The Only Moat Left Is Money

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 is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast.

The value of human thinking is going down. You probably knew this. The corollary is rarely mentioned: 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 has been building things on the internet for 25 years. This is the first time he's said it feels hard:

When someone suggested the answer was marketing:

He's right. "Just do more marketing" assumes there's a channel open. Every channel I 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.

One commenter:

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.

Another: "The vibecoder hasn't done the interesting thing, they've pulled other people's interesting things."

The effort is gone. Effort was the filter.

I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and 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. Because you showed up on the wrong side of the line.

I don't know if we've already crossed a singularity on this, 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.

PS: The thing I launched last week is called Kith — a paid, invite-only social network where every person is verified human and there's no algorithm, no ads, no bots, and no AI. If that sounds like something you want to exist, join the waitlist.