I feel like a trust factor that A) the person is willing to improve software quality even if it means rewriting it later down the line if it was generated by AI in the first term & B) the project is trying to be sustainable.
I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.
I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.
We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle
It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too
So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)
The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
What does substance mean in this case if I may ask?
I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish
Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code
Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least)
Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable?
Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
When we say we're looking for "substance" or "depth", we mean we're looking for projects that have had some significant thought and effort put into them. We're looking for a backstory, a real world problem that was causing real costs or difficulties for people, which set the developer on a journey of discovery and led them to an "a-ha" moment, where they figured out how the software should or could work, then built it in a way that's impressive (it needn't be polished just proven to work). That's the ideal.
At the other (low-substance) end of the spectrum is "lead generation tool" or "resume generator" that was built in 3 hours (and not much works other than a signup page and a link to Product Hunt). Not much of that kind of stuff makes the front page, but we see plenty of it submitted.
Most things getting 1000+ upvotes and hundreds of comments are high-substance, in that they have a back-story, some kind of deep work and/or ingenuity, and they make a great platform for curious conversation, which is, after all, what HN is for.
Thanks for your response sir! and I have had such a project where I feel like such depth can be provided.
Much of what I try to build is for my own difficulties/curiosities so this works perfectly for me!
I do have a question and I am interested if you can answer but does there have to be a single aha moment or can there be a multiple of aha moment which can build something enjoyable (atleast to me)
I don't know if it counts as promotion and sorry about that but in this comment here but like how I first went from building a yt extension for screenshot (I watch youtube lectures for studies and slides can change and I wanted to make a screenshot tool which can take photo of 2s or x seconds ago) store it in a folder and have a tool which can auto generate a slideshow of sorts with all new pictures and pdf/laser tool as well.
A lot of these were just when I had created the snapshot tool, I went into deeper and deeper because of curiosity.
Now firstly I am not sure if this is a unified tool, its 3 different products and much of the code was actually generated in less than 3 hours individually but let's say I had to connect the dots and build on them on what I feel like I can do better and better about it & added like this.
Now I don't know if this is worth a show hn given its 3 different products mashed together for my own use case. but supposing if it was one product with continuous aha-s but the original prototype was built in 3 hours as you mention, would it still be considered depth/substance (supposing that they actually give the product after multiple aha's and not just after one because at that point even to me it does feel like there is virtually no difference between that and the resume idea you mentioned)
Would Hackernews be more interested in something like this? Because I sometimes show HN when my project's the 3 hour thing but I still use it myself and build upon it and continue doing so and if I feel like I can have multiple aha's in my project, do you feel like it passes the substance test that HN is looking out for?
If so that's the case, So the feeling I get from this is that I can deploy it in a more tightknit community first (thinking a discord server) /personal use/friends, then slowly build it and once the project has had a decent bit of thought put into it, I can add a show HN article?
Because I just prototype and keep on growing what I feel like I would personally want but in most cases, there really isn't a single aha but continuous of small aha's :)
