Show HN's Signal-to-Noise Problem: More Projects, Less Attention

The Hacker News community has long been a launchpad for indie developers and bootstrappers to showcase their work, but recent data reveals a troubling trend: Show HN is drowning in submissions while engagement per post plummets.

The numbers tell a stark story. Volume on Show HN has exploded in recent months, with the platform now receiving so many daily submissions that posts disappear from the first page within hours during peak times. What was once a curated space where thoughtful projects could spark meaningful discussions has become a firehose of weekend hacks and AI-generated experiments.

This isn't just anecdotal. Analysis of post performance shows that Show HN submissions now fare significantly worse than regular Hacker News posts in terms of visibility and discussion. The graveyard of unnoticed projects grows larger each day, with genuinely interesting work getting buried under the weight of quantity.

The phenomenon has been dubbed the "Sideprocalypse" by industry observers - a perfect storm where AI coding tools have lowered the barrier to building, every idea has been executed before, and established players with bigger budgets dominate search and distribution. The result? A platform that's technically more active than ever, but where individual projects struggle to break through.

Some gems still manage to surface. Projects like Neohabit, OpenRun, and uForwarder demonstrate that quality work can still find an audience, but they're increasingly the exception rather than the rule. The shrinking window for visibility means that even well-crafted projects often expire before they can generate meaningful discussion.

This creates a paradox for the Hacker News community. The platform remains one of the best places to talk about interesting technology, but the very mechanism designed to surface new work - Show HN - is becoming less effective at its core purpose. The question isn't whether Show HN is dead, but whether the community can evolve to handle this new reality of abundance without losing what made it special in the first place.

The challenge ahead is clear: how does Hacker News maintain its role as a curator of interesting work when the volume of submissions makes curation nearly impossible? Some have suggested algorithmic solutions, others propose community-driven filtering, but the fundamental tension remains - more projects mean more noise, and noise makes it harder for the signal to get through.