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.
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.
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?
> 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...
> 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?
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I agree dream bigger!
If it gets done too fast with LLM you need to think 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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...
It 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.
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. 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?
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
[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.
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
Yahoo never should have given up their human-curated index, we need it now more than ever.
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?
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 :/
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.
Probably more like "A lot of people want to pack up"
Getting really tired of proving I'm human every time I visit a website. It's about 90% of the time now.
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.
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.
How dare you use Firefox.
The problem for many sites and apps is that it's basically impossible to tell one from another now.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
The enshittification continues until there's nothing left.