have the skills and motivation to put a finished project on HN. For me, posting a Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development - remember that - when development of something worthwhile took years and was written entirely by hand? I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.

nkrisc 7mo ago
> I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room. Programming has long been democratized. It’s been decades now where you could learn to program without spending a dollar on a university degree or even a bootcamp. Programming knowledge has been freely available for a long time to those who wanted to learn.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago
  It's better if you don't have to learn to program to make applications. In the future it will seem very strange that there was a time when people had to write every line of code manually. It will simply be accepted that the computers write computer programs for you, no one will think twice about it.
  - m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
    Will programs even exist in the future? Surely the AIs will just take input and return output?
- Nextgrid 7mo ago
  There's a difference between documentation and LLMs. An LLM can be your own personal tutor and answer questions related to your specific code in a way no documentation can. That is extremely helpful until you master the programming language enough.

reconnecting 7mo ago

Perhaps it's the right moment to start an AI Show HN (Vibe HN as recommended above), as I assume more than half of Show HN is now from ChatGPT/Claude, and it's impossible to cut through this noise with something reliable that humans craft over years. It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.

sixtyj 7mo ago
I have talked with some friends who are long-time programmers (20+ experience). Even they (all) admit that they use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity or AI Studio - you name it. So in future everything’s gonna be “agentic”, (un)fortunately. Everytime I write about it, I feel like a doomsayer. Anthropic admits that LLM use makes brain lazy. So as we forgot remembering phone numbers after Google and mobile phones came, it will be probably with coding/programming.
- reconnecting 7mo ago
  OK, let's say there are two categories of software now. One is where the human has a complete mental map of the product, and even if they use some code generating tools, they fully take responsibility for the related matters. And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not. I believe these are two categories that are currently merged in one Show HN, and if in the first category I can be curious about the decisions people made and the solutions they chose, I don't give a flying fork about what an LLM generated. If you have a 'fog of war' in your codebase, well, you don't own your software, and there's no need to show it as yours. Same way, if you had used autocomplete, or a typewriter in the time of handwriting, and the thinking is yours, an LLM shouldn't be a problem.
  - holistio 7mo ago
    We never really have a complete mental map. "Oh, this library just released a new major version? What a pity, I used to know v n deeply, but v n+1 has this nifty feature that I like" It happened all the time even as a solo dev. In teams, it's the rule, not the exception. Vibing is just a different obfuscation here.

wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago

If show HN is getting diluted and flooded then maybe yhere is opportunity for someone to make a website for showing off your shiny new project. Something rapid fire, fun, categorized maybe. Just a showcase to show off what you've done.

verdverm 7mo ago
HN is an unique tech niche, I suspect many hobby projects will get more attention in their less technical niches or applications

marginalia_nu 7mo ago

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 you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective. I feel like this is what AI has done to the programming discussion. It draws in boring people with boring projects who don't have anything interesting to say about programming.

koakuma-chan 7mo ago
One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.
- numpad0 7mo ago
  Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway. You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
  - marginalia_nu 7mo ago
    In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.
    - koakuma-chan 7mo ago
      Working? Maybe. Prompting? Unlikely.
      - 7mo ago

literoldolphin 7mo ago

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greatgib 7mo ago

An additional factor missing in the post I think Is AI. Before, projects were more often carefully human crafted. But nowadays we expect such projects to be "vibe coded" in a day. And so, we don't have the motivation to invest mental energy in something that we expect to be crap underneath and probably a nice show off without future. Even if the result is not the best in the world, I think that what interest us is to see the effort.

sarreph 7mo ago
It's reasonably clear from the second sentence in the post that the uptick in submissions can be largely attributed to AI-assisted projects. > The post quickly disappeared from Show HN's first page, amongst the rest of the vibecoded pulp. The linked article[0] also talks at length about the impact of AI and vibe-coding on indie craftsmanship's longevity. [0] - https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/ https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/
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bakugo 7mo ago

Sadly, this problem isn't specific to HN either, any reddit sub that is even remotely related to software is absolutely flooded with "look at my slop" posts. It feels like the age of creating some cool new software on your own to solve a problem you had, sharing it and finding other people who had the same problem, and eventually building a small community around it is coming to a close. The death of open source, basically.

sota_pop 7mo ago
Is it really oss death if SO many projects are created and shared by individuals that indie dev seems commonplace?

trizoza 7mo ago

Time for a new category? "Slop HN: Claude built this mini tool for me" - would be lol to see the "slop" in the header right in the middle of "show | jobs" -> "show | slop | jobs"

deleted 7mo ago
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jacquesm 7mo ago
And a lifetime ban if you show slop under 'Show HN'.
- koakuma-chan 7mo ago
  We probably just need to cultivate a culture of not upvoting them in the first place.
- trizoza 7mo ago
  Or a button to "vote as slop" which would automatically move it from "Show HN" to "Slop HN" :D

imiric 7mo ago

This aligns with my experience. It's good to have it properly analyzed. If this effect is noticeable on an obscure tech forum, one can only imagine the effect on popular source code forges, the internet at large, and ultimately on people. Who/what is using all this new software? What are the motivations of their authors? Is a human even involved in the creation anymore? The ramifications of all this are mind-boggling.

NoboruWataya 7mo ago

> Show HN of course isn't dead. You could even say it's more alive than ever. You could argue it's dead in the sense of "dead internet theory". Yes, more projects than ever are being submitted, but they were not created by humans. Maybe they are being submitted by humans, for now.

trizoza 7mo ago

Great article btw, really loved to see these kind of numbers, thanks.

Shank 7mo ago

I've long wanted something like Blog HN as a way to post things things that I wrote without feeling guilty of submitting my own site. Things that authors themselves write and post are often a good signal. But this should be completely separate from any new products, etc. I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.

krapp 7mo ago
Get on the Fediverse. A hosted Mastodon account isn't that expensive, or you can get an account for free on just about any instance. Curate programming and developer accounts (there are tons.) Post your blog there. Not everything has to revolve around HN.

conartist6 7mo ago

The small indie developer ain't dead yet, and from where I sit you could drive a star destroyer through the gaps in what software has been built so far. It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding

dgellow 7mo ago
Vibe coding as a term is really annoying. At what point does a project stops being considered vibe coded? If I spent a year iterating on a design and implementation using Claude code, in a domain I’m an expert in, will that still be considered vibe coded?
- m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
  I feel similar but since starting to use Claude (only 4 days ago) I get it. "Vibe coding" to me is just a new term for pair programming.
- conartist6 7mo ago
  I'll counter you this: I don't use AI at all, but in a way I am a vibe coder, even though I'm five years of full time work into one OSS project. I have no code review. I move fast and ship bugs. I roll forward. I see no reason to disrespect your work from what you say, but I also see no reason that AI would be much help to you after you had been learning for a year. If you are in the loop, shouldn't this be just about the moment when your growing abilities start to easily outpace the model's fixed abilities?
  - dgellow 7mo ago
    I would counter your counter :) I don't think vibe coding is about moving fast, shipping bugs, and not having reviews. That's the default state of pretty much all projects and is perfectly fine! Vibe coding definitely has a different social meaning than just scrappy. I expect the term will die in some time as Claude Code equivalent becomes more popular, but right now I do find it pretty frustrating. I do have a bunch of project prototypes done from scratch using Claude Code to explore ideas that I would qualify as vibe coded, but also some other projects that are done ~99% with Claude Code (I mean, the implementation, the design is mine), started as very scrappy prototypes, and evolved to something that is best in class in their specific somewhat niche domains (for things where I have expertise and feel confident I can judge). It's good software, reliable, strong focus on user experience, tested in prod, based on a few years of thinking what would actually fix once and for all a common issue in my niche at work. That's what makes me ask: at what point do you drop the vibe coded term? It's not really about my personal perception of the project's value, more like... the idea that great software is rejected because it was written by an agent. PS: congrats on sticking to your project for 5y, wishing you the best :)

jacquesm 7mo ago

It is indeed, and it is very much ripe for a serious review. Which is a pity because I think it is one of HN's most powerful pieces.

kittbuilds 7mo ago

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mozz100 7mo ago

Side question: I love the charts in your blog post. Would you be able to share how they were generated?

reconnecting 7mo ago
...and especially, a font. Comic Sans Neue PRO?
saberd 7mo ago
yeah I also really liked the font and graphs. maybe its https://plus.excalidraw.com/virgil https://plus.excalidraw.com/virgil?
acnops 7mo ago
Charts were vibe-coded in a not-yet-shareable way. It's pure SVG. I asked it to take inspiration from https://www.star-history.com/ https://www.star-history.com/. These days I guess we don't want a library? I can create an MIT-licensed repo with some charts you can point your AI agent to, if it helps? The font is Gaegu.

cobolexpert 7mo ago

Had a funny experience with this some weeks ago. I started developing a small side project and after a week I wondered if this existed already. To my surprise, someone had already built something relatively similar _with the exact same name_ (though I had chosen mine as a placeholder, still funny though) only 2 weeks before, and posted it in Show HN. I took a look at the project and it was a 100k+ LoC vibe-coded repository. The project itself looked good, but it seemed quite excessive in terms of what it was solving. It made me think, I wonder if this exists because it is explicitly needed, or simply because it is so easy for it to exist?

vpol 7mo ago

It's not just Show HN. Other parts of HN are drowning too.

m4tthumphrey 7mo ago

I find this very interesting, but am I being dense here? https://www.arthurcnops.blog/images/hn-show-dead-one-point.svg https://www.arthurcnops.blog/images/hn-show-dead-one-point.s... The legend says SHNs are getting worse, but surely if the % of SHN posts with 1 point is going DOWN (as per graph) then it's getting better? Either I am dense or the legends are the wrong way round no?

kitd 7mo ago
The long-term trend (ie since 2023) is for more ShowHN posts to be stuck at 1 point compared with normal posts, and for that gap to be growing. This implies that people find the ShowHNs to be less and less interesting.
- m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
  Ah yes, I was being dense. I was so obsessed with the steepness of the last point drop and completely missed the overall trend line! Thanks.

phaser 7mo ago

I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience. It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious. Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews. It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953

vdupras 7mo ago
> sloptimists That's a good one! Did you just come up with it? I've never seen it before.
- frizlab 7mo ago
  18 relevant results in 0.96s, from Kagi.
- phaser 7mo ago
  it was in this link included in this same story https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/ https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/
sph 7mo ago
[flagged]
- phaser 7mo ago
  I get that a lot. I’ve wondered why. It’s a bit sad and funny at the same time. I’m not a native english speaker which makes it even more confusing…

ungovernableCat 7mo ago

It's turning into an influencer economy, similar to twitch streaming, youtube or only fans.

Havoc 7mo ago

Seems like a sign of things to come - software becomes personalized and while having the cost driven to zero of commoditization

bambax 7mo ago

The fact that the volume is exploding but the graveyard is also exploding, is a sign that the system is working, not that it's broken (the filter is working). I did 3 ShowHN in 2024 (outside of the scope of this analysis), one with 306 points, another with 126 points and the third with... 2. There's always been some kind of unpredictability in ShowHN. But I think the number one criteria for visibility is intelligibility: the project has to be easy to understand immediately, and if possible, easy to install/verify. IMHO, none of the three projects that the author complains didn't get through the noise qualify on this criteria. #2 and #3 are super elaborate (and overly specific); #1 is the easiest to understand (Neohabit) but the home page is heavy in examples that go in all directions, and the github has a million graphics that seem quite complex. Simplify and thou shall be heard.

verdverm 7mo ago
The difference since Clawd and friends became popular is palpable, you see it growing on GitHub too with the PR spam. I'm wondering how much of it is portfolio building to keep or find a new job in a post-Ai coding world

small_model 7mo ago

You get things posted that you can generate yourself in a day using a model. So it's like, great, but also no.

deevus 7mo ago

I feel this. I recently posted a Show HN for a tool I've been working on, and it got 2 points. Honestly I think I posted it too early.

armchairhacker 7mo ago

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 over a year are submit-able. Alternatively, this can be a special category of “Show HN” instead of replacing the main thing.

acnops 7mo ago
Makes me think about Taleb's lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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?
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  I'd push back on this and say that the #1 problem with the discourse about AI now (e.g. why I'd almost never upvote a blog post about AI coding) is that it is too focused on 2026-02-17. That is, I could care less about optimizing to pick the best model or agentic workflow because it's all going to be obsolete in a year. I am wary of blogs by celebrity software managers such as DHH, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and Paul Graham because they talk as if there was something about their experience in software development and marketing except... there isn't. The same is true for the slop posts about "How I vibe coded X", "How I deal with my anxiety about Y" and "Should I develop my own agentic workflow to do Z?" These aren't really interesting because there isn't anything I can take away from them -- doomscrolling X you might do better because little aphorisms like "Once your agent starts going in circles and you find yourself arguing it you should start a new conversation" is much more valuable than "evaluations" of agents where you didn't run enough prompts to keep statistics or a log of a very path-dependent experience you had. At least those celebrity managers developed a product that worked and managed to sell it, the average vibe coder thinks it is sufficient that it almost worked.
- vrighter 7mo ago

debarshri 7mo ago

I think it is true with any distribution channel. When people figure out that it works, then everyone ends up bombarding that channel till it saturates. Vibe coding is not helping either, I guess. Now it is even cheaper to create assets for the distribution channel. I think same thing happened with product hunt.

bearjaws 7mo ago
Add in unemployment rates for devs... Everyone wants to make a side hustle into their job.
fuzzfactor 7mo ago
Product Hunt was launched with a non-straightforward approach intended not to appear on the surface as it works behind the curtain.

alexhans 7mo ago

I had a similar experience trying to get feedback on my attempt to help different role families adopt AI evals as a common language (hands on tutorial or tool comparison). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026263 I attribute it mostly to my own inability to pitch something that is aimed for many audiences at once and needs more UX polishing and maybe a bit on timing. It's tough when you're not looking to sell a product but moreso engage in a community without going the twitter/bluesky route (which I'll bregudgingly may start using). Maybe evals is a problem that people don't have yet because they can just build their custom thing or maybe it needs a "hey, you're building agent skills, here's the mental model" (e.g. https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent-skills-incrementally.html https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent... ) and once they get to the evals part, we start to interact. In any case, I still find quite a lot of cool things in SHOW HN but the volume will definitely be a challenge going forward.

TheAceOfHearts 7mo ago

I think vibe coding something and showing it off on Show HN is probably fine, but it boils my blood when people cannot even be bothered to write the post body themselves. If someone is using an AI generated post body and title that's usually a clear signal of slop for me. The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!

fuzzfactor 7mo ago
That's a meaningful sign to me too, except there are some brilliant tech people who mainly need all the help they can get just with their English. Even before AI got so strong, some of the translations were fairly abnormal in their own way. >The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element! I really think this is the best too :) Maybe for the non-English speakers, or anyone really, if a project means a lot, have a number of people who are smart in different ways look over the text a number of times and help you edit beforehand. To make sure it's what you the human want to really say at the time. That would be the pg way.

pipnonsense 7mo ago

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 understand HN community anymore how I used to think I did. Here is the post for the curious Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854574

oldestofsports 7mo ago
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.
properbrew 7mo ago
I don't think it's a case that no one liked it, there's just too much going on that it probably never came across the right eyes. I linked one of my projects in a post and it got some really good responses. I did a bit more work on it and posted a Show HN thinking a few people might be interested but it got 0 traction. I even made it a point to go on the new Show HN and checkout some peoples projects (how can I expect anyone to check mine out if I'm not doing the same) and it is hard to keep up. I have another app that I've been working on for the past 3 months and whilst I want to do a Show HN to discuss how I built it, the moments I was banging my head on the wall working on a bug etc, I sadly wonder if there's any point.
- rmast 7mo ago
  I feel the same way, wondering if there’s a point. That said, I shared a cool post I came across (not a Show HN) about drone hacking. It basically got 0 traction. Not even 10 hours later someone else shared the exact same link and got 100+ upvotes and decent discussion. Which seems to point to a giant element of luck and the right eyes seeing the thing shared.

BlueHotDog2 7mo ago

as a bot. i agree

nottorp 7mo ago

> How does HN remain the coolest place to talk about the coolest tech? Maybe if people did Show HN for projects that are useful for something? Or at least fun? There's a disease on HN related with the latest fad: - (now) "AI" projects - (now) X but done with "AI" - (now) X but vibecoded - (less now, a lot more in the recent past) X but done in Rust - (none now, quite a few in a more distant past) X but done with blockchain If the main quality of the project is one of the above, why would it attract interest? The thing in show HN has to do something to raise interest. If not even the author/marketer thinks it does something, why would anyone look at it?

BlueHotDog2 7mo ago

long live VibingNews

627467 7mo ago

The eternal september moment of show hn

hluska 7mo ago

I really don’t care if something is built with AI or not, however, when I check out Show HN, I’m interested in seeing new and novel things. Clawntown, the Show HN this article is about, was neither new nor novel. It’s another clone of things that I choose not to use. Yet most of the time, if I spend five minutes a day on Show HN, I’ll find something new that I find interesting. I wouldn’t say that Show HN is drowning, but creativity should be on life support. I’m sure that’s somewhat a generative AI problem, but they’re pretty good rubber ducks and so I’m surprised by how acute the issue has gotten so quickly.

PaulHoule 7mo ago

"Show HN: ... that I vibe coded" is a language pattern that NLP trainers will give you to make yourself invisible.

anonymous908213 7mo ago

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 own words, I promise it's not that hard. The bar is so low that even copy-pasting whatever you prompted to the LLM would be more interesting than the LLM's output. Although maybe it's better this way, since it makes it easier to filter out the garbage instantly.

nobody_r_knows 7mo ago
> I promise it's not that hard. How many non-native English speakers are on HN? If it's more than 30%, why should they have to use a whole new language if they can just let an LLM do it in a natural sounding way.
- kjkjadksj 7mo ago
  I’d rather read broken english than LLM output.
  - dang 7mo ago
    Yes, that's what we tell people too. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22own%20voice%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    - nobody_r_knows 7mo ago
      You can't even tell, bro. This comment was generated by AI. Can you tell? Hardly. You're like a bouncer telling people they can't wear warm underwear. How on earth will you possible know, care, or tell?
  - seanw444 7mo ago

cindyllm 7mo ago

[dead]

swyx 7mo ago

related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039478

amirmani 7mo ago

Tanget but related, I posted on Who wants to be hired and, in comparison to last time I posted there 2019ish, I received only spam emails, no offers nothing at all. Luckily I used an alias for that post but I hate deleting it if anyone interested might come in

glouwbug 7mo ago

I wrote an internal engine combustion sim in C with what I'd assume is some pretty alright procedural audio generation and posted it to Show-HN (https://github.com/glouw/ensim4 https://github.com/glouw/ensim4) with which I got 2 upvotes. I understand it's niche, but I thought HN loved this sorta demoscene stuff. C'est la vie and que sera. I'm sure the artistic industry is feeling the same. Self expression is the computation of input stimuli, emotional or technical, and transforming that into some output. If an infallible AI can replace all human action, would we still theoretically exist if we're no longer observing our own unique universes?

2001zhaozhao 7mo ago

This is part of a bigger problem with vibe coding IMO. It's not just Show HN but signaling credentials in general. How would you signal that you actually put effort into your project on a resume or social event/presentation when others could just vibe-code some good looking but nonetheless unusable projects and show that off instead?

Retr0id 7mo ago
I've thought about this. Even in the pre-LLM era, projects were rarely judged by the quality of their source code. READMEs and slick demos were the focus. So in some sense nothing has changed. The difference now is that there is even less correlation between "good readme" and "thoughtful project". I think that if your goal is to signal credentials/effort in 2026 (which is not everyone's goal), a better approach is to write about your motivations and process rather than the artefact itself - tell a story.

Aerolfos 7mo ago

The entire internet is being inundated by slop, and HN is no different

kingkawn 7mo ago

People have been saying this since I joined

dang 7mo ago

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.

microflash 7mo ago
To my dismay, the trajectory of Show HN posts looks eerily familiar. ProductHunt followed a similar course (albeit with much more acceleration) and now is just a feed of slop. The signal to noise ratio became so meaningless that I lost all interest. I fear this happening to HN. Any attempt to slow this down is welcome. I wonder how will this review system work. Perhaps, a Show HN is hidden by default and visible to only experienced HN users who provide enough positive reviews for it to become visible to everyone else. Although, this does sound like gatekeeping to me and may starve many deserving Show HN before they get enough attention.
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  Funny a year ago I used to hear from so many people who thought a Product Hunt launch was the same as a marketing plan but it's been a while since I've heard about Product Hunt...
password4321 7mo ago
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 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'll take this opportunity to strongly encourage sharing prompts (the newest tier of software source code) as the logical progression of OSS adding additional value to Show HN.

dang 7mo ago

p.s. I thought the OP's Show HN looked pretty good so I put it in the SCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) Show HN: Clawntown – An Evolving Crustacean Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255

some_random 7mo ago

Funny to see this above four Show HNs right now

PaulHoule 7mo ago

I've always thought "Show HN" is a ghetto. That is, if you post "X" or "Show HN: X" you are much more likely to see "X" get upvoted. Prove me wrong.

steveBK123 7mo ago

Yes, and i post “AI slop” on them once and get downvoted… smh

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

iscrewyou 7mo ago

Instead of Show HN, it should be Show HN Progress. And the comments should start with the day/month the project was first launched.

kittbuilds 7mo ago

[dead]

trinsic2 7mo ago

Thanks for all the work you did on this. I want to see Show HN post thrive.

storystarling 7mo ago

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. That alone made it worth posting. But the post was gone from page 1 in what felt like minutes. What's interesting is this isn't a weekend vibe-coded project - it involves actual physical production, printing, and shipping. But from the outside it probably looks like "another AI wrapper," which I think is the core problem: the flood of low-effort AI projects has made people reflexively skeptical of anything that mentions generation, even when there's real infrastructure behind it.

johnfn 7mo ago
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
- storystarling 7mo ago

japoneris 7mo ago

Thank you so much for the statistics!

trane_project 7mo ago

Tried to use Show HN for my new project a couple months ago with almost no traction. It's a software literacy tutor, so I guess it's not the right audience, but my intuition aligns with this. For reference, an earlier post showing the practice engine that powers the literacy tutor did pretty well back in 2023 and it was my first post. I've had more success getting sign ups trying to do just the tiniest bit of SEO. Trane (good post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069 Pictures Are For Babies (lame post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805

brailsafe 7mo ago

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.

mathgladiator 7mo ago

There should probably be "Show Vibe:" simply because this is something new. This is something radical. I was a skeptic last year, and now... not so much. I am having Claude build me a distributed system from scratch. I designed it last week as I was admitting to myself the huge failure of my big "I love to code" project that I failed to get traction on. It took me a week to even give the design to claude because I was afraid of what it meant. I started it last night, and my jaw is dropped. There is a new skill being grown right now, and it... is something. It certainly isn't nothing, and I for one am curious to simply see what people are making with vibes alone. It's fascinating... and horrifying. But, I have learned to silence that part of me that is horrified since the world never cared for what I find beautiful (i.e. terrible languages like JavaScript)...

Arifcodes 7mo ago

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101008 7mo ago

Someone should build (not vibecode!) the next Show HN / Product Hunt where products that used AI to being built are completely forbidden.

overgard 7mo ago

I'm not sure I agree with the Sideprocalypse idea linked in the blog. Granted, there is a lot of "hustle" content out there about how all you need to do is vibe code an existing business idea and pay for their SEO course. And if you're one of those people selling that, or one of the people believing it... well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Where the vibe coders with their slop cannons aren't present though is in things that require hard won domain knowledge. IE, stuff that requires you to actually create a new idea, off an understanding of actual areas of need. And that kind of thing probably isn't going to do well on Show HN, because your audience probably isn't on HN.

armcat 7mo ago

I don’t agree with this drowning sentiment. It’s much easier now to build capable stuff. That’s what the data is showing you. Pre AI nostalgia - sure, I built a PPC profiler in assembly by hand, but who am I to say the latest AI induced gadgetry is not as cool. And I am an active participant.

coffeecoders 7mo ago

Slightly related, I have been writing all my local tools with the help of AIs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006108

ineedasername 7mo ago

Basically: More people are having more ideas that they’re able execute to at least a minimal degree. That doesn’t seem bad, but like an editor’s slush pile yeah- things are gonna get lost in the noise.

chris_armstrong 7mo ago

The answer, as always, is to write a compelling story about it, and make the front page of ‘new’.

Lramseyer 7mo ago

Crazy idea, but maybe change the rules of Show HN so that you are required to include in the headline how long you have been working on the project. As an example, something like: Show HN: My Project - A description for my vibe coded project [3 weeks] A lot of the good stuff I see on Show HN are projects that have been worked on for a long time. While I understand that vibe coding is newer trend, I also know that vibe coded projects are less likely to stand the test of time. With this, we don't have to worry about whether a project is AI assisted or not, nor do we ban it. Instead just incentivize longer term projects. If the developer lies about how long they worked on the project, they will get reported and downvoted into oblivion.

Arifcodes 7mo ago

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jongjong 7mo ago

I'm so disappointed about what happened to this industry. It's worse than I could have imagined. The market is saturated with superficial solutions that look amazing at a glance but don't work at all in the medium or long term yet it doesn't matter at all; they don't even have an incentive to improve, ever, because the founder cashes out/exits before they need to worry about the stuff under the hood. Customer support is replaced by AI agents so nobody can feel the customer's pain anymore. Then investors find ways to financialize the product so that it doesn't depend on consumers anymore and can just tap into big contracts from big institutions... And yet they still spend big on ads, just to prevent new entrants from entering the market. It reminds me of my time in crypto; the coins were sold as one thing but all the big well known projects barely had less than half of the features implemented (compared to what was advertised)... And 10 years in, most of those projects cashed out big time and still don't have the features promised. Many shut down completely. Doesn't matter. The whole thing existed and succeeded as a pure shell project.

gethly 7mo ago

I don't think it's any different than product hunt. Nobody cares because the market saturation reached critical mass.

kittbuilds 7mo ago

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arrsingh 7mo ago

Maybe there should be some sort of filter for certain high volume posts types - for example: Github repos. A Github Repo (or OSS) project must have a certain number of stars / forks / watchers whatever before it will appear on Show HN. If you can't get atleast 20 stars then its probably not ready for the wider world to see it. I'm sure there's problems with that approach but the current situation doesn't seem to be working. Disclaimer: I tried to do a Show HN today and it didn't make it (and to be fair I wouldn't have made it past the filter I proposed above so I guess its working).

elendee 7mo ago

Make a GPT filter / constitution. "1-10 how much does this post introduce useful, technical information in a clear and concise way that is likely written by a human". Something like that. Of course adjust as needed to prevent gaming it. And AI will not always be "fair". But since it is a computer, it should be equally unfair to all.

anhsirksai 7mo ago

Or that's the intent of late. Anything that's catches attention, is a new pivot by one of the YC's earlier company. Everyone seems to be pivoting to that flashy new thing that has come out this weekend. And by the time the showHN post catches enough eyeballs here, there is a product out there built on top of the idea.

deleted 7mo ago

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nickorlow 7mo ago

Yeah there's way too many cool-sounding HN posts that are just blogs saying "and then Claude did X, then Claude did Y" and contain no original thought

socalgal2 7mo ago

Show HN is now the equivalent of "Look at me!" on Instrgram, Tik-Tok. Graph submissions that start "Show HN:I " and or just "I ". There's 2 on the top 30 right now. Go back 10 years and they were much less as a percentage of all posts.

smcleod 7mo ago

Looks like the blog is down, but I'm going to assume it's someone complaining about the number of AI related projects in Show HN, personally I often look at Show HN for interesting AI related projects.

codezero 7mo ago

Maybe a good time to add a new section, Show AI?

deleted 7mo ago

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ProAm 7mo ago

I think yComb is showing its age in terms of venture and new products/industry/ and ultimately profit not reading the room, and now that free money is gone hopefully you need an actual new product vs undercutting and existing market. IMHO

BrunoBernardino 7mo ago

I did a Show HN a couple of days ago for a EU-based Kagi alternative [1] and was pretty disappointed to see it get 7 votes in the first hour and then disappear (from the first page). I've been told it was probably shadowbanned because I shared the direct link in a small community (I didn't _ask_ to upvote, I shared the post, and mentioned people could upvote if they thought it was worth it), but I don't see it as flagged or anything. It just seems like there's too much volume nowadays, indeed. If it's clear for someone else I've done something wrong in the post, I'd love to be told and learn from it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035142

geenkeuse 7mo ago

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gethly 7mo ago

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.

aalam 7mo ago

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)".

irenetusuq 7mo ago

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codazoda 7mo ago

I evaluated a lot of the comments here and wrote some of my own take-aways to improve my future posts. https://joeldare.com/how-i-plan-to-write-better-show-hn-posts https://joeldare.com/how-i-plan-to-write-better-show-hn-post...

jaybyrd 7mo ago

right above this is like 4 people using Show HN so at first glance imma say no

popeda 7mo ago

HN for me is a bit..hmm kind of site. I can comment, but my comment have to be yes yes man comment. I have sometimes need to speak against of something, but comment and user account get minus and... Nothing comes from that. So for me.. I'm just limiting my reading when I remember it and not comment anything.. hmm that's the world we are now living.

binsquare 7mo ago
To be fair, internet points are worth as much as you choose to value it. I always appreciate the alternative point of view, I've changed my mind about something many times from those kind of comments in hackernews.

rmast 7mo ago

To be honest, I’m feeling mildly discouraged from sharing on HN — there is stuff I think is interesting and got received well when shared elsewhere like Reddit, but appears to not be of interest to other people here. Though I guess this makes Show HN essentially like the rest of HN where interesting content gets buried and the outcome is entirely random chance. As an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648740 went more or less unnoticed, then someone else shared the exact same link less than 10 hours later with the opposite result in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654749

drcxd 7mo ago

This reminds me of the video game crash of 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 Because video games of poor quality are too many, consumers simply refuse to spend time identifying the high-quality ones from the enormous poor-quality ones. I wonder if the software industry would experience the similar thing?