Ask HN: Isn't anyone worried about this flood of HackerTube-but-for apps?
HN used to be a hub for software experiments and interesting webs, but with the rise of AI, the speed and ease of building them gives a sense of meaninglessness.
Nah, it will dissapear in a week, like the 20 Apple anouncements just after the WWDC each year.
Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and vote some good stuff.
Man, people will always complain and your submission is proof of that. People will always complain.
Those two Show HNs which you are admonishing were heavily upvoted and occupied the very top of the front page showing that the Hacker News community found them very interesting, and I even favorited them so as to revisit later.
If you don't like it, there's still plenty of Show HNs for you to enjoy and dabble with.
People will always complain.
I will respond, because I think I have a leg in both worlds.
It is a little scary as it will likely drown new releases on steam/itch ( I think it already has ). Otoh, good stuff is still good stuff and now there is little to no excuse to not look for something better if what you find fails.
My personal major project for 2027 as a result is proper 'tagging' system that can withstand typical human tendencies and interference. Tall order, but I can already see it will be needed.
I am optimistic, because even if the above fails, I can just keep adding fun little tools for myself and they are exactly what I want them to be without having to align myself to somebody else's idea of what useful is.
If anything, it adds meaning -- but there is a trade-off.
It has definitely drowned out Steam and Itch. Steam are reportedly dedicating "significant" resources to trying to solve discovery now, so they must be assuming this would impact them negatively.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/valve-has-a-signifi...
Yet look at the ones that gain traction. In general, LLM-created content is unpopular, even on HN. However, using LLMs to aggregate, visualize, and synthesize content is popular. Likewise, when those types of functions are done against HN itself, like the last few days, it go to the top of the site.
Which tells me that people still highly value a personal connection to anything online. It also tells me that people don't want original content from AI - they want original perspectives on existing content.
Signal-and-value collapse. These apps are not a signal that you are good at anything -- and therefore you cannot derive social or economic value from them. It literally means you are bored and had $5, about as meaningful as buying a Chalupa.
Even if you did it by hand -- the noise would crowd out your work.
You have to learn to deal with abundance in a healthy way. A greater abundance of anything means more low-quality stuff as well. Whether that's food, music, people, software, or anything. But it also means more high quality stuff.
Yes but the "healthy" way is to have curated methods of finding the good stuff, it doesn't matter how much bad food there is if you can go to your supermarket and see a healthy selection they've curated.
Whereas for software, we're down to just a few supermarkets and they have made no effort to stay on top of curation - in fact Google and Apple straight up monetized bad curation with advertising, which inherently favors the "unhealthy" food able to recuperate that money through addiction.
Supermarkets hardly do any curation either. You have to walk past aisle after aisle of the most vile ultra-processed poison to get to the good stuff in the back.
It's as easy as ever to get good software for your computer or phone by doing it the old way through in-person or online message board recommendations. Starting at the App Store when searching for software is out of the question, for reasons you mentioned.
Yes, the experience here on HN, like any open software forum has been watered down for a long while now. Before you could respect even quite simple projects since good time was at least spent implementing them. Nowadays? Not so much.
I was gonna submit hackerhack but maybe too on the nose? HN is getting drowned with vibe-coded abandonware.
A "flood" of....Two or three apps in the last few days since HackerTube?
It's not the hackertube apps that are the flood, it's just the general slop flood that is the flood.