Posted by acnops 1 day ago
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.
I've launched multiple side projects through Show HN over the years. The ones that got traction weren't better products. They hit the front page during a slow news hour and got enough early upvotes to survive the ranking curve. The ones that flopped were arguably more interesting but landed during a busy cycle. That's not a Show HN problem, that's a single-ranking-pool problem.
What would actually help is a separate ranking pool for Show HN with slower time decay. Let projects sit visible for longer so the community can actually try them before they drop off. pg's original vision was about making things people want. Hard to evaluate that in a 90-minute window.