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Posted by acnops 23 hours ago

Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning(www.arthurcnops.blog)
461 points | 385 commentspage 7
TheAceOfHearts 20 hours 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 19 hours 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 20 hours 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

properbrew 13 hours 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.

oldestofsports 13 hours 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.
627467 20 hours ago||
The eternal september moment of show hn
Havoc 22 hours ago||
Seems like a sign of things to come - software becomes personalized and while having the cost driven to zero of commoditization
koakuma-chan 22 hours ago||
Yeah, I don't think that LLM output is appropriate for Shown HNs.
PaulHoule 15 hours 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.
hluska 16 hours 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.

imiric 22 hours 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.

bakugo 22 hours 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.

Aerolfos 16 hours ago|
The entire internet is being inundated by slop, and HN is no different
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