I submitted a somewhat similar project yesterday to Show HN (didn’t resonate), although mine is purely based on AI scoring, with zero community features.
I call it bubblewire. Funny. I had no prior knowledge of bubbles.town until seeing it here now.
bubbles.town looks nice! Hope to see more projects that aim to bring back the good old web.
I think it's great. I don't mind the AI ranking system (it beats a free for all), though it's a bit like HN where only a few posts appeal to me.
I'd have upvoted you but I think you got eaten by /new.
> (didn’t resonate), although mine is purely based on AI scoring
One reason for it not resonating might be that it’s yet another opaque algorithmic feed in a moment in time where people are getting sick and tired of them and wary of their manipulative features. And HN is so inundated with AI submissions that having yet another Show HN about it is uninteresting to many.
Would you visit HN if it were just a link aggregator whose ranking was decided by hidden logic of a machine? A lot of people wouldn’t. We’re a social species, there is value in human curation—especially when driven by the community—that’s inherently lacking from algorithmic curation (AI or otherwise).
That's true, provided that all activity (comments, voting) here is still coming from actual humans. That's no longer the case for community websites, I'm afraid.
It's an experiment made for the web of 2026, where you can no longer tell if the users are humans or bots.
If nobody's interested in that idea, I accept that.
> Would you visit HN if were just a link aggregator whose ranking was decided by hidden logic of a machine?
I assumed it was...?
If not, who or what decides the ranking moment-by-moment? dang?
It's based on votes mainly. This is covered in the FAQ [1] and the exact algorithm has also been shared in the past [2].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013