True story, yesterday I tried to get some feedback from an industry relevant subreddit for a real estate quick check calculation tool (automatically extracts listing data into calculation and enables sharing investment ideas). The pure mention of AI brought up a whole crowd of fed up bullies that talked it down as vibecoding trash - which it really isn't. All those places are flooded.
People, not bullies. I can sympathize with you because I've struggled with the same, but we can't blame those people. They're now being asked every two days to give feedback on yet another tool. That used to be once every 6 months. And the overwhelming majority of those new "tools" is abandoned within a month. And there is indeed a huge amount of vibecoded slop. I've put more time and thought into our product than the last 20 such tools that got posted into our industry-relevant subreddit combined, but I can't expect the mods and users to put their time into assessing that.
I think it’s strange to dislike vibe coded things. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example. The problem is mostly the intention. I think a lot of vibe coded stuff isn’t solving a problem someone has its someone trying to seek profit. It’s no different from when smartphones first came out and people wanted to make a for everything when most of them didn’t solve any problems. The difference is nobody is wowed anymore by anything so your app that turns your phone into a beer kind of thing doesn’t exist in the vibe coded world.
> I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example.
Maybe because you're not an actibe member of one of those fields whose subreddits now gets these vibecoded tools every other day. Because for those, I can tell you that the overwhelming majority isn't cool. Even when they are trying to solve a problem and aren't (yet) seeking a profit. They have very little time, energy and thought put into them. They're made by people who are passers-by, who aren't personally invested and often haven't experienced the problem first-hand; it's just a problem they heard about, or assumed would exist. And that leads to things that are a waste of time. Often they have blatantly obvious problems that show they didn't even QA it for an hour.
While this is directionally correct it does come down to a tonality, that I think wasn't justified in that case. But hey, it's the Internet and I'm not naive either.
I'm saying that the tonality is justified due to all of the other slop. You and me are simply the unavoidable casualties.
I'm saying this while in a field that's even more anti-AI/tools than yours, FWIW. By virtue of anything that mentions AI - and much of the tools that don't even mention it but are suspected - getting auto-removed by automod on the subreddit. There's only one subreddit in our field, everyone's on it, and it blanket bans anything with AI, despite the best tools out there incoporating it.
It's not even something like art, design, coding and so on where people are scared of job loss or even hobby loss, it's nothing like that at all for the community. I do suspect the mods' friends might feel threatened, as they _do_ make a living off of the community, but in our case I don't even think that's their primary reason to blanket ban it.
While that's true, my tool (as part of the flood) didn't originate from the same spring, it's just something I happen to be building that same way, I did before the LLM wave. It's not vibecoded SaaS fast food.
I checked community guidelines before and think regarding Reddit, this is where it should be resolve in my option.
Unfortunately the source doesn't matter when there so much. It is really hard to differentiate things when you are inundated. Did you try a Show HN here? It requires more luck than ever because of the same problem, but worth a try. I'll take an honest look if you do it (though hard to say if I am the target market).
Had basically the same thing happen. Posted in a side project sub, spam filter nuked it because new account. And in other subs now, anything that mentions AI gets hit with "vibecoded slop" automatically. Doesn't matter if you spent months on it.
What actually moved the needle was talking about data, not the product. I posted about my tool — crickets. Then I wrote about stuff I discovered while building it and people started engaging. Exact same product behind both posts, just "here's what I found" instead of "here's what I built." Night and day difference.
