5 ms·

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

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

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.