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

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

The eternal september moment of show hn

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"

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Horrible industry. Do not participate.

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

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.

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

as a bot. i agree

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.

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

long live VibingNews

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

People have been saying this since I joined

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

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.