The Only Moat Left Is Money

Source: Hacker News

Overview

Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something—a tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks.

This isn’t new. What is new is the scale: an AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3 am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast.

The value of human thinking is going down. The corollary—rarely mentioned—is that the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at.

Creation used to be the scarce thing, the filter. Now attention is. Most of us are on the wrong side of that trade.

Josh Pigford on the New Reality

“as someone who’s been building for the internet for 25+ years, this is the first time that i’ve ever felt like it’s very difficult to make money building new things. existing products w/ momentum are getting a nice boost. but new? substantial uphill battle.”
— Josh Pigford (@Shpigford) – February 18 2026

When someone suggested the answer was marketing:

“jUsT dO mOrE mArKeTiNg!!!!! attention spans are shorter than ever and the exponential flood of new products means there’s exponential demand for that already short attention span. likely solvable, but just a VERY different playbook from the past two decades.”
— Josh Pigford (@Shpigford) – February 18 2026

“Just do more marketing” assumes there’s an open channel. Every channel we know of has gotten quietly worse: search, social, newsletters, communities. There’s a thread on Hacker News right now called “Is Show HN dead? No, but it’s drowning” — Show HN, the one place the internet was supposed to notice if you built something real.

Community Reactions

• “One of the great benefits of AI tools is they allow anyone to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks is they allow anyone to build stuff.”
• “The vibecoder hasn’t done the interesting thing, they’ve pulled other people’s interesting things.”

Personal Experiment

I launched something last week. Fourteen people signed up—no ads, just a couple of posts. Fourteen real people who didn’t have to. That number is tiny, but it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn’t look at that math for very long.

The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both.

When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.

Reach is also gravitational. Past some threshold it accumulates without you—posts find people, people find posts, the thing feeds itself. Below the threshold, identical effort produces nothing. Same quality, same idea, same work. Zero. Not because it was bad, but because you showed up on the wrong side of the line.

I don’t know if we’ve already crossed a singularity—a point past which new entrants without existing reach or capital to buy it are effectively locked out. I think there’s a real chance we have. The uncomfortable version: if you’re not already moving, you might never take off.

• The cost of acting like this is true when it isn’t: you move fast and spend money you didn’t need to spend.
• The cost of acting like it isn’t true when it is: permanent.

The Project

Kith – a paid, invite‑only social network where every person is a verified human and there are no algorithms, no ads, no bots, and no AI. If that sounds like something you want to exist, join the waitlist.