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I've noticed this as well, and not just on HN.

If you do a bit of knitting that is obviously an amateur's attempt, people will say "wow, so cool that you can knit". When you work hard and get better at knitting and you produce stuff that is so good that it's commercial-product quality, people will say "what's the point in spending all that time and effort when you can just buy one?". Only when you become so good at knitting that your output is of a quality that is not generally available commercially do people find it interesting again.

Replace "knitting" with anything you like: programming, painting, woodworking, welding, electronics, 3d printing, pottery, basket-weaving, card tricks, ...

People are interested in things that seem cute and homemade. They're interested in things that are better than anything they've seen before. They're not generally interested in the mediocre middle, even when it has been created by 1 person who spent a lot of time and tried hard, rather than by a faceless megacorporation.

EDIT: I think I did the faceless megacorporations a disservice there. Faceless megacorporations also make high quality products through the hard work of their employees, they just do such a great job, and they mass-produce so efficiently, that the products end up inconceivably cheap and we take them for granted.

It's also true when learning languages. If you speak a language a tiny bit, locals act politely impressed. If you speak it kind of good but aren't a native speaker, at least in some countries that lands much worse than speaking the language badly.

if you speak the language like crap and they've never seen you before they think aww, this tourist really tries. When you speak kind of good they know you live there damn it!

I used to always hear this about black Americans in France. You're unbelievably popular and everybody thinks you're charming and cool until your French gets too good. Then you start being mistaken for an African immigrant and go from being cute to getting spit on by strangers.

Actual advice from black people to other black people not to work on your accent.

The joke about Japan is that people will constantly tell you "nihongo jouzu" (your Japanese is good) when it isn't really. You know you're getting somewhere when they start correcting you. Although I don't think they'd get mad at you either way; maybe that'd happen at work or if you get something else cultural like body language wrong.

Having a bad accent might help you sound like an enthusiastic tourist though; Americans start off with pretty bad pronunciation, Spanish/Italian/Finnish are closer and people might think you're fluent.

Mentioning “knitting” and etc. is interesting, and reminds me of a variation on this theme:

Browsing BoingBoing in the 2010s, the maker-themed posts that gained traction were projects that were essentially structured as: An over complicated _______ but it’s actually a simple ________. For example, ‘a 3d printed diy wrist mounted display that actually only shows yesterdays’ tweets”.

In some ways today’s pattern of projects being either very complicated or very simple is a distillation/separation of the earlier pattern.

I think we also enjoy playing with other peoples fun passion projects.

It’s different playing with something that someone built because they wanted to build it and it was fun, rather than them having some sense of commercial gain. See: indie games.

Maybe I can describe how I work and why sharing anything more than protoypes is hard, and then people can comment if this rings true to them.

Like many people here I have a full time job writing software. Most of the time I get home and don't really want to sit at a computer for a bunch more hours working on a side project. But a few times a year I get super inspired or have an acute need and will spend my spare time working on a game, or a small project or something like that. Inevitably I lose interest after reaching the 'alpha' phase of the project (or sometimes even failing to get there). At that point I sometimes want to share the project with others, but I won't usually continue working on it.

I think this may partially explain your experience.

I think it's to be expected that the kind of projects you mention are rare. Consider that even if 80% of the people posting worked on games that take a couple of years to develop, and 20% worked on games that take one month, you'd still have a ratio of 6 short games posted for every single two-year project launched.

I think the abstract conversations about the future of AI are in the same ballpark as this. Thing is, there's only two kinds of makers you see on HN:

- People who make small simple things and put them on HN

- People who make bigger nontrivial stuff

The latter stuff also shows up on HN but less often because the amount of time spent making is so much more, like if something takes 3 years it's a single Show HN and if it takes a day to make it's also a single Show HN. Also note that a decent blog post takes about as long to make as a basic game, ie "thought leadership" is in box 1.

The people working at OpenAI and related are empathically not spending all their time doing Show HNs, nor even blogging on the AI future. They're actually making stuff, just like indie gamedevs or the average Microsoft employee. They're all in box 2.

Lots of people are doing nontrivial stuff all the time, but most of it isn't big enough for other people to write blog posts and huge HN comment threads about, yet also not small enough to make a new HN submission every few days.

You should check out https://lobster.rs! It's like HN if it were dedicated to the middle of that content distribution you describe. Nothing too simple, but nothing too abstract either.

that link's broken, I think you meant https://lobste.rs/

There’s something pleasant about software that feels light and simple and does one thing well. Most software tends to grow to become perhaps more useful, but also complex and inelegant.

Not sure if that explains your observation or not, but at least it’s what attracts me to engage with a submission like this.

Same reason why there are so few mid-budget movies in Hollywood, and why medium size business either become giants or die.

Cheap stuff is easy to churn out -> low chance of success, x many shots

Expensive stuff costs a lot to be the best, and gets big payoff.

Middle-tier stuff costs too much for its benefits.

I've noticed this too. It's mentioned in other comments below, but I definitely think it's easier to see the human behind something if it looks like a hobby project. I'm not sure what camp my games fall into, but I've had limited traction on HN, even though I'm just a lone human trying to hack it at full-time indie game dev.

Ironically I just launched a new word game today so we'll see if it makes the front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184884

I've got a project like that (few years working on it, it's very unique, there's a demo), I talk about it in the comments from time to time but haven't done a dedicated writeup or anything.

I don't think I've ever seen a youtube video get to the front page of HN, and that seems the easiest way for me to broadly communicate all that I've put into it. Some part of me thinks a medium post about it or whatever just wouldn't make sense. I want to present what you're hungry for, haha.

You might have a better shot if you write a blog post that includes video elements.

In the middle is the vast majority of HN content: serious businesses.

Interesting observation about the split of subjects

One similarity is: both don't take too long to create. The AI it self might, but the thought about it don't

> both don't take too long to create

That's what I've been noticing, and why I gravitate toward those comments about AI which are like, "have you thought about using an if/then for this thing?"

After spending a year on-and-off making a game I realized that I don't really have a compelling story to tell and my artist friend is too busy to help me with the visual side.

Also, the real underlying reason why I started was the technical itch I wanted to scratch - it's been done so many times by so many people that I don't think it would be particularly interesting at this point.

I suppose there are more people like me.

FWIW: So I started some hobbyist game dev using Unity and realised that the full process of making a game has dependencies on a mass of lower-level skills including lighting virtual environments. As a hobbyist photographer I could see some useful analogies from lighting studios and other scenes

So I pivoted, and eventually made money, not from selling a game, but from developing tutorials about digital lighting. I was also able to contribute to a project at work that was making a product based on a commercial games engine, not by actually coding it, but by helping to better estimate the costs of the asset generation required.

Coding Unity object scripts in C# also got me back into programming, and I went on to successfully build a self-hosting lisp interpreter following the Make a Lisp guidelines [0].

[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md

Could you link me to your tutorial? I'd like to improve the lighting in my game and I'm quite excited to have seen your comment!

Thanks for being so interested! However the tutorial is actually specific to the Daz Studio system from Daz 3D, and the Iray render engine, and isn't free [0]. I'm in the process of doing a similar thing using more open source tools and released through a more accessible channel but realistically that will takes ages.

[0] https://www.daz3d.com/killer-lighting--lighting-for-photorea...

If ya poop, ya have time for dadagrams!

exactly! two types of people on HN: those who have five or ten minutes to spare (on the bog) and those who comment "professionally" to bolster some sense of compulsion

those who comment "professionally" to bolster some sense of compulsion

I wonder what would happen to the quality of discourse on HN if there wasn't a scorecard at the top of each screen.

The "gamification" of everything is so 2010.

True, I wonder how much internet points improve quality of conversation. Given some people keep arguing even when they're being downvoted into oblivion, there must be something deeper, like a need for engagement.

It is a well known fact that everyone who gets down voted is always wrong

And the person getting downvoted is never an expert talking to amateurs, and the downvoters are always correct that there is zero nuance to the subject.