Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last year

[jacquesm]

One of the reasons is that there are a lot of adverts masquerading as Show HN.

[hsuduebc2]

Some subreddits became polluted the same way. Pretty annoying.

[captn3m0]

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

This is an interesting post, but not a Show HN.

[theraven]

I didn’t submit it that way, it got auto massaged into that format because of the ‘Show HN’ prefix I believe

[Normal_gaussian]

This is very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099 posted 4 days ago.

And there is also this https://dewmal.medium.com/hacker-news-is-a-living-time-capsu...

[freehorse]

And link to that analysis from the linked discussion https://snubi.net/posts/Show-HN/

which also includes the average voting scores, which actually fall at the same time the quantity increases (while the average story scores remain the same), which is interesting.

[wumms]

Related: "Data on AI-related Show HN posts"

Original title: "Data on AI-related Show HN posts More than 1 in 5 Show HN posts are now AI-related, but get less than half the votes or comments."

6 months ago, 155 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463249

[galkk]

Laid off people have more time on their hands, while on llm-powered steroids?

[etothepii]

Do you have any numbers on the number that get some number of upvotes? What about a chart of upvotes on Show HN?

I assume the vast, vast majority never get any upvotes.

[rfarley04]

I have a little bit of data on that from my post last summer. It's pretty easy to query the data: ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/

[wheybags]

Would be nice to see some qualitative analyis to know if it's just slop, or actually more interesting projects. Not sure how to do that though. I think just looking at votes wouldn't work. I would guess more posts causes lower average visibility per post which should cause upvotes to slump naturally regardless of quality.

Edit: maybe you could:

- remove outliers (anything that made the front page)

- normalise vote count by expected time in the first 20 posts of shownew, based on the posting rate at the time

[Normal_gaussian]

a weighted sampling method is probably the best. Segment by time period and vote count or vote rate, then human evaluate. This could be done in a couple of hours and it gives a higher degree of confidence than any automated analysis.

[carimura]

sentiment analysis of comments?

[alberto-m]

I think I read some days ago another stat, that the average rating of “Show HN” posts is going down. So the pessimistic take is that people feel the bar to present their product in a “Show HN” is lowering.

(edit: striked) <strike>Is it deliberate that this post appears as “Show HN” itself? I hope not to be too negative, but to qualify as such I would expect much more that a page with two graphs.</strike>

[theraven]

No, it wasn’t deliberate to be a Show HN itself, it seemed to be auto updated to that based on the prefix. I’ve tried updating it back.

[peteforde]

I suspect that this will drive the folks who insist LLM productivity gains are the real hallucinations truly bonkers.

[anonymous908213]

No, the fact that Show HN is spammed with LLM-generated garbage is what drives me bonkers. The Show HNs are in fact living proof of how illusory LLM productivity gains are, because we are overwhelmed with trivial proof-of-concepts that have no merit, not even the merit of a human having put effort into creating something neat, rather than actually interesting software anybody would try or discuss.

[7777777phil]

I feel like HN is quite divided about that actually, A couple of days I started a survey which I plan to run monthly to see how the community feels about "LLM productivity etc". Now I have ~250 answers, need a couple more to make it significant but as of now it looks like >90% report productivity gains from AI tools - happy if you participate, only takes a minute: https://agentic-coding-survey.pages.dev/

[Tade0]

They are, but in the sense of net productivity gains.

Responsible people who use their knowledge to review LLM-generated code will produce more - up to their maximum rate of taking responsibility.

Irresponsible people will just smear shit all over the codebase.

The jury is out what's the net effect and the agents' level of sophistication is a secondary factor.

[fhennig]

IMO a productivity gain of about x2 seems about right!

[Semaphor]

/r/selfhosted also got tons of new submissions, all unmaintainable AI slop. Now that they are only allowed on Fridays, it calmed down again. But I guess folks who insist on AI superiority think that’s a productivity gain.

[jacquesm]

AI productivity gains are not found in the slop bucket with projects tossed off after five prompts and zero intention of keeping them alive for the longer run.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

It's slop disguised as productivity.

[seinvak]

Probably the same happening for websites being built or apps being published.

[captn3m0]

A better metric would be how many Show HN posts are reaching the front page.

[direwolf20]

More AI?

[voidUpdate]

Isn't it posts/month? What's the p for?

[direwolf20]

maximum title length

[discreteevent]

Eternal LLMber