more tools I will never use or need theres just an endless supply of new open source projects now I stopped paying attention
I increasingly feel the impact of landing on the frontpage of HN is not as pronounced as it used to be. The demographic shift of HN is also noted, it has a lot more "reddit" vibe than I remember.
Before all the vibecoding when I saw some project even if I thought it was dumb or didn't appeal to me, there was still a level of respect for it because at least someone put the effort in to write the code and at least attempt to understand what they were doing. The more they understood they more they learned about programming even if the project itself isn't super useful for others.
Now I see these things and its more likely than not that it was spit out by an agentic tool with little to no understanding of the code, and hardly learning or effort took place. Feels cheap and a waste of time. Why spend my time looking at something that someone made in a few hours so they could up their fake portfolio?
Its great to find real development out there but these types of posts eg "Show: random agentic tool gibberish" feel cheap and flaccid now. Nothing impressive
Kind of sad, because I can't think of anywhere that's replacing this.
tbh I think open internet forums are just dead. It was fun while it lasted but the reason it was good is because of the gatekeeping conditions (not to say that the gatekeeping didn't push away valuable contributors) that kept the internet forums hard to access.
GCs, blogs, and small chatrooms are the way.
already on HN I am seeing a lot of generated or AI assisted comments. on Reddit, sometimes I will engage in a debate then it gets drawn out and I realize I am talking to a bot.
perhaps the biggest hit is the trust, now people will just jump to conclusion and say your comment is AI and overall the presence that I used to feel from before the AI days is not there.
its no longer rewarding and ironically i've started to engage a lot less and seek human connections outside so perhaps there is an upside.
I also see a lot of people cutting back on instagram and social media use. AI appears to be slowly driving people off the internet and towards analog real human connection but its very subtle and too little to celebrate
> I also see a lot of people cutting back on instagram and social media use. AI appears to be slowly driving people off the internet and towards analog real human connection but its very subtle and too little to celebrate
I think it was bound to happen. The open internet is like public infrastructure with no janitor. People rant on it, people lie on it, people push zealous activism on it, people send bots onto it. The amount of work it would take to effectively moderate this stuff wouldn't make it economically viable to run any site. You'd need a full time staff just to police this stuff.
Small groups are small enough to be moderated by everyone in the group. It might feel sad (it certainly feels sad to me), but I think we should realize we just happened to be on the internet in a weird moment where a high bar was needed to get onto it that happened to align around norms of good discussion. I'm struggling with this transition (because it's hard as an adult to find new places to socialize), but need to ween myself off this site because it's obvious the quality has dipped too low to get much out of it.
why can't we simply raise the bar for posting? I remember semi-open platforms, where you were invited, had to earn the right to post comments and posts. and you could easily lose those rights when downvoted. its seems strange in the AI-bot era that we allow any entity the freedom of speech.
That's essentially how most small chatrooms work these days. Join a bigger GC or small Discord/Matrix/IRC and bad behavior gets flagged with impunity. But most of the big web forums like HN, Reddit, etc predate that and moving to a model like that would pretty much kill the sites as we know them.
there's always been an endless supply of open source projects, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find an open source replacement for this project
There are dozens or hundreds of sandbox projects and companies now. It's the new vector database / agent memory until people notice OCI can do most of this and is already widely adopted in industry.