HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago Dearth of original ideas, lots of pointless retro stuff like "I did x on mac os classic" lots of reinventing the wheel with LLMs and LLM cargo culting. What is the perpetual growth myth to do once physics is known and energy is constraining? |
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016)
Examples are legion. Here are a couple others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020)
I don't know of any good way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.
One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.
So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.
The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.
Now I'm waiting for these ideas to collide and once the hoopla about AI hits a lull, everyone's going to go re-invent parsing the DOM, again and we'll see lots of new AI generated JS frameworks.
Show HN, being used by people to share the cool things they create was an important part of creating of a community, aka always having people which would find interest in what you share.
It was a channel to push novel unpolished ideas to the world. It was one differentiating thing from other places where self-promoting is usually forbidden. Here it was welcoming people to take a more active role and create things.
Now it's just screaming into the void, the only feedback you get are email spam from LLM companies trying to push their solution to help you promote your content.
Sharing projects is also just feeding your competitors and killing the potential of your ideas, now that a clone is less than a prompt away.
I don't know who still look at this page, but then if you want to get past it you now probably need to turn to the dark side with some form of cheating, which is also conveniently easier than before to have bots spam about your product everywhere on the internet.
Show HN are now becoming the reverse, instead of feeling heard, it's even more isolating than before because when you put some effort and if even in the niche market where it's suppose to gather attention it doesn't, so you think you are not welcomed here, don't come back and look elsewhere.
I think you work so hard for everyone here. Maybe it's a kind of cultural gardening.
AI native ______ for _______
______ for AI agents
AI _______ for _______
LLM posts are like when a new meme template comes out and gets run into the ground everywhere you look, but someone tinkering with old computers just seems like normal human hacker interests. Perhaps you could argue that too much nostalgia is a bad thing. I have been hearing "frutiger aero" a disturbing amount the last year or so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300772 (March 2026)
There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the community needs growth, just not runaway growth.
Major new tools like LLMs are inevitably going to get widely used, as they should. Figuring out what the best uses are will take time. Figuring out how to share what one is doing with them is an unsolved problem.
The risk I see is that if the goal is growth but the low quality submissions are drowning out other submissions that could negate growth as some of the newer accounts that legit try to be part of a community would just drift away as they are in the poisoned well. I too struggle to think of a way to separate them out of the noise without creating a system that would just be gamed by the LLM's. On one hand if the system requires the regulars to "vouch" so to speak it will create little elitist bubbles whereas too much tweaking to algorithms will just be detected and gamed by LLM's.
Out of curiosity, are the LLM posts coming from residential and mobile addresses or from AI data-centers themselves? If it's not already that could be yet another weighting factor. And/or AI user-agents as a weight. There are many bot signals that could be weighting or division factors. Bots are easy to spot from the server.
I guess I don't care about today's "AI agent for the agricultural industry" as much as I cared about yesterday's "Tool to help farmers plan crop rotation".