Tell HN: Show HN has become an awful way to introduce your project

I disagree.

When I re-launched Artpacks.org at the end of January, I did so with a Show HN. I stayed at the top of the ShowHN page for most of the day, and was in the top 5 on the home page for much of the day, too. For the day I launched, and one day after, I received 4.5k uniques, about 80k pageviews, and had 90-120 concurrent users through a large part of the day.

When I launched SendToMyCloud.com a week later, I barely touched the front page, and had about 1/3 that traffic. I attribute a lot of that to the type of site (content vs app) and the amount of free content. I did get lots of signups via HN, despite the fact that HN users didn't fit my target demographic.

In both of these cases, after the initial surge was over and the sites were off the front page, the project got a lot of long-tail traffic coming from /show.

I disagree, I've had a couple successful posts in Show HN that I was able to garner some really useful feedback off of. I think the key is that people have a short attention span so posting to show HN needs:

1. A moderately interesting post title 2. A direct link to a page that immediately comes out and easily comes out and says what the thing does and shows it off

Anything other than that seems to not do well or get negative comments, I think that's ok.

IMO there's a noise problem in Show HN, so I tend to avoid the section. Not that people are building lousy projects (probably the opposite), but most projects just aren't particularly relevant to me. When so many people are submitting projects, I'd only ever be interested in maybe 1 project out of every page.

Meanwhile in Ask HN, I click on about 5-10 links at any given time.

Agreed lots of noise. But I still scan the Show HN page frequently for some signal amongst the noise. I would be worried if the noise caused good show HN's to be buried but j don't think that's the case. If anything, consolidating noise and signal in one place makes it easier to find the signal.

Much like the negativity thread, the will of a community reflects that of its participants.

The more new projects are valued and encouraged by the community, the more attention and benefit they'll receive. (Engineering only goes so far.)

2. "Show HN" shouldn't be a place to introduce startups and other "real world" projects.

Let's face it, a typical HN user is a programmer wanting to read something technical.

He will not take time to understand/appreciate your non-technical startup. What you can get at most is a snarky comment, but almost all will just ignore it.