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.
More seriously though, I think some sort of curation is unavoidable with such topics. If you get inspired by stack overflow where you have some similar mechanics at work, then I'd say that is not too bad. But of course you risk some people being angry about why their amazing vibe coded app is not being shown. Although the more I think of it, this might be a good thing.
For example, in one project, PRs have to be submitted to the "next" branch and not the default branch. This is written in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is linked in the PR template, with the mention that PRs that don't respect that will be close. Most if not all submitters of low-quality PRs don't do anything once their initial PR is closed.
Pretty bummed about that as I just submitted a show HN I'm pretty happy about (it solves an annoying problem I had for years, which I know many people have) and I was looking forward to talk about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050872)
So while I understand that new features on HN are few and far between, a quick validation of "Show HN" posts that says, "I see you are trying to post a Show HN..." with some concise explanation of the guidelines might help. I want to believe that most new users mean well, they just need better explanations.
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.
Show HN [NOAI]:
This wouldn't necessarily need to be a technical change, just an intuitive agreement that posts containing LLM or vibe coded content are not allowed to lie by using the tag, or will be flagged... Then again it could also be used to elevate their rank above other show HN content to give us humanoids some edge if deemed necessary, or a segregated [NOAI] page.
[edit]
The label might need more thought, although "NOAI" is short and intelligible, it might be seen as a bit ironic to have to add a tag containing "AI" into your title. [HUMAN]?
Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.
e.g. [20h/2d/$10] could indicate "I spent 20 human-hours over 2 days and burned $10 worth of tokens" (it's hard to put a single-dimensional number on LLM usage and not everyone keeps track, but dollars seem like a reasonable approximation)
Meaning you would have to demonstrate that you had or were willing to contribute to the HN community before just promoting your own stuff.
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.
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.
I’ve seen variation of this question since first few weeks /months after the release of ChatGPT and I havent seen an answer to this from leading figures in the AI coding space, whats the general answer or point of view on this?
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One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the problem was real enough to make solving it worthwhile.
Now there's no such filter function, so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas, by people who don't know very much
It's a bit parallel to that thing we had in 2023 where dinguses went into every thread and proudly announced what ChatGPT had to say about the subject. Consensus eventually become that this was annoying and unhelpful.
In the past, new modders would often contribute to existing mods to get their feet wet and quite often they'd turn into maintainers when the original authors burnt out.
But vibe coders never do this. They basically unilaterally just take existing mods' source code, feed this into their LLM of choice and generate a derivative work. They don't contribute back anything, because they don't even try to understand what they are doing.
Their ideas might be novel, but they don't contribute in any way to the common good in terms of capabilities or infrastructure. It's becoming nigh impossible to police this, and I fear the endgame is a sea of AI generated slop which will inevitably implode once the truly innovative stuff dies and and people who actually do the work stop doing so.
There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do.
It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired for this visually-impressive-but-otherwise-slop abundance.
Last year though I purchased the next book in the series and I am 99% sure it was AI generated. None of the characters behaved consistently, there was a ton of random lewd scenes involving characters from books past. There were paragraphs and paragraphs of purple prose describing the scene but not actually saying anything. It was just so unlike every other book in the series. It was like someone just pasted all the previous books into an LLM and pushed the go button.
I was so shocked and disappointing that I paid good money for some AI slop I've stopped following the author entirely. It was a real eye opener for me. I used to enjoy just taking a chance on a new book because the fact that it made it through publishing at least implied some minimum quality standard, but now I'm really picky about what books I pick up because the quality floor is so much lower than in the past.
Honestly: there is SO much media, certainly for entertainment. I may just pretend nothing after 2022 exists.
Wait, what? That's a great benefit?
— Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
Some day I’m going to get a crystal ball for statistics. Getting bored with a project was always a thing— after the first push, I don’t encounter like 80% of my coding side projects until I’m cleaning— but I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed. I think a lot of what we’re seeing are projects that were easy enough to reach MVP before encountering the final 90% of coding time, which AI is a lot less useful for.
My experience is the opposite. It’s so much easier to have an LLM grind the last mile annoyances (e.g. installing and debugging compilation bullshit on a specific raspberry pi + unmaintained 3p library versions.)
I can focus on the parts I love, including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.
I have two projects right now on the threshold of "Show HN" that I used AI for but could have completed without AI. I'm never going to say "I did this with AI". For instance there is this HR monitor demo
https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/
which needs tuning up for mobile (so I can do an in-person demo to people who work on HRV) but most all being able to run with pre-recorded data so that people who don't have a BTLE HR monitor can see how cool it is.
Another thing I am tuning up for "never saw anything like this" impact is a system of tokens that I give people when I go out as-a-foxographer
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840
I am used to marketing funnels having 5% effectiveness and it blows my mind that at least 75% of the tokens I give out get scanned and that is with the old conventional cards that have the same back side. The number + suit tokens are particularly good as a "self-working demo" because it is easy to talk about them, when somebody flags me down because they noticed my hood I can show them a few cards that are all different and let them choose one or say "Look, you got the 9 of Bees!"
It seems silly, but I know I'm more likely to review an implementation if can learn more about the author's state of mind by their style.
Side note: I’d think installing Anubis over your work would go a long way to signaling that but ymmv.
> author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space
I’ve stopped saying that “AI is just a tool” to justify/defend its use precisely because of this loss of thought you highlight. I now believe the appropriate analogy is “AI is delegation”.
So talking to the vibe coder that’s used AI is like talking to a high level manager rather than the engineer for human written code
Thing is I worked manually on both of these a lot before I even touched Claude on them so I basically was able to hit my wishlist items that I don't have time to deal with these days but have the logic figured out already.
These days I do see a lot of people choosing software for the money. Notably, many of them are bootcamp graduates and arguably made a pivot later in life, as opposed to other careers (such as medicine) which get chosen early. Nothing wrong with that (for many it has a good ROI), but I don’t think this changed anything about people with technical hobbies.
When you’re young, you tend not to choose the path the rest of your life will take based on income. What your parents want for you is a different matter…
I mean it's a real problem, but it's also a solved problem, and also not a problem that comes up a lot unless you're doing the sort of engineering where you're using a CAD tool already.
I don't doubt it's useful, and seems pretty well crafted what little I tried it, but it doesn't really invite much discussion.
Having too may subs could get out of hand, but sometimes you end up with so much paperwork generated so fast that it needs its own dedicated whole drawer in your filing cabinet ;)
It's still early and easy to underestimate the number of visitors who would absolutely love to have the main page more covered in absolute pure vibe than it is recently.
I would like to hear opinions as to why the non-human touch is preferred, that could add something that not many are putting into words.
Hopefully it's not a case of the lights being on but nobody's home :(
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.
concur, perhaps a dedicated or alternative, itch.io like area named "Slop HN:..."
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.
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.
> sloptimists
This really bothers me, coming here asking for human feedback (basically: strangers spending time on their behalf) then dumping it into the slop generator pretending it is even slightly appreciated. It wouldn't even be that much more work to prompt the LLM to hide its tone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393992#46396486) but even that is too much.
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.
because they can't. that's the whole point here. people can easily distinguish the LLM generated content, and can tell it's not like interacting with a real person.
Post both versions
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
As per the old efficient market jokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044
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.
> 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/
It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.
If I used LLMs to generate a few functions would I be eligible for it? What constitutes "built this with no/ minimal AI"?
Maybe we should have a separate section for 80%+ vibe coded / agent developed.
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.
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.
"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.
When you upgrade a library, you made that decision — you know why, you know what it does for you, and you can evaluate the trade-offs before proceeding (unless you're a react developer).
That's not a fog of war, that's delegation.
When an LLM generates your core logic and you can't explain why it works, that's a fundamentally different situation. You're not delegating — you're outsourcing the understanding, and that makes the result not yours.
The benefit of libraries is it's an abstraction and compartmentalization layer. You don't have to use REST calls to talk to AWS, you can use boto and move s3 files around in your code without cluttering it up.
Yeah, sometimes the abstraction breaks or fails, but generally that's rare unless the library really sucks, or you get a leftpad situation.
Having a mental map of your code doesn't mean you know everything, it means you understand how your code works, what it is responsible for, and how it interacts with or delegates to other things.
Part of being a good software engineer is managing complexity like that.
Case in point: aside from Tabbing furiously, I use the Ask feature to ask vague questions that would take my coworkers time they don't have.
Interestingly at least in Cursor, Intellisense seems to be dumbed down in favour of AI, so when I look at a commit, it typically has double digit percentage of "AI co-authorship", even though most of the time it's the result of using Tab and Intellisense would have given the same suggestion anyway.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
If you invested a (being generous) week of casual prompting into it, it probably doesn't have legs despite being 100k lines or whatever metric.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And the comments should start with the day/month the project was first launched.
Show HN: Clawntown – An Evolving Crustacean Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255
It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding
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?
If you do then not vibe coded.
For me, I have different levels of vibes:
Some testing/prototyping bash scripts 100% vibe coded. I have never actually read the code.
Sometimes early iterations, I am familiar with general architecture, but do not know exact file contents.
Sometimes I have gone through and practically rewrote a component from scratch either because it was too convoluted, did not have the perfect abstraction I wantet/etc.
For me the third category is not vibe coded. The first 2 are tech debt in the making.
Good question, and by the same "token" when does it start?
Maybe if there's no possible way the creator could have written it by hand, perhaps due to almost complete illiteracy to code in any language, or something like that, it would be a reference point for "pure vibe". If the project is impressive, that's still nothing to be ashamed of. Especially if people can see the source code.
All kinds of creative people I see are mostly no dummies and it might be better than nothing for them to honestly rate their own submissions somewhere on the scale from pure vibe to pure manual?
With no stigma regardless, and let the upvotes or downvotes from there give an indication of how accurate the self-assessments are. Voting directly to Show HN could even have a different "currency" [0] to help regulate the fall of Show submissions, where a single upvote could mean something like infinitely more than zero.
I'm not disappointed by a project purely vibed by somebody like a visual artist, storyteller, or business enthusiast who has never written a line of code, as long as it is astoundingly impressive, in the league of the better projects, those I would like to take a look at.
I also see real accomplished coders guide their agents to arrive at things that wouldn't be as nice if they didn't have years of advanced manual ability beforehand.
Plus I think I'm in the vast majority and have no interest in "slop", in a way that aligns with so many kinds of people who are also turned off.
But so far, the best definition we have for slop is "we know it when we see it".
Oh, well that's all I've got, so far :)
[0] slop vs non-slop which is like pass/fail, or even a numerical rating could be on the "ballot".
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?
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... ) 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.
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?
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.
I'm wondering how much of it is portfolio building to keep or find a new job in a post-Ai coding world
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.
Something rapid fire, fun, categorized maybe. Just a showcase to show off what you've done.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not everything has to revolve around HN.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This is still possible. Vibe coders are just not interested in working on a piece of software for years till it's polished. It's a self selection pattern. Like the vast amount of terrible VB6 apps when it came out. Or the state of JS until very recently.
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.
Somewhere right now there's a complete greehorn vibecoder who's saying "hold my beer" ;)
While they proceed to learn everything they can about the code that the LLM generated for them.
For the next few years, and never come back to drink the rest of the beer :)
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.
The obvious counterpoint is that AO3 is brilliant, which it is: give people a way to ontologize themselves and the result is amazing. Sure, AO3 has some sort of make-integer-go-up system, but it reveals the critical defect in “Show HN”: one pool for all submissions means the few that would before have been pulled out by us lifeguards are more likely to drown, unnoticed, amidst the throngs. HN’s submissions model only scales so far without AO3’s del.icio.us-inherited tagging model. Without it, tool-assisted creative output will increasingly overwhelm the few people willing to slog through an untagged Show HN pool. Certainly I’m one of them; at 20% by weight AI submissions per 12 hours in the new feed alone, heavily weighted in favor of show posts, my own eyes and this post’s graphs confirm that I am right to have stopped reading Show HN. I only have so much time in my day, sorry.
My interest in an HN post, whether in new or show or front page, is directly proportional to how much effort the submitter invested in it. “Clippy, write me a program” is no more interesting than a standard HN generic rabble-rousing link to a GotHub issue or a fifty-page essay about some economics point that could have been concisely conveyed in one. If the submitter has invested zero personal effort into whatever degree of expression of designcraft, wordcraft, and code craft that their submission contains, then they have nothing to Show HN.
In the rare cases when I interact with a show post these days, I’ve found the submissions to be functionally equivalent to an AI prompt: “here’s my idea, here’s my solution, here’s my app” but lacking any of the passion that drives people to overcome obstacles at all. That’s an intended outcome of democratization, and it’s also why craft fairs and Saturday markets exercise editorial judgment over who gets a booth or not. It’s a bad look for the market to be filled with sellers who have a list of AI-generated memes and a button press, whose eyes only shine when you take out your wallet. Sure, some of the buttons might be cool, but that market sucks to visit.
Thus, the decline of Show HN. Not because of democratization of knowledge, but because lowering the minimum effort threshold to create and post something to HN reveals a flaw-at-scale of community-voting editorial model: it only works when the editorial community scales as rapidly as submissions, which it obviously has not been.
Full-text search tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort in favor of language modeling, and turned out to be a disastrous failure after a couple decades due to the inability of a computer to distinguish mediocre (or worse) from competent (or better). HN tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort and it has survived well enough for quite some time, but gestures at Show HN trends graphs it isn’t looking good either. Ironically, Reddit tried to implement centralized moderation on a per-community basis — and that worked extremely well for many years, until Reddit rediscovered why corporations of the 90s worked so hard to deprecate editorial staff, when their editors engaged in collective action against management (something any academic journal publisher is intimately familiar with!).
In that light, HN’s core principle is democratizing editorial review — but now that our high-skill niche is no longer high-skill, the submissions are flooding in and the reviewers are not. Without violating the site’s core precepts of submission egality and editorial democracy, I see no way that HN can reverse the trend shown by OP’s data. The AO3 tagging model isn’t acceptable as it creates unequal distinctions between submissions and site complexity that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards ontologies. The Reddit and acsdemic journal editorial models aren’t acceptable as it creates unequal distinction between users and editors that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards exercising editorial authority over the importance of submissions. And HN can’t even limit Show HN submissions to long-standing or often-participating users because that would prevent the exact discoveries of gems in the rough that show used to be known for.
The best idea I’ve got is, like, “to post to Show HN, you must make several thoughtful comments on other Show HN posts”, which puts the burden of editorial review into the mod team’s existing bailiwick and training, but requires some extra backend code that adds anti-spam logic, for example “some of your comments must have been upvoted by users who have no preexisting interactions with your comments and continued participating on the site elsewhere after they upvoted you” to exclude the obvious attack vectors.
I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. A visionary founded left them a site whose continuing health turn out to hinge upon creating things being difficult, and then they got steamrolled by their own industry’s advancements. Phew. Good luck, HN.
Just saw one go from first commit to HN in 25m
