The Only Moat Left Is Money February 18, 2026
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:
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
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.
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