[detectivestory]

I tried to share a project on Show HN recently (twice!), and I didn't get a single user interaction (basically no one even visited the project, nevermind responding with a comment). I don't think my title was that bad, its more just that there are so many new projects using AI that people are fatigued from it. Its kind of a shame because I'm sure there are lots of really good ideas that are being completely overlooked because of this.

[tomhow]

Plenty of good projects get missed by the audience, but we can always put things in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).

No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.

The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).

[zahlman]

> If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which interest the community) would get karma along with the original submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.

Did this happen?

[keepamovin]

I am a Show HN expert. You need to just keep trying until you get traction. Sometimes it's title. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's more substantial - a chance to rethink, redo, rebrand, rewrite, etc.

Also, mods can help. They are friendly and generous. Reach out to them via email and ask them about your post. Often they have something to say and it's useful.

The challenge you encountered is nothing to do with the recent spike. I've been doing Show HN for 10 years. It's always been this way. It's never "easy" to get the attention of the community. But there are some things that can help, such as the time you post.

Check out these heatmaps of the average/mean post score versus hour/day of post and you can see the trends: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=archive

[lucianbr]

> Sometimes it's title. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's more substantial - a chance to rethink, redo, rebrand, rewrite, etc.

How do you choose what to change? No interaction means no feedback.

[keepamovin]

Intuition. Trial and error. Rejection gives you a chance to rethink. Experiment!

Don’t overthink it. Don’t get obstructed by choice.

[mathgeek]

> Intuition

I mean no offense by this, but intuition literally means acquiring knowledge without an explanation. Did you mean experience or are you telling GP that you cannot explain how you do it?

[keepamovin]

No that is not what it means. I did not mean experience; I did not mean that I cannot explain how I do it; I meant what I said: intuition. I can explain how I do it; I can even explain how it works (as far as I think), but I don't really know how it works, and I don't care. I just care that I can do it, and that it works.

[dugidugout]

They mean to distinguish intuition, which draws on experience and can only be reflected on, from experience, which deals in actionable heuristics. Any appeal to intuition you make will fall on experiential advice when pressed. Intuition _works_ here, but if you mean to share your wisdom, you must translate it through experience, which is the actual concept we communicate through.

[riku_iki]

> You need to just keep trying until you get traction

is this a violation of rules, and you simply take attention by spamming from those who follow rules?

[CuriouslyC]

I'm curious, how do you explain the frequency of stuff that rockets to the front page only to get lambasted in the comments for being a total shitshow? Are there really that many oblivious upvoters in /new who fire off upvotes based on title alone?

[kqr]

I have experienced this before (almost universally negative comments, but still many upvotes). In those cases, some people have reached out to me personally to tell me they enjoyed whatever it was and didn't agree with the negative feedback. They didn't comment because they didn't think it was worth engaging with people who clearly didn't get it, and it's fine that not all people get it.

[keepamovin]

A whole bunch of dynamics. Efficient markets require liquidity to measure quality, so expect reactions and counter-reactions. Psychology means people respond to perception over reality, so expect herd action. Ego means success challenges personality, so expect defenses. Probably lots more, too

[dcminter]

I just hopped into the show page - of 30 items perhaps half a dozen are mildly interesting to me. There's a lot of "Something zomething agentic zzzzz..." that may well hide something good. A bunch of things that are perhaps good but not of interest to me personally (your submission would be in this category). Those half dozen that might pique my interest have all been on the front page.

I'd posit that HN is only a good place to promote things that will interest the HN crowd. Ok, not a great insight, but I don't think dropping the submission in Show HN is the problem here.

[galfarragem]

This. And also a lack of respect for people commenting about it.

I used to randomly evaluate and give honest feedback on invisible projects when I had the time. Most times I was completely ignored, even when I was the only person who really cared enough to answer. Eventually, I got bored.

[dirkc]

I've had similar experiences, but also good experiences where the person reached out/replied and we had a conversation.

I suspect for some of the non-engaging posts it's just throwing it out there, inexperience or part of the product hunt playbook

[pmontra]

There have been 203 Show HNs in the last 24 hours. This is not a bad thing but nobody can open all of them, so we look at the title and if it matches something we care about we might open it or at least upvote it.

[detectivestory]

I'm actually surprised that its only 203!

[aeonfox]

With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new. If you get enough votes, you're supposedly moved from shownew to top stories, but somehow 5 votes wasn't enough for me (though I saw other posts that got there with just 2). I'd like to see someone attempt to persuade me otherwise, but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.

[embedding-shape]

> With Show HN vs a regular submission you're shoved on shownew, which gets a lot less eyeballs than new

I don't think that's right, it's visible in both places, it's not "either or". Currently /new shows 5 "Show HN"s, which are also visible on /shownew.

> but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.

You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time, but best of all, the users who engage with you are in a different mindset for the "Show HN" posts.

On a normal submission, you get a whole range of top-level posts that are mostly tangible related to the topic at hand. It's basically a free-for-all, as long as it's at least a bit related to the submission's theme and topic.

On "Show HN" posts you get users who view it and comment about it as a way of providing feedback what they think of the idea itself, and its implementation. Completely different mood and input, that is much more about what you're actually sharing, than a submission.

That's my experience of "Show HN" at least, YMMV.

[aeonfox]

> it's visible in both places

Yeah I corrected myself in another comment. But I find with submissions to `shownew` they don't enter `top` straight away, or at all.

> You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time

With a regular submission, it gets on `top` for at least a short period of time as well as `new`, whereas that doesn't seem to always be the case for a Show HN. And certainly not in my case. That said, many Show HNs do make it to top with less votes than the tiny few I got organically, so maybe I tripped some HN's filters? Or maybe it was bad timing? But if I post again, it'll be without the Show HN.

[embedding-shape]

The long trail of visits for Show HNs come because they stay on /show a lot longer than it'd stay on the frontpage. So while it can be featured on the frontpage for an hour or two, that same submission could stay 2-3 days on the Show HN frontpage, even as it dropped of from the actual frontpage.

I think the frontpage is both a lot harder to get into, faster to get dropped from there, but obviously also has a lot more traffic. But the traffic from Show HN frontpage seems to engage more (again probably because of the mindset) and it stays there for a lot longer.

Personally, when I want feedback about the idea and implementation, I'd go for Show HN, because you're out after comments and discussions then, not just traffic and views. But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".

[aeonfox]

> But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".

Traffic and views can lead to comments and discussion. I was definitely looking for feedback. I think there's a minimum threshold of interest that's required before people start engaging. But it could also be that my submission was super boring, or there was something else off-putting about it – I'd be surprised if it was the latter, because the HN audience isn't known for holding back on criticism.

[detectivestory]

I do personally check out shownew quite often, yet I would never really visit new. I might not be a typical user, but I think I am a lot more likely to engage with a shownew post than someone who comes across it on new.

[aeonfox]

It's a bit like ProductHunt. The only people that look at ProductHunt, are the people that post on ProductHunt—or at least that's its reputation. Though that's an unfair comparison, because I think on HN there is actually genuine engagement by other builders (or perhaps I'm mistaken about PH).

[cs02rm0]

I don't think it's wildly unfair, it's a genuine problem.

Not that I have the answer unfortunately.

[aeonfox]

As in you think it's as bad on HN as it is on PH? From what I've heard PH is basically dead internet.

[cs02rm0]

Not quite as bad, but I do think the ShowHN posts suffer a form of the same issue where most posts seem to get very little attention and the little there is, probably comes from other people who post to it, rather than receiving the attention of the wider community (which, at least HN has).

[Semaphor]

Huh, didn’t know about shownew. But looking at it now, wow. That’s a *lot* of AI slop. Probably makes it even harder to get into new.

[aeonfox]

I might have been mistaken, I think if you post to Show HN, it puts you on both shownew and new. I think in my case I saw Show HNs with less points and engagement on the top list, and somehow mine never appeared and I wonder if maybe there's some cherry picking there.

[comboy]

Just opened it, interesting idea but there was not much to go on after I got the feedback for my description. On it's own I think it's not enough to hook somebody in, but could be useful as part of a bigger learning tool. And it clearly supports way more languages than Spanish so you were selling yourself short with these titles I think.

[detectivestory]

thanks for checking it out! I have been considering various flows to keep people more engaged (there are currently challenges, smart flash cards, and achievements) but at the moment the app promotes "active" learning, and I want to be careful not to introduce anything introduces "passive" learning learning paths like you might find on other apps where you don't really need to think or fully engage. My thinking at the moment is that I'd rather a user just learn something once and never come back than return every day and learn nothing..

[comboy]

I'm also learning a language and decided to use that as a pretext to see what I can get out of agents without coding[1].

It all depends on your goals but I've had similar thoughts and I decided I'm just making opinionated tool for myself that I'm perfectly fine with never making public. Since deciding on such path I think I actually moved closer to something that may be useful to others (but I'm still staying on that path for now).

I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed (testing along all those which does not quite fit, which I did), than creating a version custom tailored for myself. It's... interesting times.

1. https://imgur.com/a/73sBI7G

[detectivestory]

>I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed.

That is a pretty interesting point. I've been running into that problem quite often recently.

[rixed]

Exact same here; not that I was expecting otherwise, but publishing on HN was a personal milestone.

Seeing the flood of low ambition projects led me to think about the issue. I was wondering if we needed a kind of "proof of work" to help sort the entries. For instance counting a project number of contributors, number of commits, age of the project... Not that any of those metrics are good indicators or are hard to game, of course, but that could help triage good faith attempts from shallow LLM vomit.

For the record, nobody's denying how useful LLMs are, but let's also acknowledge that they excel at things that have a lot of prior art, so by definition not really a good fit for show HN any more (in the past it may have been; But what was interresting in vibe coding has never been the end result but that it was possible at all, like a dancing bear.)

[raincole]

> twice

Right here. The problem is right here.

Unfortunately, the internet is a race to the bottom. You need to hustle (euphemism for "shamelessly spam") for attention.

[ls65536]

But if everyone follows this advice, then everything just gets overwhelmed by "hustlers" (and their "shameless spam"), and collectively we're now all worse off because of it. It just turns into yet another tragedy of the commons situation.

I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).

Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise. But we should be aware of what we're giving up when we overall tend to behave in such a way, even if it's the inevitable outcome.

[raincole]

Yes, this is why it's called a race to the bottom. If everyone does what is best for themselves then everyone's result will be worse.

[croisillon]

i looked at the Snapalabra webapp and... i don't even know where to start commenting on it: as someone who started vibecoding, i see how the UX, images, translations, everything feels like when the slop gets horribly wrong ; of course i could read explanations in the about section but it's a 404

why even post that?

[detectivestory]

thanks for having a look... Did you look at the actual app or just the landing page? You ask why would I post it even though it is not perfect. Well, I personally find it useful (thats why I made it). It helps me with bridging the gap between comprehension and expression. And I am curious to see if others also find it useful. I am in contact with professional translators etc but that is probably not something I would be wise to invest too heavily in if the idea itself is not interesting to other people.

[__jonas]

I gave it a try, my impression is this: I’m looking at an AI generated image, and describing it based on AI generated hints, and my description is judged by an AI. The UI is fairly janky on my phone and not very appealing, though I like how it places the hints over the picture.

The fact that it’s all genAI stuff puts me off, but that might not be the same for everyone.

I think crucially, if I wanted to do this kind of challenge, I would have a better experience just using an LLM chat directly, like “Generate me an image, then judge my description of it in <language>, and give me useful language learning hints according to my level of <level>”

[detectivestory]

Thanks for the feedback. The images come from pixabay, pexels, and my own camera, some will be AI generated, most aren't - they are selected for their suitability in learning certain vocabulary. The hints are all manually added. AI is used for translations (although I am in the process of replacing most translations for the non-beta languages with professional translations) and feedback. If you found the web app UI to be "janky" maybe you could try install the native app for your device.

[__jonas]

I see, thanks for explaining the image and hint selection process. I guess I got unlucky then, as today's image is an AI one, and my impression that the hints were generated came from the fact that there is that 'refresh' button that seems to bring up slight variations of the hints, which I assumed came straight from an LLM.

I'll admit, "janky" is not very useful feedback. The first thing that gave me that impression was a couple of seconds of loading time showing just the background color, then the whole page background flashing white every time after clicking/tapping something in the onboarding. I get this both on iOS Safari and macOS Firefox. On iOS, the page also crashed at some point with the 'a problem repeatedly occured on <url>' message.

Looking at it closer, seems like it's a Flutter web app, so I suppose this is to be expected and the experience is probably indeed better on the iOS/android builds, might be that I was judging too quickly.

[croisillon]

ok maybe i've been too harsh, one thing i like is the "sa" flag for afrikaans language, this one really shows attention to the details, i'll try restarting my router to see if it persists

[croisillon]

i went in it with good faith, started the webapp with a couple languages and clicking wherever my mouse landed, quickly enough it appeared to me this was not produced in good faith and i became very critic of it ; at best i would look at it like a proof of concept you send to a team of real dev and designers to get done properly, but in the current state i would never sign in

[shevy-java]

> nevermind responding with a comment

Not disagreeing on that, but often this can be explained when someone lacks time. For some articles I can only skim over the top some comments; articles with like +30 comments I can barely read all and the article, so I focus just on the first page or so.

> using AI that people are fatigued from it

I think some accounts here are actually AI accounts. I have no data to prove this, but just the voting situation is very, very odd; I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it, before retiring due to crazy moderators.

[b40d-48b2-979e]

    I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it

It was ever present. I'm afraid there is no solution to botting without excluding most of the Internet from a given website. HN has an even lower entry to barrier by not requiring an email as well.

[0dayman]

same here