HN Explorer

HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago

43 points by morpheos137 ↗ HN
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?

20 comments

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david927
HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
Bender
The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and enhancing them assuming LLM's can do such a thing. The voting ring detector probably needs some tuning as well. I can't tell if the goal is to poison the search engines and AI platforms so nobody can find the original open source programs or what else may be going on. Robert Hanlon said, never attribute to malice..., well I do.
dang
This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself:

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 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.

thegrim33
And the "people in the past said things were worse, so therefore it's impossible for things to ever actually be worse" line is just as old.
nostrademons
All living things are constantly dying.

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.

mattbrewsbytes
You do a great job not curating content. If people are complaining about the plethora of JS frameworks years ago or "everything is AI" these days, its a reflection of what people are discussing online.

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.

GistNoesis
When we look when logged-in at https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew (the input pipeline for all ShowHN) at any given time now more than half the page is either dead or flagged (I did the experiment now and it was 18/30 flagged or dead), then the rest of the page (100%) were AI related or claude generated.

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.

bicepjai
“Thinks have always been getting worse” remind me of entropy and arrow of time :)
d--b
I'm not one to fetishicize the past, but to be honest there has been quite a bad turn lately.

COVID, Trump's second election, Musk turning into the Bond villain he was cut out to be, Altman's good guy mask melting down slowly, the AI bubble sucking up all the money and making developers anxious about their future.

One shouldn't wonder why the mood is gloomier.

At least we have Mark Rober still out there working for the greater good, but I think it starts to transpire that things are starting to weigh on him too.

lellow
As someone who has been coming here for the past 8 years, I can't comment on "10-15 years" ago, but my experience hasn't changed a bit. This is and has been the only place where I visit almost daily (new account if you are looking at my profile) - and this is during vacation, during work, during weekends, etc. There is ALWAYS, literally, always an interesting discussion happening on topics that I would never be part of, if it wasn't for someone starting the discussion here. Yeh, today there is a bunch of AI, bla, bla, bla... so what will be next?! Not sure, but I know it will be here.
mirmor23
recently, you were rambling on-and-on about how netbsd was not a good desktop setup, even though netbsd primary usecase is embedded systems. nobody owes you anything; so just read threads that are interesting and ignore the rest; if that is not acceptable, why don't you be the change you wish to see in the world?
opan
The LLM stuff is tiresome, but how is retro stuff even comparable? Maybe I'm not seeing what you're seeing, but I generally think people tinkering with old Mac OS stuff is cool. Though I'd rather OS X than Classic, as the unix-y bits are part of the cool factor for me. I do like the fonts and visuals of Classic, though.

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.

Ancalagon
My account is nearly 10 years old (wow). I dont think its more dead afaict. It is more full of AI posts than ever, and AI-built slop show and tells.
bellowsgulch
I wouldn't say it's dead, but the commenters are noticeably of lower quality compared to a 15+ years ago.

I think that's natural given HN's age and popularity, but I don't recall so many confidently incorrect posters frustrating SMEs and Dan and whomever is left moderating can't police it all.

mradek
I've only been here a few years. I remember when it was a lot of crypto and no-code. Then it shifted to AI.

I think it is just the ebb and flow of the zeitgeist reflected here.

Not sure what the future holds, but I'm looking forward to the next wave after AI.