alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
All of the fun has been sucked out of it.
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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.
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.