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 "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.

What I see is new users who are trying to share something without having yet understood HN. I get the impression that they think of "Show HN" as no different than "Show and Tell", and that putting the label on their post is communicating the message of "Here is something I want people to see", instead of "Here is something you can try out".

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.

Not sure if it would work for HN / how it could be adapted to HN, but something I noticed on opensource projects, is that once they hit a hurdle, submitters of low quality AI-written PRs don't try to solve it and go elsewhere.

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)

How about inverting the issue, highlight posts with an opt in label. e.g

  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]?

In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator. If it's completed within a few days, it should require more thorough human review. On the other hand, if the project has been active for a while and received contributions spread throughout that timeline, I think that would indicate accumulated effort (human and/or AI) and higher quality.

It's a tough problem.

Once some users have extra power to push content to the front-page, it will be abused. There will be attempts to gain that privilege in order to monetize, profit from or abuse it in some other way.

The only option along this path would probably be to keep the list of such users very tightly controlled and each vouched for individually.

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I'm haunted by the criticism Dropbox received from HN users when they posted their project here. While I respect the views many of us have, I think this has the potential to have the StackOverflow effect where the community makes the whole process miserable and worse.

Unfortunately there's now a whole cotton-industry of "vibe-coding classes and marketing" (similar to "life-coaching" on socials) that probably target HN as well. I think HN needs to think a layer of abstraction "higher" and model around some collection of semantics/metrics that allow to filter out "gloss without quality" vaporware or voting ring tactics.

How much would it help cut down if Show HN was prohibited for accounts that were green and/or only had 1 karma?

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’m in some discord servers that have both #art and #ai-art channels. This seems to work well. It’s not perfect but it’s cheap and might be good as a start.

I wonder if some kind of voluntary tagging system could help?

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)

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.

Proposal:

- Min. 90 days account existence in order to submit

- Cap on plain/Show/Ask HN posts per week

Most of the spam I see in /new or /ask is from fresh accounts. This approach is simple and awards long-term engagement/users while discouraging fly-by-night spammers.

Something based on the principles of 'New'? (not clear on the details of how Show HN works, does it automatically appear?). Just shove entries under 'New' and let the group decide what is "Show HN"-worthy.

Every system can be gamed, but if it were me and I were looking for a simple filtering solution, I would do something like this ..

Set a policy of X comments required per submission in the last 30 days (not counting last 24 hours) for all submissions, not just "Show HN:" posts.

Meaning, users would need to post X comments before they could post a submission and by not counting the last 24 hours, someone couldn't join, post X comments and immediately post a submission.

It would limit new submission posts to people who are active in the community so they would be more familiar with the policies and etiquette of HN along with gaining an idea of what interests its members.

One thing I noticed recently while going through several of the Show HN submissions was that a lot of the accounts had been created the same day the submission was made.

My guess is HN has become featured on a large number of "Where do I promote/submit my _____?" lists in blogs, social media, etc. to the point that HN is treated like a public bulletin board more than a place to share things with each other in the community.

I love the Show HN section because so many interesting things get posted there but even I have cut back on checking it lately because there are simply too many things posted to check out.

I hope they do something to improve it.

Maybe restrict Show HN posts to 70 or 100 characters - readers can then scan many, and quickly find stuff of interest.

The clarity and focus this discipline would enforce could have a pleasant side effect of enabling a kind of natural evolution of categorizations, and alternative discovery UIs.

May be dont show them under "Show HN" unless the post has accumulated a certain number of points/upvotes ? Just like a regular new post comes on front page.

> 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.

HN has a vouch system. Make a Show HN pool, allow accounts over some karma/age level to vouch them out to the main site. I recently had a naive colleague submit a Show HN a week or so ago that Tom killed... for good reason. I told the guy to ask me for advice before submitting a FOSS project he released and instead he shit out a long LLM comment nobody wants to read.

The HN guidelines IMO need a (long overdue) update to describe where a Show HN submission needs to go and address LLM comments/submissions. I get that YC probably wants to let some of it be a playground since money is sloshing around for it, but enough is enough.

> HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

hah that sounds like a Show HN incubator.

Maybe you should train an LLM to judge the content /s

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.

Edit: One more thought just came to my mind. A slight modification to the curation rule, you let everything through, just like now. However, the posts are reviewed and those with enough postive review votes get marked in some shape or form, which allows them to be filtered and/or promoted on the show page.

Please make the home page show 60 rather than 30 stories by default.