[iloveyouocean]

Totally agree. When I first joined HN (2100+ days ago) there were posts nearly every day of the 'Show HN: My new startup/website/app/etc' type and the thoughtful feedback and comments were genuinely helpful and insightful. It wasn't uncommon for multiple people to actually take screenshots and rework design elements, provide thorough user interaction impressions and potential improvements, offer assistance in numerous ways (debugging, introductions, alpha/beta testing, etc.), and be generally supportive. HN truly seemed like a community of semi-collaborative or at least fully helpful hackers.

It saddens me that the most common response these days seems to be some version of 'Let me list all the reasons why this is crap.'

What happened?

[matb33]

Maybe it's a matter of adjusting some copy... "Show HN" was appropriate when HN consisted of its higher quality membership. You were showing your project to people who were more likely to provide better quality feedback.

Now that the population has grown, there are more commenters and more Show HNs, yet the presentation hasn't changed to accommodate this (same number of posts per page, same comment layout despite more comments, etc).

Maybe something like "Review HN"? Whatever it would be, it may be time to get more specific. Ultimately you're trying to filter out unhelpful comments. Those will always appear, but now there's just more of them in the same space...

[chacham15]

Wow, that sounds like a dream for a startup. I'm getting fairly close to releasing a beta and people like that would be awesome. In fact, I've been thinking that maybe if I charge a nominal amount (a dollar or something similar) to try the beta, it might act as a filter for these kinds of people. Lately, however, the cynic in me is saying that I'll just end up with no one :(.