Everyone's Packing Up (widdershins.verja.net)

84 pointsby speckx2 hours ago61 comments

ramon156 an hour ago

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

soundworlds an hour ago

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?

esikich 36 minutes ago

Probably not. They made "smart nerd" their whole personality and that is now being challenged, hurts the ego.

altmanaltman 28 minutes ago

> 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

soundworlds 18 minutes ago

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...

laxd 22 minutes ago

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.

hollowturtle 42 minutes ago

> 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?

mjr00 40 minutes ago

> 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!

BatFastard 28 minutes ago

I agree dream bigger!

If it gets done too fast with LLM you need to think bigger.

socializer 13 minutes ago

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.

eggbrain an hour ago

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.

xanderlewis an hour ago

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.

jibalt 38 minutes ago

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.

xanderlewis 27 minutes ago

I’m just providing another data point; no need to get your knickers in a twist.

sodapopcan 35 minutes ago

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.

freetonik 29 minutes ago

YouTube sure is doing its part to make YouTube less and less appealing.

sodapopcan 27 minutes ago

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.

xanderlewis 25 minutes ago

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.

sodapopcan 24 minutes ago

Ya, that's the problem... I've learned so much from it... I'm torn.

nickelpro an hour ago

[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.

sodapopcan 34 minutes ago

I don't have a citation, but as hyperbole goes, it's a growing trend no matter how slow or small.

jibalt 40 minutes ago

This sort of post is ridiculous ... the vast majority of people are not "packing up", and people are constantly arriving.

bunderbunder an hour ago

Lately I’ve found myself thinking about BBSes for the first time in ages.

Online used to feel like an actual place.

nickradford an hour ago

I stopped using Reddit after Apollo got blocked, well, I had it side-loaded for a while too with AltStore, but that stopped working

redanddead 40 minutes ago

Reddit went to absolute shit

Enshittification takes so much from us

pupppet 30 minutes ago

Yahoo never should have given up their human-curated index, we need it now more than ever.

blfr an hour ago

Is this a real trend or like that time everyone abandoned Twitter for Mastodon?

VCFundedGenYer an hour ago

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.

murderfs an hour ago

This doesn't look like a particularly thriving platform: https://mastodon-analytics.com/#:~:text=Mastodon%20Active%20...

nvme0n1p1 an hour ago

I hope one day someone calls one of my projects a failure because I only have a few hundred thousand daily users.

serf an hour ago

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.

ceejayoz an hour ago

> 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.

nvme0n1p1 39 minutes ago

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?

ryukafalz an hour ago

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.

jibalt 33 minutes ago

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.

kg an hour ago

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.

ToucanLoucan an hour ago

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.

neitherboosh 41 minutes ago

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 :/

jibalt 36 minutes ago

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.

ThePinion 28 minutes ago

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?

UncleOxidant 30 minutes ago

Probably more like "A lot of people want to pack up"

sentinel1909 an hour ago

This is why I’m building all my own stuff.

tverbeure 41 minutes ago

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.

TutleCpt an hour ago

Getting really tired of proving I'm human every time I visit a website. It's about 90% of the time now.

switchbak an hour ago

Soon you'll have to prove you're an adult the same way to click through for cookies. Can't wait.

doctorshady an hour ago

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.

userbinator 25 minutes ago

Hopefully AI can provide you a usable avatar.

sodapopcan 31 minutes ago

Age verification is a hard line for me, and may be what helps kick my YouTube addiction.

esseph 35 minutes ago

The problem for many sites and apps is that it's basically impossible to tell one from another now.

esseph 29 minutes ago

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.

jimbob45 37 minutes ago

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.

dgellow an hour ago

> A few years ago that would have sounded like giving up

I’m confused by that sentence. Giving up on what exactly?

jaggederest an hour ago

This reads as slop to me. Added contrast containing no semantic content.

Same with:

> it changed under them

warkdarrior an hour ago

Leaving a large audience platform was/is like giving up on having a large audience for your stuff.

jolmg an hour ago

Personal sites were always an option and yet they chose the big platform. I interpret "giving up" in that sense, giving up your preference.

shakamd 42 minutes ago

The enshittification continues until there's nothing left.

jmclnx an hour ago

I part of the reason is Capthas, something is needed but Capthas are a pain to use.

OutOfHere an hour ago

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.

kator an hour ago

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/

OutOfHere an hour ago

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. 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.

sbysb an hour ago

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.