There are only 30 places on the front page and 30 places on the Show HN page, and thousands of submissions each week (including hundreds of Show HNs each day) trying to get into one of them.

The community has developed an immune response to people just trying to get attention for their own work without first contributing to the community or demonstrating credibility. Since about December 2025 there's been a huge spike in the number of people posting Show HN projects, because coding agents have made it so much easier to build things, and a lot of people are finding it exhausting.

If you want to get your work seen on HN, take some time to establish yourself as a good community member who submits interesting articles from different sources about a variety of topics, and makes insightful comments about different topics. When you post your Show HN project, include an intro post that tells the whole story of why you built it, what challenges you overcame and what you learned.