Show HN: Show HN submissions have tripled since 2023 (opens in new tab)

(imgur.com)

18 pointsanythingworks2mo ago4 comments

I analyzed 10 years of Hacker News data (2016-2025) to track Show HN submission trends.

- Show HN posts went from ~900/month (2016-2019) to 3,315 in Dec 2025

- Share of all stories: 2.4% (2016) → 12.8% (Dec 2025)

- Notable spikes: COVID-19 (2020), AI boom (2023), and accelerating growth through 2024-2025

Data source: HackerBook (144k Show HN posts / 3.4M total stories)

4 comments

lunar_mycroft2mo ago

Interestingly, things like domain name registrations and new github repositories didn't have the an inflection point in recent years [0]. This means it's almost certainly that a greater portion of new projects are getting submitted as Show HN, not that there's more new projects overall.

[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

anythingworksOP2mo ago

Really suprising result that new public Github repositories haven't increased much. I wonder what actually caused the downtrend?

I'd be curious to see this article updated in a few months; post Opus 4.5 and other model updates we had towards the end of 2025.

rzmmm2mo ago

Has anyone analyzed what is the proportion of AI-related submissions over time in HN?

etyhhgfff2mo ago

Here is something like that https://beuke.org/hn-ai-coverage/

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