altairprime
today at 1:03 PM
Programming has been democratized in terms of ātime invested in programmingā by AI, which has resulted in exactly what happens to any high-investment community when a tool-assisted method of avoiding that investment is developed. You could ask any newspaper or movie script submissions reviewer before AI what percent of what they receive as uninvited-submissions is even slightly worth their time and theyāll look at you with the deadest eyes in the world and say āzero percentā. What invention led to their industries being buried in meaningless (relative to pre-invention) submissions that took a thousandth of the effort to produce than they did prior to it, without the editorial staff being scaled accordingly? The typewriter.
The obvious counterpoint is that AO3 is brilliant, which it is: give people a way to ontologize themselves and the result is amazing. Sure, AO3 has some sort of make-integer-go-up system, but it reveals the critical defect in āShow HNā: one pool for all submissions means the few that would before have been pulled out by us lifeguards are more likely to drown, unnoticed, amidst the throngs. HNās submissions model only scales so far without AO3ās del.icio.us-inherited tagging model. Without it, tool-assisted creative output will increasingly overwhelm the few people willing to slog through an untagged Show HN pool. Certainly Iām one of them; at 20% by weight AI submissions per 12 hours in the new feed alone, heavily weighted in favor of show posts, my own eyes and this postās graphs confirm that I am right to have stopped reading Show HN. I only have so much time in my day, sorry.
My interest in an HN post, whether in new or show or front page, is directly proportional to how much effort the submitter invested in it. āClippy, write me a programā is no more interesting than a standard HN generic rabble-rousing link to a GotHub issue or a fifty-page essay about some economics point that could have been concisely conveyed in one. If the submitter has invested zero personal effort into whatever degree of expression of designcraft, wordcraft, and code craft that their submission contains, then they have nothing to Show HN.
In the rare cases when I interact with a show post these days, Iāve found the submissions to be functionally equivalent to an AI prompt: āhereās my idea, hereās my solution, hereās my appā but lacking any of the passion that drives people to overcome obstacles at all. Thatās an intended outcome of democratization, and itās also why craft fairs and Saturday markets exercise editorial judgment over who gets a booth or not. Itās a bad look for the market to be filled with sellers who have a list of AI-generated memes and a button press, whose eyes only shine when you take out your wallet. Sure, some of the buttons might be cool, but that market sucks to visit.
Thus, the decline of Show HN. Not because of democratization of knowledge, but because lowering the minimum effort threshold to create and post something to HN reveals a flaw-at-scale of community-voting editorial model: it only works when the editorial community scales as rapidly as submissions, which it obviously has not been.
Full-text search tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort in favor of language modeling, and turned out to be a disastrous failure after a couple decades due to the inability of a computer to distinguish mediocre (or worse) from competent (or better). HN tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort and it has survived well enough for quite some time, but gestures at Show HN trends graphs it isnāt looking good either. Ironically, Reddit tried to implement centralized moderation on a per-community basis ā and that worked extremely well for many years, until Reddit rediscovered why corporations of the 90s worked so hard to deprecate editorial staff, when their editors engaged in collective action against management (something any academic journal publisher is intimately familiar with!).
In that light, HNās core principle is democratizing editorial review ā but now that our high-skill niche is no longer high-skill, the submissions are flooding in and the reviewers are not. Without violating the siteās core precepts of submission egality and editorial democracy, I see no way that HN can reverse the trend shown by OPās data. The AO3 tagging model isnāt acceptable as it creates unequal distinctions between submissions and site complexity that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards ontologies. The Reddit and acsdemic journal editorial models arenāt acceptable as it creates unequal distinction between users and editors that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards exercising editorial authority over the importance of submissions. And HN canāt even limit Show HN submissions to long-standing or often-participating users because that would prevent the exact discoveries of gems in the rough that show used to be known for.
The best idea Iāve got is, like, āto post to Show HN, you must make several thoughtful comments on other Show HN postsā, which puts the burden of editorial review into the mod teamās existing bailiwick and training, but requires some extra backend code that adds anti-spam logic, for example āsome of your comments must have been upvoted by users who have no preexisting interactions with your comments and continued participating on the site elsewhere after they upvoted youā to exclude the obvious attack vectors.
I wouldnāt want to be in their shoes. A visionary founded left them a site whose continuing health turn out to hinge upon creating things being difficult, and then they got steamrolled by their own industryās advancements. Phew. Good luck, HN.