I spent a lot of my time on the internet because I was lonely in my teens and these connections were exciting. I learned software dev because I was a nerd that loved math and loved the concept of building software, having complete control on how it's done. That was the concept I signed up for.
Software dev today is sitting in front of a prompt bar, sometimes checking the IDE, sometimes some DevOps, but nothing about it excites me anymore. Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo.
I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering
> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days.
This is only true if your definition of "hobby project" is limited to "initial prototype with basic functionality and a generic corporate-looking landing page".
Yeah, a lot of tools that would have made fun weekend projects can now be one-shot by Claude and aren't even worth sharing, because someone who needs that functionality can just use Claude too. But you can accomplish so much more now. Someone just did a hobby project to reverse engineer NVidia drivers and make them work on Windows XP. Dream bigger!
Indeed, your half-broken prototypes that are not worth sharing with the world can be now 10x the scale.
But seriously, I have not seen anyone get far with vibecoded hobby projects. The problem is that removing the pain, the frustration, and the triumph also removes any emotional attachment you have to the project to keep it alive. If it's not making you money, if you're not learning anything, and if everyone can vibecode the same thing... well, it still gives you some short-term rush - as if by magic, your words birthed a piece of software - but then what? Why keep going? Why fix bugs, why keep improving it? If you look back at the past several months of "Show HN"-style posts, it's not pretty.
I've got my hobby project fully working the way I want and ready for the masses. I just am stuck trying to get the app in google/apple stores. Its a mental block, I'm stuck on taking the time to get it through the hoops and then don't really no where to start or want to for that matter with the marketing aspects.
By Nov, 2nd 2026 your hobby project app is released on google Play Store and ready for download and install. Someone besides you - another new user - will install the app.
Google Play Store is just an assumption, cause it's not clear, which store you would prefer first.
Is this target describing your goal, what you are truly want to ship?
I've had a few beta users and I've used it extensively in real mission critical scenarios several times. Very good feedback so far from adversarial non friendly peeps. So I no I have something. I've got a full time well paying Golden handcuff type of real job so you know how that is...
It’s the social media-fication of computer hobbies. Cotton candy that tastes good briefly but offers no nutritional value.
I enjoy cotton candy, nothing wrong with that, but I also know I can’t just eat cotton candy all the time. And it’s probably not worth trillions of investment dollars.
> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo.
I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering
Try solving a very hard problem or a very good game. Or at least publish some very good polished software, they all sucks! This really is a paradox, all this doomerism and AI that has solved “coding” and it’s “very good now” and we don’t mot only have not good software, but it’s getting worse! Good lord how the heck we get out of this situation?
Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.
I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?
Robots in my garage doing woodwork would be nice. They'd be auto-orchestrated by all the spywares and spydevices already in place - and who knowns more about me and my ideas than me. And I don't have to learn anything.
You can buy cedar-scented air fresheners on Amazon. Isn't buying a wooden dresser and an air freshener enough to rekindle the love of your calling? Look, the sides of the dresser are CNC-milled to a level of perfection you could never achieve at home.
> Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.
I don't quite get what you mean by this. Music is a form of expression; it is supposed to be effortless once you are good at it, but software (if we go by a strict definition) is not about expression but about building reliable and efficient systems. Like what do you mean exactly
I am currently exploring music-software-combined-artifacts, and there is a lot of aesthetic and other design taste decisions that go into what I am choosing to make with AI assistance. It feels like self-expression at some level to me - e.g. https://johnoestmannmusic.com/0009-when-we-become-discoverer...
If I plugged it into something like an AI song generator and asked it to generate a bunch of sounds kind of like that, I think I could find something more appealing. All of this work to build this feels like a chore that could be prompted away.
For me, I've always been interested in music -- but now, I can have an AI generate limitless music, far better than anything I can do with less effort.
Imagine if you never had to pick up a guitar, blowing a trumpet, or even opening a tracker ever again.
You could just ask the AI to make music that made your best efforts look like a kindergartener's painting on the fridge. Isn't that a musician's utopia, surrounded by music without lifting a hand to make it?
I was almost replying to your previous reply by saying something akin that with the text-to-speech you can be illiterate, and that should be a reader's utopia.
Then I got this feeling that there was an odd chance of you being sarcastic.
It's difficult to tell on HN these days. Some replies I read should be sarcasm, but I those bad takes are stone faced.
> I was almost replying to your previous reply by saying something akin that with the text-to-speech you can be illiterate, and that should be a reader's utopia.
Secondly I realized, belatedly, that I could implement the "(syscall N arg1 arg2 ..)" primitive in my lisp. Which meant that I could write wrappers like this:
(defconst SYS_mkdir 83)
(defun mkdir (path)
"Create the given directory."
(if (< (syscall SYS_mkdir path (octal "0o755")) 0)
nil
1))
And that let me remove a bunch of assembly code I'd written. Sure writing "system" isn't hard it's just a combination of fork/dup/exec/wait, but I wrote that in assembly using syscalls, and now I have an implementation in more readable lisp.
Nobody will find it too interesting, I'll say again, but writing a compiler (in golang) that has it's own static runtime written in pure assembly? I'm sure some models will eventually one-shot that, but it won't teach anybody anything.
For me hobby projects are either a) to solve a need (which is what led to me writing a toy CP/M emulator), or they're for learning. And for learning the whole point is to type the code yourself, identify the inevitable bugs, and make iterative improvements.
Looking at what I have now? It feels good. Despite the existance of other lisp interpreters, compilers, or the random LLM stuff people do.
It's not a competition, I've not lost anything, and now I think I've internalized the SysV ABI convention, learned about the limits, and implemented trivial things like "print a floating point number in assembly". As well as learning about how to invoke linux syscalls to read the entries in a directory, & etc.
Everyone says they are packing up. But most of the people I’ve seen complain either are still on the site they complain about, or left briefly just to realize that other sites aren’t any better and came back.
I’ve left everything (Facebook, Instagram, I’ve even deleted the YouTube app from my phone, etc.) apart from HN. I occasionally look at Twitter, but only when someone sends me a link.
Me too, except for YouTube. I'm still hopelessly addicted to YouTube, but I'm working on it. I also ditched my smartphone eight months ago and going strong, zero desire to return to it.
Seriously, fuck all this shit. Some people love to say that love of the old web is just nostalgia and they are free to think what they want.
What really helped me to go through the YouTube backlog quickly was a user-script sending closed captions to an LLM to summarize, with some custom instructions of what I want. Occasionally I will ask a follow-up question. Now, I can read the summary of an hour-long video in 3 minutes and close it. I only watch or listen to videos that I really want to hear in full.
As another option, I use the Redirector browser add-on to automatically take me from /shorts/{videoid} to /watch?v=$1. Its amazing how manipulative the shorts interface is because if you're not in it, the temptation is SO massively reduced. Shows how much money they obviously spent on psych profiling for shorts to get that first click. We are just meat puppets to them.
My plan is to sell my laptop so that I only have a desktop and can't just watch willy-nilly wherever I am in my apartment. But it's a tough trigger to pull.
I’ve learned a huge amount from YouTube and am very thankful for its existence. It’s the absolute insistence on showing me idiotic ‘shorts’ that made me leave. I didn’t want to.
I haven't been on twitter for about 5 years, facebook for about 10, my instagram account lasted 2 weeks before I got tired of it. These sites are pretty easy to leave.
Whatsapp is harder, because people I actually care to talk to use it. I would rather not give facebook a dime of my money.
I just deleted WhatsApp and told everyone I'm on Signal and if they didn't want it they can call me. But it's not like my "network" is very big or anything, so I guess harder for some people than others.
I think the basic premise under there is still valid. Lots of online sites/communities/etc turn into rugpulls. Success leads to management change, then depersonalization, then monetization.
You say that, but the platforms have pretty much reached market saturation. The only way to get more users is for more users to be born, or perhaps some will be forced offline and then eventually come back online because of age gating.
Yeah, i think it's not only social media platform. I used to read a lot of bad fiction on internet (sometimes it was _really_ good, but most of the time, not), and it took a large part of my time (easily 2 hours a day, plus one hour of reading paper book to help me fall asleep). Nowadays i have the impression almost everything is AI-enhanced. Shorter sentences, quips for no reason, lack of details. It makes dialogs as tense as action scene, and i'm just tired.
I'm quitting. Slowly, but surely. Some days i don't read anything now. Even when i'm bored in the train, i don't necessarily read anymore. Instead i'm in smaller communities, often on discord, sometimes on whatsapp/signal, almost always one where i've met people IRL first, and i must admit, i feel somehow a bit better. Not that i ever felt that bad, i am usually happy, but weirdly it feels like a new benefits of AI.
Can confirm, I'm one of those people. I mean I had an account on a Mastodon instance before that, but it became my primary social platform when Twitter got taken over.
non sequitur. The point is that "everyone" left Twitter is nonsense; no one said that no one did. Mastodon and Bluesky are alternatives, but Twitter is still dominant despite all the Nazis there.
I know a considerable number of people who abandoned Twitter for either Mastodon or Bluesky and haven't gone back. It probably depends on what circles you run in. There are some people I know who keep Twitter accounts because it's used for professional networking, for example, but they're in specific fields.
People (correctly) bag on Bluesky's mod team (it'd be awesome if they just stopped doing boneheaded shit but that's a complaint as old as USENET...) but I have thriving communities there. I post, I respond to posts. I don't get 17k likes but I don't especially want that anymore. I like small social media and Bluesky delivers.
This post has a badge that says “written by a human not by AI”… but I noticed a lot of LLMisms, and Pangram says it’s 100% AI generated. The post also cites AI as a reason for everyone leaving everything…some kind of weird irony here :/
P.S. The response is non sequitur. I already noted that TFA is ridiculous, but that has nothing to do with the fact that Pangram produces a very high number of false positives.
So was the article. It was more of a shower thought with no real thought. Seeing a lot of these two paragraph blog posts on HN a lot lately. Do we have so much AI fatigue that it's shareworthy to post a paragraph allegedly written by a human?
I don't think big, open comment aggregators on the net have a future. The most motivated commenter is unfortunately often the least valuable to the platform.
IP/subnet reputation. Either someone in your house has a hacked device, or someone in your neighborhood or IP subnet does, or maybe they were used as a residential proxy due to a router with a hardcoded password or something.
funny - the vpn through work gives me lots of verification. At home I don't get that, but cloudflare/edgesuite does block me for browser/extensions I use.
Don't forget having to take a picture of yourself to pass a Recaptcha check. Ideally, that'll be acknowledged as a bad idea and just go away, but we'll see.
No, I don't think captchas are a reason people are leaving platforms, at least not in any large number. If the content of a platform is good, the (extremely slight) roadbump for people is not going to deter them.
Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.
Buddy, I a close a tab the instant I see any form of popup. Add friction, lose me as a consumer of your content. Screw that noise and the psychopaths in marketing.
Yes, I think captchas are the wrong solution. They annoy all clients, humans included.
IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only a few requests per day are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?
Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
Sorry but the proposal is egregious, considering your website's access far falls short of a DDoS attack against it. You voluntarily host it on the public web. Pay-for-access proposals have existed for decades, and there is a reason they never go anywhere.
Even a $5 VM I have has an included quota of at least 1TB egress data per month, and it can handle 9,540,534 requests in a day if not less. A Rust server can handle a lot more. In practice, my egress quota is larger by virtue of having a couple of more nodes.
If you actually cared, you would use something cheaper then AWS, ideally with zstandard compression, and a CPU efficient service that doesn't buckle under a moderate load.
Because that requires thinking, and unfortunately lazy always wins.
> Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
While I can agree with this in principle, due to vibeslopping in general there are a LOT more unruly scrapers browsing around, which tilts the scales quite a bit.
When the light went on I pulled everything down from GH and all my private repos (80 or so) off bitbucket. I quit social media way long ago so nothing there. I refuse to let platforms train on my code. Since I could see the writing on the wall, I jumped off MacOS and installed linux on everything I own including macbooks although they have been replaced now with non apple hardware now. The few services that I have online refuse connections from data centers and sketchy user agents.
When LLMs are done killing the Internet (and they will), I wont lament it, Ill say good riddance. There was a time that search worked, that time is long gone. Most web "technology" is really garbage.
The age of extraction, tracking, training and enshittification of everything has arrived. Why stay? Also once the lights are turned off I dont think the Internet will be reinvented, I think it will just start to look more and more like the dark web and become a fully bad place to connect your computer.
Twitter used to be a fantastic place to interact with other electronics hobbyist. Then it became the nazi bar and that was that. Every once in a while I go back out of morbid curiosity but the Following tab is barren and the For You tab is disgusting.
I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.
It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.
I use xitter and as long as you nudge the For You tab by clicking show less of this a bit and following the odd thing you like it becomes quite useable.
I spent a lot of my time on the internet because I was lonely in my teens and these connections were exciting. I learned software dev because I was a nerd that loved math and loved the concept of building software, having complete control on how it's done. That was the concept I signed up for.
Software dev today is sitting in front of a prompt bar, sometimes checking the IDE, sometimes some DevOps, but nothing about it excites me anymore. Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo.
I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering
> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days.
This is only true if your definition of "hobby project" is limited to "initial prototype with basic functionality and a generic corporate-looking landing page".
Yeah, a lot of tools that would have made fun weekend projects can now be one-shot by Claude and aren't even worth sharing, because someone who needs that functionality can just use Claude too. But you can accomplish so much more now. Someone just did a hobby project to reverse engineer NVidia drivers and make them work on Windows XP. Dream bigger!
Indeed, your half-broken prototypes that are not worth sharing with the world can be now 10x the scale.
But seriously, I have not seen anyone get far with vibecoded hobby projects. The problem is that removing the pain, the frustration, and the triumph also removes any emotional attachment you have to the project to keep it alive. If it's not making you money, if you're not learning anything, and if everyone can vibecode the same thing... well, it still gives you some short-term rush - as if by magic, your words birthed a piece of software - but then what? Why keep going? Why fix bugs, why keep improving it? If you look back at the past several months of "Show HN"-style posts, it's not pretty.
I've got my hobby project fully working the way I want and ready for the masses. I just am stuck trying to get the app in google/apple stores. Its a mental block, I'm stuck on taking the time to get it through the hoops and then don't really no where to start or want to for that matter with the marketing aspects.
I turn all my vibe-coded stuff into PWAs. You don't need anyone's permission. Maybe it will fit some of your use-cases.
This is the way. I do the same, but it's because I don't care about monetizing anything, I just like making stuff.
By Nov, 2nd 2026 your hobby project app is released on google Play Store and ready for download and install. Someone besides you - another new user - will install the app.
Google Play Store is just an assumption, cause it's not clear, which store you would prefer first.
Is this target describing your goal, what you are truly want to ship?
I've had a few beta users and I've used it extensively in real mission critical scenarios several times. Very good feedback so far from adversarial non friendly peeps. So I no I have something. I've got a full time well paying Golden handcuff type of real job so you know how that is...
With a well paid fulltime job, I guess what is missing is time and not skills.
By Nov 2 your app will be launched in google Play Store, and someone besides your beta-users is going to install it via Google Play Store.
Does this describe your goal, yes or no?
It’s the social media-fication of computer hobbies. Cotton candy that tastes good briefly but offers no nutritional value.
I enjoy cotton candy, nothing wrong with that, but I also know I can’t just eat cotton candy all the time. And it’s probably not worth trillions of investment dollars.
[dead]
I agree dream bigger!
If it gets done too fast with LLM you need to think bigger.
[dead]
> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo. I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering
Try solving a very hard problem or a very good game. Or at least publish some very good polished software, they all sucks! This really is a paradox, all this doomerism and AI that has solved “coding” and it’s “very good now” and we don’t mot only have not good software, but it’s getting worse! Good lord how the heck we get out of this situation?
Considering games still require dozens of patches I don't believe AI is actually producing this mythical flawless code.
Watching Bob Ross didn't make anyone into a Rembrandt or van Gogh.
I think with time. At some point people will see that codebases are becoming unmaintainable
Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.
I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?
Robots in my garage doing woodwork would be nice. They'd be auto-orchestrated by all the spywares and spydevices already in place - and who knowns more about me and my ideas than me. And I don't have to learn anything.
If you like sawing wood and gluing it together, just keep doing that.
If you want a wooden dresser, buy one.
Nobody does woodworking because it's necessary.
You could say the same about software; clearly it's missing the same 'ease and cheapness of creating the bespoke idea you have'.
> Nobody does woodworking because it's necessary.
I don’t understand this, can you explain or am I missing something?
I probably didn't phrase that well. I meant that garage woodworking is not necessary, in an economic sense. It's an optional/leisure activity.
And people still do it anyway. Which is great. Because it's still useful, and valuable. Just not necessary.
Do it if it's your thing. I fletch arrows I might never shoot or will not fly right. Just an itch to scratch.
But I love the smell of freshly carved wood, you would miss out on that.
You can buy cedar-scented air fresheners on Amazon. Isn't buying a wooden dresser and an air freshener enough to rekindle the love of your calling? Look, the sides of the dresser are CNC-milled to a level of perfection you could never achieve at home.
> Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.
I don't quite get what you mean by this. Music is a form of expression; it is supposed to be effortless once you are good at it, but software (if we go by a strict definition) is not about expression but about building reliable and efficient systems. Like what do you mean exactly
I am currently exploring music-software-combined-artifacts, and there is a lot of aesthetic and other design taste decisions that go into what I am choosing to make with AI assistance. It feels like self-expression at some level to me - e.g. https://johnoestmannmusic.com/0009-when-we-become-discoverer...
If I plugged it into something like an AI song generator and asked it to generate a bunch of sounds kind of like that, I think I could find something more appealing. All of this work to build this feels like a chore that could be prompted away.
Not the op, but it lets you shape ideas and test them a lot faster, and that does feel (to me) more like art or music.
For me, I've always been interested in music -- but now, I can have an AI generate limitless music, far better than anything I can do with less effort.
Imagine if you never had to pick up a guitar, blowing a trumpet, or even opening a tracker ever again.
You could just ask the AI to make music that made your best efforts look like a kindergartener's painting on the fridge. Isn't that a musician's utopia, surrounded by music without lifting a hand to make it?
> Isn't that a musician's utopia, surrounded by music without lifting a hand to make it?
I think my sarcasm detector is broken. I really hope there’s an implicit /s at the end of that.
There is. But it's not so different from what other people have posted without sarcasm.
> There is.
Ok, phew.
> But it's not so different from what other people have posted without sarcasm.
I agree—and that’s why I had trouble being sure.
I was almost replying to your previous reply by saying something akin that with the text-to-speech you can be illiterate, and that should be a reader's utopia.
Then I got this feeling that there was an odd chance of you being sarcastic.
It's difficult to tell on HN these days. Some replies I read should be sarcasm, but I those bad takes are stone faced.
> I was almost replying to your previous reply by saying something akin that with the text-to-speech you can be illiterate, and that should be a reader's utopia.
/me gestures towards literacy rates.
Yeah that’s called being lazy.
Probably not. They made "smart nerd" their whole personality and that is now being challenged, hurts the ego.
> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days.
It depends what you're building, and why you're doing it.
For example I've always been interested in compilers and interpreters, and I've spent the past few months writing (by hand) a lisp compiler.
It's nothing special, nobody will use it, and existing solutions already exist. But I've had a lot of fun getting things working.
To highlight two examples, and bearing in mind my output binaries are statically linked with no libc, I wrote a garbage collector in amd64 assembly. Getting that working took a couple of weeks, as I kept finding random segfaults and issues. But now? Now I could write something similar in an afternoon. (And because it was for learning I chose stop© instead of mark&sweep. It seemed simpler and easier.)
Secondly I realized, belatedly, that I could implement the "(syscall N arg1 arg2 ..)" primitive in my lisp. Which meant that I could write wrappers like this:
And that let me remove a bunch of assembly code I'd written. Sure writing "system" isn't hard it's just a combination of fork/dup/exec/wait, but I wrote that in assembly using syscalls, and now I have an implementation in more readable lisp.Nobody will find it too interesting, I'll say again, but writing a compiler (in golang) that has it's own static runtime written in pure assembly? I'm sure some models will eventually one-shot that, but it won't teach anybody anything.
For me hobby projects are either a) to solve a need (which is what led to me writing a toy CP/M emulator), or they're for learning. And for learning the whole point is to type the code yourself, identify the inevitable bugs, and make iterative improvements.
Looking at what I have now? It feels good. Despite the existance of other lisp interpreters, compilers, or the random LLM stuff people do.
It's not a competition, I've not lost anything, and now I think I've internalized the SysV ABI convention, learned about the limits, and implemented trivial things like "print a floating point number in assembly". As well as learning about how to invoke linux syscalls to read the entries in a directory, & etc.
Everyone says they are packing up. But most of the people I’ve seen complain either are still on the site they complain about, or left briefly just to realize that other sites aren’t any better and came back.
I’ve left everything (Facebook, Instagram, I’ve even deleted the YouTube app from my phone, etc.) apart from HN. I occasionally look at Twitter, but only when someone sends me a link.
So there are some counterexamples.
Me too, except for YouTube. I'm still hopelessly addicted to YouTube, but I'm working on it. I also ditched my smartphone eight months ago and going strong, zero desire to return to it.
Seriously, fuck all this shit. Some people love to say that love of the old web is just nostalgia and they are free to think what they want.
What really helped me to go through the YouTube backlog quickly was a user-script sending closed captions to an LLM to summarize, with some custom instructions of what I want. Occasionally I will ask a follow-up question. Now, I can read the summary of an hour-long video in 3 minutes and close it. I only watch or listen to videos that I really want to hear in full.
I'm in pretty much the exact same place as you - although I need my smartphone for work.
If you need help with YouTube, like I do, here are some extremely helpful uBlock Origin scripts to hide Shorts: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
As another option, I use the Redirector browser add-on to automatically take me from /shorts/{videoid} to /watch?v=$1. Its amazing how manipulative the shorts interface is because if you're not in it, the temptation is SO massively reduced. Shows how much money they obviously spent on psych profiling for shorts to get that first click. We are just meat puppets to them.
Ref: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector
Oh man, THANK YOU! I only know for sure shorts leak through when searching and so far so good. Ya, thanks again!
YouTube sure is doing its part to make YouTube less and less appealing.
It really is!
My plan is to sell my laptop so that I only have a desktop and can't just watch willy-nilly wherever I am in my apartment. But it's a tough trigger to pull.
I’ve learned a huge amount from YouTube and am very thankful for its existence. It’s the absolute insistence on showing me idiotic ‘shorts’ that made me leave. I didn’t want to.
Ya, that's the problem... I've learned so much from it... I'm torn.
At least stay away from the shorts.
Just don’t do drugs.
It’s hard though when Google tries to tempt you to do drugs every three seconds.
I do my best to hide shorts via CSS plugins and UnTrap but they seem to weasel their way through in search results.
Non sequitur. "Everyone is" is nonsense, "most aren't" is correct. Individuals who are: irrelevant, as that was already implied.
P.S. The response misses the point, going for personal rudeness instead of reasoning.
I’m just providing another data point; no need to get your knickers in a twist.
I haven't been on twitter for about 5 years, facebook for about 10, my instagram account lasted 2 weeks before I got tired of it. These sites are pretty easy to leave.
Whatsapp is harder, because people I actually care to talk to use it. I would rather not give facebook a dime of my money.
I just deleted WhatsApp and told everyone I'm on Signal and if they didn't want it they can call me. But it's not like my "network" is very big or anything, so I guess harder for some people than others.
I've left a few sites.
I think the basic premise under there is still valid. Lots of online sites/communities/etc turn into rugpulls. Success leads to management change, then depersonalization, then monetization.
[citation-needed]
People don't loudly announce they're not going anywhere and not changing anything, of course you only perceive the ones who do otherwise.
It doesn't mean they there's a wide spread trend.
I don't have a citation, but as hyperbole goes, it's a growing trend no matter how slow or small.
Lately I’ve found myself thinking about BBSes for the first time in ages.
Online used to feel like an actual place.
sdf.org is still running.
This sort of post is ridiculous ... the vast majority of people are not "packing up", and people are constantly arriving.
You say that, but the platforms have pretty much reached market saturation. The only way to get more users is for more users to be born, or perhaps some will be forced offline and then eventually come back online because of age gating.
The only growth is in fake bot accounts.
Coming soon: "The forced births will continue until MAU improves!"
> The only way to get more users is for more users to be born
As I said, people are constantly arriving.
I stopped using Reddit after Apollo got blocked, well, I had it side-loaded for a while too with AltStore, but that stopped working
Reddit went to absolute shit
Enshittification takes so much from us
Don't worry, they're still making it worse:
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1wubgvt/continuing...
(TL;DR: they're killing old.reddit, RSS, automod, and a lot of other bots.)
Yeah, i think it's not only social media platform. I used to read a lot of bad fiction on internet (sometimes it was _really_ good, but most of the time, not), and it took a large part of my time (easily 2 hours a day, plus one hour of reading paper book to help me fall asleep). Nowadays i have the impression almost everything is AI-enhanced. Shorter sentences, quips for no reason, lack of details. It makes dialogs as tense as action scene, and i'm just tired.
I'm quitting. Slowly, but surely. Some days i don't read anything now. Even when i'm bored in the train, i don't necessarily read anymore. Instead i'm in smaller communities, often on discord, sometimes on whatsapp/signal, almost always one where i've met people IRL first, and i must admit, i feel somehow a bit better. Not that i ever felt that bad, i am usually happy, but weirdly it feels like a new benefits of AI.
Is this a real trend or like that time everyone abandoned Twitter for Mastodon?
Mastodon is absolutely thriving. I get you want to be a contrarian but the fediverse is loaded with people who left X and never went back.
This doesn't look like a particularly thriving platform: https://mastodon-analytics.com/#:~:text=Mastodon%20Active%20...
I hope one day someone calls one of my projects a failure because I only have a few hundred thousand daily users.
just don't compete against facebook and twitter.
mastodon has failed to capture the audience numbers of the products it sought to compete against, you can say that without criticizing the product.
> mastodon has failed to capture the audience numbers of the products it sought to compete against
I really don't think that was ever the goal.
They never wanted to capture every single user (have you seen the people on twitter? who would want to deal with that???)
They sought to carve out a targeted subset of users and did so successfully.
Life is about more than numbers, you know. Would you call your local steakhouse a failure because they're not putting up the numbers McDonalds does?
And thank god for that; I left in no small part because of those audiences of shit flinging gibbons.
Quality over quantity :)
Can confirm, I'm one of those people. I mean I had an account on a Mastodon instance before that, but it became my primary social platform when Twitter got taken over.
non sequitur. The point is that "everyone" left Twitter is nonsense; no one said that no one did. Mastodon and Bluesky are alternatives, but Twitter is still dominant despite all the Nazis there.
I know a considerable number of people who abandoned Twitter for either Mastodon or Bluesky and haven't gone back. It probably depends on what circles you run in. There are some people I know who keep Twitter accounts because it's used for professional networking, for example, but they're in specific fields.
People (correctly) bag on Bluesky's mod team (it'd be awesome if they just stopped doing boneheaded shit but that's a complaint as old as USENET...) but I have thriving communities there. I post, I respond to posts. I don't get 17k likes but I don't especially want that anymore. I like small social media and Bluesky delivers.
Yahoo never should have given up their human-curated index, we need it now more than ever.
https://ooh.directory/
This post has a badge that says “written by a human not by AI”… but I noticed a lot of LLMisms, and Pangram says it’s 100% AI generated. The post also cites AI as a reason for everyone leaving everything…some kind of weird irony here :/
Pangram is utterly useless.
P.S. The response is non sequitur. I already noted that TFA is ridiculous, but that has nothing to do with the fact that Pangram produces a very high number of false positives.
So was the article. It was more of a shower thought with no real thought. Seeing a lot of these two paragraph blog posts on HN a lot lately. Do we have so much AI fatigue that it's shareworthy to post a paragraph allegedly written by a human?
I don't think big, open comment aggregators on the net have a future. The most motivated commenter is unfortunately often the least valuable to the platform.
This is why I’m building all my own stuff.
This is an interesting idea but was too homogenized by the article. WordPress shouldn’t be lumped in with the rest. GitHub too.
It would have been better to categorize the reasons/platforms and then analyze if the farewell posts matched the crimes of the platforms.
I will celebrate shutting down the last Wordpress site I have to deal with like the last day of supporting Front Page Server Extensions for UNIX.
Getting really tired of proving I'm human every time I visit a website. It's about 90% of the time now.
IP/subnet reputation. Either someone in your house has a hacked device, or someone in your neighborhood or IP subnet does, or maybe they were used as a residential proxy due to a router with a hardcoded password or something.
funny - the vpn through work gives me lots of verification. At home I don't get that, but cloudflare/edgesuite does block me for browser/extensions I use.
Soon you'll have to prove you're an adult the same way to click through for cookies. Can't wait.
Don't forget having to take a picture of yourself to pass a Recaptcha check. Ideally, that'll be acknowledged as a bad idea and just go away, but we'll see.
Hopefully AI can provide you a usable avatar.
Age verification is a hard line for me, and may be what helps kick my YouTube addiction.
The problem for many sites and apps is that it's basically impossible to tell one from another now.
How dare you use Firefox.
I part of the reason is Capthas, something is needed but Capthas are a pain to use.
No, I don't think captchas are a reason people are leaving platforms, at least not in any large number. If the content of a platform is good, the (extremely slight) roadbump for people is not going to deter them.
Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.
Buddy, I a close a tab the instant I see any form of popup. Add friction, lose me as a consumer of your content. Screw that noise and the psychopaths in marketing.
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Yes, I think captchas are the wrong solution. They annoy all clients, humans included.
IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only a few requests per day are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?
Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
IP blocking doesn't work for bots, they use residential IP addresses and make only one or two requests per IP.
[1] Proposed Amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (2026-05-08) - https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/
Sorry but the proposal is egregious, considering your website's access far falls short of a DDoS attack against it. You voluntarily host it on the public web. Pay-for-access proposals have existed for decades, and there is a reason they never go anywhere.
Even a $5 VM I have has an included quota of at least 1TB egress data per month, and it can handle 9,540,534 requests in a day if not less. A Rust server can handle a lot more. In practice, my egress quota is larger by virtue of having a couple of more nodes.
If you actually cared, you would use something cheaper then AWS, ideally with zstandard compression, and a CPU efficient service that doesn't buckle under a moderate load.
Because that requires thinking, and unfortunately lazy always wins.
> Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
While I can agree with this in principle, due to vibeslopping in general there are a LOT more unruly scrapers browsing around, which tilts the scales quite a bit.
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When the light went on I pulled everything down from GH and all my private repos (80 or so) off bitbucket. I quit social media way long ago so nothing there. I refuse to let platforms train on my code. Since I could see the writing on the wall, I jumped off MacOS and installed linux on everything I own including macbooks although they have been replaced now with non apple hardware now. The few services that I have online refuse connections from data centers and sketchy user agents.
When LLMs are done killing the Internet (and they will), I wont lament it, Ill say good riddance. There was a time that search worked, that time is long gone. Most web "technology" is really garbage.
The age of extraction, tracking, training and enshittification of everything has arrived. Why stay? Also once the lights are turned off I dont think the Internet will be reinvented, I think it will just start to look more and more like the dark web and become a fully bad place to connect your computer.
Reddit is leaving me, by killing RSS. Oh well.
All those big platforms have to say:
Pack it up, pack it in, let me begin
I came to win, battle me, that's a sin
I won't ever slack up, punk, ya better back up!
> A few years ago that would have sounded like giving up
I’m confused by that sentence. Giving up on what exactly?
Personal sites were always an option and yet they chose the big platform. I interpret "giving up" in that sense, giving up your preference.
Leaving a large audience platform was/is like giving up on having a large audience for your stuff.
This reads as slop to me. Added contrast containing no semantic content.
Same with:
> it changed under them
Probably more like "A lot of people want to pack up"
Wait… gopher is still a thing?
> But the people who made them interesting in the first place keep quietly walking out the side door, and writing a post about it on their way out.
I think the really interesting ones just quietly vanished without needing a dramatic blogpost or similar screed at all.
The enshittification continues until there's nothing left.
Twitter used to be a fantastic place to interact with other electronics hobbyist. Then it became the nazi bar and that was that. Every once in a while I go back out of morbid curiosity but the Following tab is barren and the For You tab is disgusting.
I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.
It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.
Things are bleak.
I use xitter and as long as you nudge the For You tab by clicking show less of this a bit and following the odd thing you like it becomes quite useable.
Absolutely false. Twitter is an unusable hellhole. Its relevance fell off a cliff years ago.
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