7 ms·

pinky promise this is my last time, trying to get a cursor moment

keepamovin 2mo ago
I think HN may be less useful these days. I noticed many posts got a great initial vote profile in a few minutes but then were prevented from any front page or or any good show page slots. Is either moderation downweighting, or some abusing the flag system. It’s not good to suppress good work. I’m having success right now with Reddit and YouTube. I think HN may be over for good work unless you are protected/blessed/not downweighted by mods. I love your promos video - how did you put that together? Vibing with the retro internet story. Also i am building something with similar goals: https://duetbrowser.com/dub-cli https://duetbrowser.com/dub-cli I’m very glad you got on the show page. Many of my recent posts that got the same vote/time rate with similar min stories on show never escaped new - indicating flag or mod suppression - even tho there’s zero rational reason and no good reason for anyone to do that. Good work should be shown not hidden by personal bias of a few I’m not a noob - i got the biggest show HN of last year, but the system, or the experience of some accounts including mine has radically changed in the last few months. So far the mods are saying they don’t know anything about outright downweighting, but have not shown data that supports that. What I’ve seen very much supports that Good luck with your post!
- tomhow 2mo ago
  HN has changed because the whole technology world has changed. The number of Show HNs submitted has spiked dramatically, and the average level of interestingness/impressiveness/technical depth has changed inversely. Of course we want to see “good work”; we're working constantly to develop new ways of identifying it. And the moderators are not going to down-weight work that is “good”; if we did that we'd be hurting HN and YC. Most of what it submitted to Show HN, we don't see, because so much is submitted that it's impossible to review it all. What we are looking for is evidence of credibility, substance, depth and novelty, and it's actually not very hard to convey that if it exists; you just need to make make the effort to write a good post that tells the story of why and how you built the project and what you overcame and learned along the way.
  - keepamovin 2mo ago
    This sounds like it puts the issue back on creators. A real tension. Is that how you see it? “System is already perfect, if your work is not getting up it must be shit”? What doesn’t scan is i don’t make shit. I regularly hit front over the last ten years. Now the posts that get community signal are held back, and not a single one of my high-quality works has hit HN front page in six months. Why are you doing this? Also i suggest for posterity you prevent the comments in our thread here from being flagged invisible. Let’s keep it open and fair. The sole exception to the above ‘ban’ was so egregiously flagged and misrepresented in comments it led to GitHub disabling the projects’ repo. Mods did not step in to protect or police the bad comments. Night and day with before. Edit: edit fair enough on looking for a new ways to identify signal, but to be honest it seems like you guys already have a good signal of interestingness. I mean it worked before this year, and it also seems the ability to consistently hit the front page should be a good signal of ability to generate interesting content, but you seem to be penalizing that in my case? Thanks for the back and forth
    - tomhow 2mo ago
      The reality is that there are only 30 places on the front page, but there's been a vast increase in how many Show HN posts are trying to get into one of them. Further, HN exposure only has any value if the interestingness level of content that makes it to the front page is high. If the interestingness drops – and there have been many complaints this year that the interestingness has dropped due to AI code generation and AI-generated writing – then the value of HN drops for everyone, including everyone who wants their project to be on the front page, including you. > “System is already perfect, if your work is not getting up it must be shit”? I didn't say the system is perfect, I literally wrote “we're working constantly to develop new ways of identifying” good work. And I didn't say work (by you or anyone) that doesn't make it to the front page is “shit”. The question that matters is what is interesting to the HN audience. Yes, you had some big hits on the front page, and we gave you plenty of support with that. It's also the case that after a while, your subsequent projects were minor variations on the same theme, and some members of the audience found them repetitive. It's always the case that when an individual developer submits multiple variants of a similar concept, their exposure has to be reduced, because repetitiveness is bad for HN and also for the developer. We've often seen that developers who submit similar projects over and over get ignored or resented. It’s unclear which is worse, but neither is good. Projects that are interesting, novel and offer some gem of insight for the audience to learn about will always have place on HN.
tomhow 2mo ago
This is not how Cursor got their moment. They built credibility gradually by continuing to develop the product and regularly sharing it in different spaces (Twitter, GitHub, probably elsewhere). If a project has already been on HN and has set off a flamewar, you don't get a better outcome by submitting the same project under a different URL the following week. You take the feedback and think about how to improve the product or the messaging, then try again when it's changed enough to be worthy of another shot at the front page.
- arhamshahrier 2mo ago
  i do agree with you, however, i would say thats the path that we are trying to take as well. we took the flamewars' feedback very seriously. since then, the system has had major work, we crossed 20k+ installs, and we reframed what the project is actually for. i am sure you also saw how the old framing leaned on getting past bot detection, which reads as enabling abuse. we have tried really hard to move past that, and making it so that it turns into a product thats enabling growth of the web. also, the post last wekk was about an open soruce engine, this is the infra layer that enables 1000x of what that did. on benchmarks regarding stealth, speed and usability, we now beat all major providers. what hn is goated precisely because ppl here are real, and the last weeks feedback helped us grow a lot. we are hoping that exponentiation keeps happening.
  - tomhow 2mo ago
    Ok, but you need to wait more than a week before asking for the attention of the HN audience again (it really needs at least a couple of months at least, to allow time for a the memory caches to clear), and if friends/related accounts upvote and comment, it only does harm to your credibility and reputation. You need to stop treating HN as a game to hack, and instead treat the community with respect.

I think HN may be less useful these days. I noticed many posts got a great initial vote profile in a few minutes but then were prevented from any front page or or any good show page slots. Is either moderation downweighting, or some abusing the flag system. It’s not good to suppress good work. I’m having success right now with Reddit and YouTube. I think HN may be over for good work unless you are protected/blessed/not downweighted by mods. I love your promos video - how did you put that together? Vibing with the retro internet story. Also i am building something with similar goals: https://duetbrowser.com/dub-cli https://duetbrowser.com/dub-cli I’m very glad you got on the show page. Many of my recent posts that got the same vote/time rate with similar min stories on show never escaped new - indicating flag or mod suppression - even tho there’s zero rational reason and no good reason for anyone to do that. Good work should be shown not hidden by personal bias of a few I’m not a noob - i got the biggest show HN of last year, but the system, or the experience of some accounts including mine has radically changed in the last few months. So far the mods are saying they don’t know anything about outright downweighting, but have not shown data that supports that. What I’ve seen very much supports that Good luck with your post!

tomhow 2mo ago
HN has changed because the whole technology world has changed. The number of Show HNs submitted has spiked dramatically, and the average level of interestingness/impressiveness/technical depth has changed inversely. Of course we want to see “good work”; we're working constantly to develop new ways of identifying it. And the moderators are not going to down-weight work that is “good”; if we did that we'd be hurting HN and YC. Most of what it submitted to Show HN, we don't see, because so much is submitted that it's impossible to review it all. What we are looking for is evidence of credibility, substance, depth and novelty, and it's actually not very hard to convey that if it exists; you just need to make make the effort to write a good post that tells the story of why and how you built the project and what you overcame and learned along the way.
- keepamovin 2mo ago
  This sounds like it puts the issue back on creators. A real tension. Is that how you see it? “System is already perfect, if your work is not getting up it must be shit”? What doesn’t scan is i don’t make shit. I regularly hit front over the last ten years. Now the posts that get community signal are held back, and not a single one of my high-quality works has hit HN front page in six months. Why are you doing this? Also i suggest for posterity you prevent the comments in our thread here from being flagged invisible. Let’s keep it open and fair. The sole exception to the above ‘ban’ was so egregiously flagged and misrepresented in comments it led to GitHub disabling the projects’ repo. Mods did not step in to protect or police the bad comments. Night and day with before. Edit: edit fair enough on looking for a new ways to identify signal, but to be honest it seems like you guys already have a good signal of interestingness. I mean it worked before this year, and it also seems the ability to consistently hit the front page should be a good signal of ability to generate interesting content, but you seem to be penalizing that in my case? Thanks for the back and forth
  - tomhow 2mo ago
    The reality is that there are only 30 places on the front page, but there's been a vast increase in how many Show HN posts are trying to get into one of them. Further, HN exposure only has any value if the interestingness level of content that makes it to the front page is high. If the interestingness drops – and there have been many complaints this year that the interestingness has dropped due to AI code generation and AI-generated writing – then the value of HN drops for everyone, including everyone who wants their project to be on the front page, including you. > “System is already perfect, if your work is not getting up it must be shit”? I didn't say the system is perfect, I literally wrote “we're working constantly to develop new ways of identifying” good work. And I didn't say work (by you or anyone) that doesn't make it to the front page is “shit”. The question that matters is what is interesting to the HN audience. Yes, you had some big hits on the front page, and we gave you plenty of support with that. It's also the case that after a while, your subsequent projects were minor variations on the same theme, and some members of the audience found them repetitive. It's always the case that when an individual developer submits multiple variants of a similar concept, their exposure has to be reduced, because repetitiveness is bad for HN and also for the developer. We've often seen that developers who submit similar projects over and over get ignored or resented. It’s unclear which is worse, but neither is good. Projects that are interesting, novel and offer some gem of insight for the audience to learn about will always have place on HN.

tomhow 2mo ago

This is not how Cursor got their moment. They built credibility gradually by continuing to develop the product and regularly sharing it in different spaces (Twitter, GitHub, probably elsewhere). If a project has already been on HN and has set off a flamewar, you don't get a better outcome by submitting the same project under a different URL the following week. You take the feedback and think about how to improve the product or the messaging, then try again when it's changed enough to be worthy of another shot at the front page.

arhamshahrier 2mo ago
i do agree with you, however, i would say thats the path that we are trying to take as well. we took the flamewars' feedback very seriously. since then, the system has had major work, we crossed 20k+ installs, and we reframed what the project is actually for. i am sure you also saw how the old framing leaned on getting past bot detection, which reads as enabling abuse. we have tried really hard to move past that, and making it so that it turns into a product thats enabling growth of the web. also, the post last wekk was about an open soruce engine, this is the infra layer that enables 1000x of what that did. on benchmarks regarding stealth, speed and usability, we now beat all major providers. what hn is goated precisely because ppl here are real, and the last weeks feedback helped us grow a lot. we are hoping that exponentiation keeps happening.
- tomhow 2mo ago
  Ok, but you need to wait more than a week before asking for the attention of the HN audience again (it really needs at least a couple of months at least, to allow time for a the memory caches to clear), and if friends/related accounts upvote and comment, it only does harm to your credibility and reputation. You need to stop treating HN as a game to hack, and instead treat the community with respect.