Earlier in the week there were probably about 10 posts on the front page that tempted me to post "Ask HN: Why are there so many Show HN & Ask HN posts today" - I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation.
Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
I actually conducted a similar analysis back in December. I was more focused on discovering the topics that most resonated with the community but ended up digging into this phenomenon as well (specifically focusing on the probability of getting over 100 upvotes)
The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10.
It will become a ghost town.
It became a gallery of other people prompts.
It used to mean something else, one would expect care put into a passion project.
I think there should be an ai-assistance badge on every Github project. I don't want to look at Contribution graph and Commit history and then eventually the source code to find out the same information. What are we hiding now?
the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first.
using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived.
it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020.
if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately.
nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know
My qualitative experience is that, far from lower quality submissions, the Show HN posts that make the front page seem to be increasing in quality.
There are likely to be a number of possible explanations for this that offset the lower average score. The obvious one is that the filtering effect of the front page with a higher amount of content. Perhaps we are also seeing higher standards—a project that used to take 6 weeks and a ton of conviction now wraps up in a few hours, and people are resetting their expectations.
I’ve seen a few submissions recently that look great - convincing landing page, complex app, modern design - but are almost unusable due to JavaScript bugs. I’m guessing it’s the power of AI.
When I use the search function for topics I'm interested in and encounter Show HN that way, it's dominantly slop (and has been for most of the time I've had an account). The actual Show HN page is not much better.
The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README.
Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works.
[1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.
This is an unfortunate trend we will see across software going ahead. When the bar to make something is low, the market is inevitably flooded by cheap and mediocre stuff that overshadow everything else. Soon there won't be an incentive to make high quality stuff because even if you did, you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention with it because it's all taken away by the endless slop that won't stop.
I fear the day when someone figures out that a well-crafted Show HN post is a great way to get "engagement", and starts marketing to others how to do so or doing it for them.
I will be very surprised if people are not already optimizing their HN posts for marketing purposes.
It's not uncommon to see people showing off their website traffic graph on Twitter after hitting HN. You can also find people asking for advice on how to use HN to market their shitty SaaS on places like reddit.
Another kind of marketing you see quite often is people replying with a post that starts off reasonable, until the third paragraph where the commentator says "this is why we built blah" and makes you feel you are staring at an half eaten Apple with half a worm in it.
IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit.
Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
The original goal of Show HN was for people to show off their work in a way that other people could participate in, sharing code and experience to satisfy intellectual curiosity. It's become nothing more than a funnel for landing pages and vibe-coded slop.
We’re trying to push things back towards the original goal. Something I’m now telling people who ask for help or SCP inclusion is that Show HN isn’t Product Hunt; it’s not for launching your product and capturing signups, it’s for showcasing interesting/deep innovation that others can learn from. Of course we can’t stop anything being submitted but we can avoid promoting projects that lack substance and we can downrank posts that are not worthy of the front page or a high place on the Show page.
If your home pages looks like this (https://www.ycombinator.com), you can expect people to try want to "launch" their startups on your forum. There seems to be a large contingent of HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned! Obviously this can be the case, but its pretty evident that the technology is going nowhere and anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back. The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. For people who are interested in creative web projects, we live in very exciting times, regardless of the negative noise.
There's also a very simple reality of AI vibecoded projects:
If you were able to get an LLM to vibecode a project for you, so could any of us, so why even share the project as if you are showing off? It takes very little effort for anyone else to prompt an agent and get a similar result.
That means the only thing left in a shared vibecoded project is the original idea, and well, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone has them and idea spread has never really been a limiting factor.
So what are you really sharing at that point?
Noise.
"Look at this code I got an LLM to generate" is inherently uninteresting.
I tried to share a project on Show HN recently (twice!), and I didn't get a single user interaction (basically no one even visited the project, nevermind responding with a comment). I don't think my title was that bad, its more just that there are so many new projects using AI that people are fatigued from it. Its kind of a shame because I'm sure there are lots of really good ideas that are being completely overlooked because of this.
Everyone is always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and we can advise on whether a project and its intro post are a good fit for HN. Plenty of good projects get missed by the audience, but we can always put things in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.
The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).
I am a Show HN expert. You need to just keep trying until you get traction. Sometimes it's title. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's more substantial - a chance to rethink, redo, rebrand, rewrite, etc.
Also, mods can help. They are friendly and generous. Reach out to them via email and ask them about your post. Often they have something to say and it's useful.
The challenge you encountered is nothing to do with the recent spike. I've been doing Show HN for 10 years. It's always been this way. It's never "easy" to get the attention of the community. But there are some things that can help, such as the time you post.
I just hopped into the show page - of 30 items perhaps half a dozen are mildly interesting to me. There's a lot of "Something zomething agentic zzzzz..." that may well hide something good. A bunch of things that are perhaps good but not of interest to me personally (your submission would be in this category). Those half dozen that might pique my interest have all been on the front page.
I'd posit that HN is only a good place to promote things that will interest the HN crowd. Ok, not a great insight, but I don't think dropping the submission in Show HN is the problem here.
This. And also a lack of respect for people commenting about it.
I used to randomly evaluate and give honest feedback on invisible projects when I had the time. Most times I was completely ignored, even when I was the only person who really cared enough to answer. Eventually, I got bored.
There have been 203 Show HNs in the last 24 hours. This is not a bad thing but nobody can open all of them, so we look at the title and if it matches something we care about we might open it or at least upvote it.
With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new. If you get enough votes, you're supposedly moved from shownew to top stories, but somehow 5 votes wasn't enough for me (though I saw other posts that got there with just 2). I'd like to see someone attempt to persuade me otherwise, but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
Just opened it, interesting idea but there was not much to go on after I got the feedback for my description. On it's own I think it's not enough to hook somebody in, but could be useful as part of a bigger learning tool. And it clearly supports way more languages than Spanish so you were selling yourself short with these titles I think.
Exact same here; not that I was expecting otherwise, but publishing on HN was a personal milestone.
Seeing the flood of low ambition projects led me to think about the issue. I was wondering if we needed a kind of "proof of work" to help sort the entries.
For instance counting a project number of contributors, number of commits, age of the project... Not that any of those metrics are good indicators or are hard to game, of course, but that could help triage good faith attempts from shallow LLM vomit.
For the record, nobody's denying how useful LLMs are, but let's also acknowledge that they excel at things that have a lot of prior art, so by definition not really a good fit for show HN any more (in the past it may have been; But what was interresting in vibe coding has never been the end result but that it was possible at all, like a dancing bear.)
i looked at the Snapalabra webapp and... i don't even know where to start commenting on it: as someone who started vibecoding, i see how the UX, images, translations, everything feels like when the slop gets horribly wrong ; of course i could read explanations in the about section but it's a 404
Not disagreeing on that, but often this can be explained when someone lacks time. For some articles I can only skim over the top some comments; articles with like +30 comments I can barely read all and the article, so I focus just on the first page or so.
> using AI that people are fatigued from it
I think some accounts here are actually AI accounts. I have no data to prove this, but just the voting situation is very, very odd; I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it, before retiring due to crazy moderators.
I guess the real question is: is the decrease in average score more than just a function of a larger ratio (and its expected long tail score distribution)?
It's a mirror of what's happening everywhere. It has become easier than ever to create something whether that's content or an app. But because of that it's harder than ever to get attention. Quantity is drowning out quality and people are becoming desensitized to new creation.
“Also I have no idea why the average score was increased in 2022. A lot of new users?”
Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community
It's a volume problem, almost feels like people is spamming HN for quick results. I do appreciate some of the projects and conversations that happened from some of those threads, but a lot of it, it's just feels spam.
I've been noticing a lot of posts tp Ask that are essentially people uaing it as a blogging platform. Sometimes its vapid "thought leader" -type pieces, others are low-value posts or rants, and others are fairly obvious attempts at SEO.
With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.
I feel like a trust factor that A) the person is willing to improve software quality even if it means rewriting it later down the line if it was generated by AI in the first term & B) the project is trying to be sustainable.
I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.
I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.
We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle
It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too
So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)
The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
He may be on to something; I'd also think something may be odd with the voting situation. Are there voting bots or something? Because the voting situation here is extremely strange in the last few weeks; not even on reddit did I notice this and reddit voting system has tons of issues as well.
There is on average a new submission every minute on HN. So basically an entry exposure in /newest first page is 30 minutes.
How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable.
You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).
This reflects the sentiment I've seen in the wider industry. AI like ChatGPT has given everyone a Dunning-Kruger effect where people think they're experts at everything in tech. The lack of appreciation is concerning and toxic.
This would require a significant culture change, much bigger then what happened post zero interest era.
For now rainmakers are still praising the ability to spew bullshit.
See the recent ralph debacle. Theo this week praising someone for running 50 active "projects" with zero users.
Tobi Shopify CEO shitting out dummy projects.
Linus vibing side projects.
The thrill of seeing a project slip into the realm of the incomprehensible is too great.
I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality.
Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.
blitzar|1 month ago
Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
zahlman|1 month ago
Months ago, I didn't refrain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780249
kianN|1 month ago
The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10.
Analysis here if anyone is interested: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/
altairprime|1 month ago
nsoonhui|1 month ago
heliumtera|1 month ago
Rotten lemons all the way down.
epolanski|1 month ago
hahahahhaah|1 month ago
rishabhaiover|1 month ago
heliumtera|1 month ago
the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first. using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived. it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020.
if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately.
nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know
_alternator_|1 month ago
There are likely to be a number of possible explanations for this that offset the lower average score. The obvious one is that the filtering effect of the front page with a higher amount of content. Perhaps we are also seeing higher standards—a project that used to take 6 weeks and a ton of conviction now wraps up in a few hours, and people are resetting their expectations.
leoedin|1 month ago
zahlman|1 month ago
The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README.
Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works.
[1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.
Kinrany|1 month ago
potamic|1 month ago
criddell|1 month ago
Thus the rise of the influencer economy. What better way is there to learn about something than from somebody you trust?
trollbridge|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
trollbridge|1 month ago
pibaker|1 month ago
It's not uncommon to see people showing off their website traffic graph on Twitter after hitting HN. You can also find people asking for advice on how to use HN to market their shitty SaaS on places like reddit.
Another kind of marketing you see quite often is people replying with a post that starts off reasonable, until the third paragraph where the commentator says "this is why we built blah" and makes you feel you are staring at an half eaten Apple with half a worm in it.
theplatman|1 month ago
heliumtera|1 month ago
a. this week, someone teaching how to launch a language followed by a few tries (git repository created few hours before I saw it)
b. in this thread
zahlman|1 month ago
IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit.
Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
krapp|1 month ago
All of the fun has been sucked out of it.
tomhow|1 month ago
detectivestory|1 month ago
mrguyorama|1 month ago
If you were able to get an LLM to vibecode a project for you, so could any of us, so why even share the project as if you are showing off? It takes very little effort for anyone else to prompt an agent and get a similar result.
That means the only thing left in a shared vibecoded project is the original idea, and well, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone has them and idea spread has never really been a limiting factor.
So what are you really sharing at that point?
Noise.
"Look at this code I got an LLM to generate" is inherently uninteresting.
kingkawn|1 month ago
cracki|1 month ago
rfarley04|1 month ago
rsanek|1 month ago
red-iron-pine|1 month ago
AI may be the largest bubble yet in history, and it has the ability to sustain itself directly via online hype-bots.
tulips can't specifically target all of your replies and explain why you're a cunt and should buy more
echelon_musk|1 month ago
hahahahhaah|1 month ago
There was no warning / taster of this. AI just dialed up to 11 real quick.
ProllyInfamous|1 month ago
Seems like there should be a restriction on greenies (from posting) until they've lurked more, here.
detectivestory|1 month ago
tomhow|1 month ago
No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.
The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).
keepamovin|1 month ago
Also, mods can help. They are friendly and generous. Reach out to them via email and ask them about your post. Often they have something to say and it's useful.
The challenge you encountered is nothing to do with the recent spike. I've been doing Show HN for 10 years. It's always been this way. It's never "easy" to get the attention of the community. But there are some things that can help, such as the time you post.
Check out these heatmaps of the average/mean post score versus hour/day of post and you can see the trends: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=archive
dcminter|1 month ago
I'd posit that HN is only a good place to promote things that will interest the HN crowd. Ok, not a great insight, but I don't think dropping the submission in Show HN is the problem here.
galfarragem|1 month ago
I used to randomly evaluate and give honest feedback on invisible projects when I had the time. Most times I was completely ignored, even when I was the only person who really cared enough to answer. Eventually, I got bored.
pmontra|1 month ago
aeonfox|1 month ago
comboy|1 month ago
rixed|1 month ago
Seeing the flood of low ambition projects led me to think about the issue. I was wondering if we needed a kind of "proof of work" to help sort the entries. For instance counting a project number of contributors, number of commits, age of the project... Not that any of those metrics are good indicators or are hard to game, of course, but that could help triage good faith attempts from shallow LLM vomit.
For the record, nobody's denying how useful LLMs are, but let's also acknowledge that they excel at things that have a lot of prior art, so by definition not really a good fit for show HN any more (in the past it may have been; But what was interresting in vibe coding has never been the end result but that it was possible at all, like a dancing bear.)
raincole|1 month ago
Right here. The problem is right here.
Unfortunately, the internet is a race to the bottom. You need to hustle (euphemism for "shamelessly spam") for attention.
croisillon|1 month ago
why even post that?
shevy-java|1 month ago
Not disagreeing on that, but often this can be explained when someone lacks time. For some articles I can only skim over the top some comments; articles with like +30 comments I can barely read all and the article, so I focus just on the first page or so.
> using AI that people are fatigued from it
I think some accounts here are actually AI accounts. I have no data to prove this, but just the voting situation is very, very odd; I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it, before retiring due to crazy moderators.
0dayman|1 month ago
keepamovin|1 month ago
plastic041|1 month ago
keiferski|1 month ago
NedF|1 month ago
[deleted]
yellow_lead|1 month ago
KellyCriterion|1 month ago
scalemaxx|1 month ago
jharohit|1 month ago
Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community
jcmartinezdev|1 month ago
andyjohnson0|1 month ago
With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.
ljlolel|1 month ago
Ronsenshi|1 month ago
AI DOS practically. Unfortunate for those that have curious projects that end up drowning in slop.
amelius|1 month ago
giacomoforte|1 month ago
eamag|1 month ago
Imustaskforhelp|1 month ago
I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.
I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.
We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle
It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too
So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)
The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
tomhow|1 month ago
shevy-java|1 month ago
red-iron-pine|1 month ago
why would it be different here?
the struggle is to build consensus in an open and democratic forum and we've solved that problem via LLMs.
conradfr|1 month ago
How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable.
You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).
heliumtera|1 month ago
iainctduncan|1 month ago
flowerthoughts|1 month ago
I recently saw a Show HN [1] that had no link to anywhere, but it did have a project name. It currently has 13 points.
[removed]
philipwhiuk|1 month ago
It's weird because it's named similar to a popular Android logging library: https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber
kittikitti|1 month ago
code51|1 month ago
heliumtera|1 month ago
I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality. Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.
janlucien|1 month ago
[deleted]
lifetimerubyist|1 month ago