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Comment by Oras

9 days ago

Posting a product on any of these sites will not have the same impact as it did before AI. Not because your product is not good, but because there is much more noise now.

This applies to social media posting, SEO, articles, you name it. AI has amplified the noise to the point where finding something useful is pretty hard now.

Building in public is and was always a fake trend. You see a few who made it a long time ago by posting their journey (personal choice), and then everyone jumps in to spam, which is back again to the noise, ending with a lack of value.

I feel for anyone trying to take a product to the market right now, while there are more tools to build, marketing has gotten a lot harder, consumers are struggling financially, and companies are trying to stay afloat due to a lack of growth.

27 comments

Oras

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ivm  9 days ago

It did not work even before AI. The rise of "indie hacking" in the late 2010s brought in thousands of hustlers creating similar lists, and many of them were simply selling shovels to other indie hackers (including the lists themselves). By the time of the pandemic, the "submit to every directory & community" strategy was already useless.

thorio  9 days ago

True story, yesterday I tried to get some feedback from an industry relevant subreddit for a real estate quick check calculation tool (automatically extracts listing data into calculation and enables sharing investment ideas). The pure mention of AI brought up a whole crowd of fed up bullies that talked it down as vibecoding trash - which it really isn't. All those places are flooded.

  • deaux  9 days ago

    People, not bullies. I can sympathize with you because I've struggled with the same, but we can't blame those people. They're now being asked every two days to give feedback on yet another tool. That used to be once every 6 months. And the overwhelming majority of those new "tools" is abandoned within a month. And there is indeed a huge amount of vibecoded slop. I've put more time and thought into our product than the last 20 such tools that got posted into our industry-relevant subreddit combined, but I can't expect the mods and users to put their time into assessing that.

    • mnky9800n  9 days ago

      I think it’s strange to dislike vibe coded things. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example. The problem is mostly the intention. I think a lot of vibe coded stuff isn’t solving a problem someone has its someone trying to seek profit. It’s no different from when smartphones first came out and people wanted to make a for everything when most of them didn’t solve any problems. The difference is nobody is wowed anymore by anything so your app that turns your phone into a beer kind of thing doesn’t exist in the vibe coded world.

      2 replies →

    • thorio  9 days ago

      While this is directionally correct it does come down to a tonality, that I think wasn't justified in that case. But hey, it's the Internet and I'm not naive either.

      1 reply →

  • owebmaster  9 days ago

    Yes but your content is also part of the flood

    • thorio  9 days ago

      While that's true, my tool (as part of the flood) didn't originate from the same spring, it's just something I happen to be building that same way, I did before the LLM wave. It's not vibecoded SaaS fast food.

      I checked community guidelines before and think regarding Reddit, this is where it should be resolve in my option.

      1 reply →

  • Andrei_dev  8 days ago

    Had basically the same thing happen. Posted in a side project sub, spam filter nuked it because new account. And in other subs now, anything that mentions AI gets hit with "vibecoded slop" automatically. Doesn't matter if you spent months on it.

    What actually moved the needle was talking about data, not the product. I posted about my tool — crickets. Then I wrote about stuff I discovered while building it and people started engaging. Exact same product behind both posts, just "here's what I found" instead of "here's what I built." Night and day difference.

baby  9 days ago

The producthunt noise was a thing on day 1 I feel like, I quickly stopped checking that website after they launched

nvardakas  9 days ago

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  • frabia  9 days ago

    Can you share what approach you’re taking for this? I’ve tried engaging in a similar way but struggled to strike a balance between helping for the sake of helping (no return for me), and asking research-focused questions, with people not caring too much about to answer

Sohazur  9 days ago

[flagged]

  • dennisy  8 days ago

    Whilst this is a very valid view, I am not sure there is evidence for it, if you have it please do provide it.

    It is not obvious to me that one credible citation is better than having appeared many times in the training data.

    Also knowledge releases of models are too slow to be depended on for marketing in my view. It is the search / retrieval of LLMs for which one can optimise.

    A final point would be that none of this changes the point made, which is that there too much noise due to too many products being shipped.

  • baubino  9 days ago

    AIs recommend what is most popular/well-known, which isn’t necessarily what is best. Both your description of AI sourcing and your AI-written comment demonstrate this point.