HN Explorer

It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

682 points by greendude29 ↗ HN
I know that "tech" is all about startups and business success, but I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here.

Of course HN is run by YC so there will always be the mod posts about startups and jobs, but it seems the community here sometimes tilts more towards business than technology.

Just a personal thought, would like to hear if others also have a similar perception.

294 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] thread
detaro
go to /new and upvote the stuff you want to see more of. Surprisingly few people seem to do so, and early voting has quite an effect.
krapp
Also under lists in the bottom bar, the second chance pool[0] and invited reposts list[1].

Also, obviously, it's better to post more of the kind of content you want to see, rather than complain about the content you don't like.

Also, remember that leaving a comment (even a thoughtful one) without also leaving an upvote acts as an implicit downvote and will eventually trigger the flamewar detector in a thread. It's entirely possible a lot of technical threads get sunk because they simply generate technical conversation but not enough kudos.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/invited

gus_massa
> Also, remember that leaving a comment (even a thoughtful one) without also leaving an upvote acts as an implicit downvote and will eventually trigger the flamewar detector in a thread.

This happens if the post has at least 20 or 40 comments (I don't remember the number now). Most post in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest die with no of very few comments and upvotes, so most of the times it's not bad to add a comment to an obscure post. Sometimes a post is not good enough for upvoting, but it looks promising and the author may have some interesting insight.

FridayoLeary
The first half-hour is crucial. The continued success of your post is generally defined by reaching (and staying on) the front page.
OJFord
Yeah, and not for any mysterious or secret reason either - new is sorted by time, and front by .. ok that's a bit mysterious and secret, but some function of points, comments, time, views, clicks, etc.

So, roughly speaking, you have until another full page's worth of new comes in to get enough engagement to rank in the front two or three pages.

FridayoLeary
Related, the upvoting has a snowball effect. I'm sorry to say but most people are too lazy to read a link that doesn't already have a few upvotes. Why is a post with 800+ points on the front page more worthy of your clicks then a brand new post? ( And yes, i'm slightly bitter my submissions aren't more popular)
mindcrime
Funny, I'd say there's less, no, a LOT less, startup / business oriented discussion here than in the past. To me, the big thing that has emerged over the past few years has been a lot more "stuff" that can loosely be described as "politics / culture / public policy / society" or whatever. And if I could wave a magic wand and change anything, I'd ban that stuff. Because I agree,

"I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here"

That said, there is still a lot of that stuff. But the proportion of various topics have definitely shifted over the years.

Thorentis
These types of articles are actually what kept me here. The unique blend of comp sci, and socio-political-economic-whatever discussions is fantastic.
jolux
I really think it makes the site worse. I’m already an avid Twitter user, I come to Hacker News for discussions and content that I couldn’t find anywhere else. The political discourse on here is just lower-quality and less interesting than on Twitter.
LordDragonfang
If you think the discourse here is lower quality than on twitter, I'd really like to know how you're curating your twitter feed.
jolux
Aggressively. I'm constantly following new people and unfollowing loads of other people. I try to keep a good mix of tech, music, and philosophy in with all the policy and politics. I also liberally mute and block. Only way to make it usable, but the result is far better than political discourse on Hacker News.
LordDragonfang
Any specific recommendations for consistently good/high signal-to-noise accounts for tech, philosophy, policy, and politics?
the_lonely_road
I second this. Twitter and Reddit are not places I’m interested in participating in any kind of political discussion but for whatever reason I’m inclined to participate here, frequently against my better judgement to just stay quiet. I’m coming here regardless because it’s how I keep my finger on the pulse of the industry and for better or worse use that to make most of my tech leadership decisions at work, so it’s nice to be able to do both in one place.

That said I probably spend too much time here because of it.

Ericson2314
Yes it is good. I truly believe there is no engineering in a vaccum — I don't mean morally, like it's "not right" to not consider the context, but rather not considering the context is simply incomplete engineering.
rachelbythebay
Yes please. People trying to discuss those topics on here makes me come back less. It’s probably the worst part of the site for me overall.
evandwight
Would you be interested in a wrapper around hacker news that lets you filter to only technical discussions?

(I'm already playing with wrapping it so that probably isn't hard to add)

andrewtbham
If I could filter all politics out of hacker news that would be great. the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots"

I have filtered a lot of politics on twitter by blocking prominent politicians and mute words.

evandwight
I added a flag for technical and then sort it by hot [1]. I just needed to train a classifier so there's less manual classification needed.

Maybe something like a naive bayes [0] will work? I'm not sure if it's the best dataset. I could make my own dataset by just looking at how many removed comments there are :P

I haven't implemented a classifier before so it may take me a few days. If you'd like to be notified when it's actually working send me an email at info@{the site name}

[0] - https://www.kaggle.com/kinguistics/classifying-news-headline...

[1] - https://efficientdemocracy.com/technical-and-hot

paulryanrogers
> the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots"

Does such a broad brush add to the discussion?

Disagreement can be healthy. I'd say the varied political and philosophical perspectives of HN and Slashdot contributed a lot to changing my worldview. (Hopefully for the better, though we're all still learning.)

pdimitar
I'm simply not at all interested in political topics here and don't care about the (potential) healthy disagreement. Those threads always derail and spiral to opinions and "us vs. them" mentality.

Never have I found a political comment section here that helped me emerge enlightened. I tried for years, eventually gave up and I'm objectively feeling better because of it.

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Traster
I actually think this is a problem hackers have in general. It's the Zuckerberg problem. You build something cool, you want to talk about all the tricks you did to scale to N billion users and all anyone can talk about is that genocide you caused. You just built the tech, right? It's all about the Tech. Except it's not about the tech when you're actually having an effect on people's lives, and we should be more willing to openly talk about that. Is it easier to pretend that stuff doesn't exist? Sure. But it does exist, and we do need to actually discuss what happens in the real world due to the technology we work on.
mindcrime
Except it's not about the tech when you're actually having an effect on people's lives, and we should be more willing to openly talk about that. Is it easier to pretend that stuff doesn't exist? Sure. But it does exist, and we do need to actually discuss what happens in the real world due to the technology we work on.

I agree with you, and I'm not asking anybody to pretend that anything doesn't exist. It's just that I would prefer that the "politics / culture / social / whatever" conversations happen somewhere else. But that's just me. I understand that not everyone will agree.

But still, for me, I'd much rather see "How I built a startup on Guile" than yet another story about how (Facebook|Instagram|TikTok|Twitter|Usenet|Gopher|UUCP|BBS's|whatever) are bad for our mental health. shrug

Even better, I'd like to see "How I wrote my own Guile interpreter in COBOL, added Java and Rebol interop, ported it to the Raspberry Pi, and interfaced it with my handbuilt analog computer, and then built a startup out of it."

quicklime
Zuck and his employees at Facebook need to talk about the social impacts of their tech, for sure. But why does that topic need to be discussed on HN? We (both broader society, as well as the subset of it that makes up the "tech community") have other forums for that.
obeid
I too, would like an echo chamber, please.
quicklime
There's a big difference between restricting topics, and restricting viewpoints. The latter creates echo chambers, the former doesn't.
idrios
Facebook created React to get notifications to show up in real time so you no longer needed to refresh the page. There's a place for discussion on the impact of realtime notifications on mental health, and a place for discussion on the use cases of React. You absolutely can separate conversations about technologies from their impact
lsiebert
Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.

There has always been a strong anti-authoritarian ethos to hacker culture, one where personal privacy and bodily autonomy and the right to encryption were intrinsically at odds with corporate and government attempts to control and surveil, and I hope that doesn't go away.

derefr
> Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.

Well, yes, but usually from an aesthetic perspective, rather than a moralistic one. E.g. bad laws and cronyism being seen as ugly hacks and misfeatures on what could be a beautiful and elegant system of law; the cleverness of computer intrusion being more important than its consequences; the Internet (Tor, cryptocurrency, whatever) "routing around damage" — i.e. systems of law that seek to constrain behavior — and this being seen as "natural and inevitable" in the same way one might prescribe no moral agency to carnivorous animals killing their prey; etc.

Communities that start out full of hacker-aesthetes, seem to invariably shift to being full of engineer-moralists. HN wasn't purely a hacker-aesthete community when it started — it was tempered with a good number of other types of people — but they're certainly even more rare here now.

lsiebert
I mean there is and has been wide diversity in thought within the hacker community, so there's certainly people who view things only through asthetics.

But I don't think that erases the presence of explicitly moral/ethical thoughts within the hacker community. The philosophical and political manifest in the hacker community in many forms: anarchic, communal, utopian, anti authority, anti centralization, pro equality and merit, etc.

For example: From The Hacker Manifesto

"... You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals...."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Manifesto

also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

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neither_color
It mostly has gone away. There is a certain type of corporation that we just have to trust now, since seemingly noone is qualified to judge the brilliant people who work there or the merits of their product. Some jurisdictions even require you to prove you use this product as a condition of employment or entry into business establishments.
lifthrasiir
The HN guideline says "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" can be on-topic. In my opinion this summary is pretty much correct and also useless, because hackers seem to be curious about almost everything. I am interested in politics after all. But I don't think HN is or can be a good venue for political discourses. Of course some links can be very political and yet marginally technological due to the overreaching influence of technology over society, but there are annoyingly political links that I used to flag immediately nowadays.

I'm also concerned that the front page seems to prefer topics that only make sense in USA and especially California. For example I found following links posted today to be especially domestic:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806363 The Off-Grid Laws of Every State in America

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809517 Tesla’s Texas Move Is Latest Sign of California Losing Tech Grip

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812137 America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

Yeah, you can still argue that they somehow gratifify someone's intellectual curiosity. For me they don't.

shusaku
There are so few sites out there where you can have a real discussion about “ anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”. I recall posting on a space subreddit an article that talked about mining asteroids for water, and it was abundantly obvious that zero of the responders read past the title (which only mentioned mining asteroids, not the water part). Hacker News is far from perfect, but here at least you have some real hope that others will read the posted article and drive a discussion based on the specific content. I would hate for this site to be too tech focused… I mean what other site would I go to if I read, for example, a great article on theory of the mind, an obscure language, etc.
1_player
The intellectual curiosity rule was fine when most people in here were hackers.

Now hacker news has become the exception.

1_player
Lately 60% of HN's front page is indistinguishable from Ars Technica. Just common denominator techy or popsci news.

I'd rather see a post about yet another JS framework honestly.

yellow_lead
I think people want to browse HN and not have to put much mental effort in, so more "news" articles are upvoted, commented on, etc.
krapp
Most people here don't read the articles, so there isn't much mental effort being put in either way.
Kaibeezy
I think people do read the articles.

For a while, I was adding a reply to most of my posts where I pulled in a key bit of the article and maybe made a brief comment. I thought this would be a good way to encourage discussion, but I was advised it could also steer the discussion, so probably better to keep it to a minimum.

This I did, and while fewer posts gain critical mass without that condensation nucleus, it’s clear my best posts usually do end up going somewhere really interesting, and that the articles are definitely being read.

the_lonely_road
I’m not interested in rust, or elixer, or Python or…the list keeps going and is much longer than the list of tech I am interested in. This means I’m unlikely to even grep the title of articles about some keyword specific to them let alone engage with them. I would assume a large number of if not a majority of tech readers are in the same boat. Better believe I’m clicking on any Ruby related articles and probably engaging further as well. Most people here are probably skipping over those same articles I’m engaging with.

An article about Iran or Google is probably going to pull a big audience simply because it’s relevant to a wide audience of the readers here.

GaryTang
I’d say the opposite is true. Additionally, it is much MUCH easier to find tech communities to have a discussion as compared to business-oriented communities.
randycupertino
I post articles and deep-reads that I personally find interesting from all ranges of topics. I like hackernews because of the discussions and the comments.

Personally, I think the diversity of threads here is an asset. There was a front-page thread here on Ham Radio yesterday which I know nothing about but reading through the comments was fascinating!

Agree that sorting by /new and upvoting the content you like is hugely helpful.

MerelyMortal
Before my time, but HN was originally called "Startup News" which is more-or-less business.
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newbamboo
Programmers aren’t interested in the same programming related topics because everyone is too specialized now. The topics I’d be interested in would be boring to someone else, etc. aside from stuff about elixir which we all geek out on. So general tech topics like dunking on Facebook/apple/surveillance tech and complaining about leetcode job interview headaches get much traction.
prawn
This is probably the main explanation, I agree. There are countless programming languages and storage methods and so on, 99% of which aren't really of interest to me. I use one long-out-of-fashion programming language only ever mentioned as a punchline, and one non-trendy database. Broader topics usually are of interest to me, and tech-adjacent or societal things relevant worldwide like approaches to housing, homelessness, how we use the environment, developments in growing/selling food (robot restaurants).
dalmo3
As a relatively new user, at first I was curious about every topic but over time I learned to avoid "I built an AI GPU Compiler in Rust" threads because the whole discussion goes way over my head.
kulshan
I can't say I agree...look at the top 60 links currently. How many would you say are "business news"?
jaytaylor
Try lobste.rs ( https://lobste.rs ) if you want "real" hacker news.

They punish non-technical submissions.

fersarr
Looks cool! hmm would you invite me? :)
hackpert
Ooh good recommendation, lobste.rs is cool. I've been looking for someone with a potential invite for a while too if anyone here is offering :).
wizeman
I love lobste.rs too, an invite would also be appreciated!
andrekandre
yea definitely would love an invite there too ^^
corobo
They also appear to have no comments (maybe it's a bad day for it, sunday?)

I'm here probably 20% for the link, 80% for the discussion

huwnang
I never realized I wasn’t the only oddball who had so little connection with other computer people that they didn’t know anyone to let them into lobste.rs.
darthvoldemort
HN is HN. It ebbs and flows like the tide. I love HN for what it is, a news feed of interesting articles, with a bias towards technology but not always. I've been introduced to so many things because of the wide range of articles that are fascinating to like-minded people.

> I'd like to see conversations about software, hardware, computer science, and hacker culture resurge and dominate here.

Feel free to upvote the articles that you enjoy. But forcing HN to only be about the above would probably lead to its demise.

ksec
This is strange, are we even reading the same front page? ( I am pretty sure HN dont have personalised front page )

I just ran through the first 100 Front page times and there are barely any business related news.

I also dont see how the community here sometimes tilts more towards business than technology. Other than some rare news on another Unicorn, Public Listing, earning from FAANG. There has rarely been any business news on HN at all.

There are some economics news ( if you count them as business news ), but are again in the minorities.

YC backed start up Jobs are only shown may be once per day. They are more like ads on HN. Who is hiring is also only a monthly posting.

I am actually in flavour of more business news, but I also think the current balance seems to be fine.

hobofan
You are right, as of the moment of writing this, there is next to no "business news" on the FP right now.

Anecdotally, I would claim that there is a lot more non-tech content during the week, and mostly tech content on the weekends (see for yourself via the "past" link at the top).

ksec
I think it is fair to say, non-tech / business / economics / stocks ( and as well as politics ) etc tends to get more during the week because that is how the news and PR cycle works. i.e Business aren't going to publish their quarterly results during weekends, economics forecast etc get there by mid week ( Monday is never a good to start PR ).

So may be if you only ever go on HN during weekdays, the amount of business entries could be a little higher, but generally speaking I still believe HN aren't anywhere business focus at all. ( If it was I wouldn't have to rant about Supply Chain and Operation management every time the topic comes up )

smitty1e
What intrigues me is that the "Hackers", who care about state, programs, and process, haven't turned attention to the State, and set about un-jacking its programs and streamlining its process.

Why haven't we got a robust git server with anonymous read-only access for everyone who pays taxes that holds all (unclassified) legislation/regulation affecting society?

Commits would be possible for elected officials/appointees only.

Similarly transparent treatment for the tax code.

Come on, Hackers: let's beat the entropy out of (or at least minimize it) in the res publica.

int_19h
If the elected officials & appointees actually cared for something like this, it would have existed already.

Ultimately, the problem is that the "res publica" is not actually for the public. The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic.

smitty1e
Indeed, such an improvement would have to be insisted upon by the demos.

But the res publica has NEVER been a democracy at any point.

What we have is a gnarly attempt to scale from the individual to the group, the singular to the plural, the integer to the list(integer).

Hence my comment: technically savvier people like those who visit this site badly need to give this res publica an enema.

int_19h
Engineers of all people should know that scaling is best achieved by distributed systems.
smitty1e
If only there were 50 smaller units of analysis beside the District of Columbia to which to distribute political power!

Admittedly, this many years on, it's hard to introduce fresh concepts. The only way for such smaller units of analysis to achieve any gravitas would be to acquire the notoriety of the States. . .

int_19h
US states are too large themselves. For this to work, it needs to start literally at the very bottom - a local assembly on the block / neighborhood. From there, it can be scaled up indefinitely in a multi-layer federation.
krapp
>The whole premise that a single person can meaningfully "represent" millions is so laughable, I don't know why we keep pretending it's actually democratic.

What does "meaningfully" mean, in this context?

int_19h
It means that votes taken by the representative actually advance the specific interests of their constituents.

The problem is that, for this to be the case, constituents must have a working communication channel. But when you have a single representative ostensibly speaking for millions (or even tens of thousands) of people, any such channel is quickly overwhelmed, and becomes mostly a token thing.

Council democracy tries to solve it by ensuring that, at every level, each delegate speaks for a relatively small group of people - small enough that it can regularly assemble to keep the delegate under control at all times.

tdeck
Had the same thought when Rent the Runway's IPO was on the front page. They're not even a tech company.
randycupertino
I'd argue they're a tech company as much as Uber, WeWork, or Airbnb. Rent the runway uses a website and programming to monitor their logistics, inventory, implement designer looks each season and AI to learn user's preferences and suggest new looks to recommend to them for certain events. Their "stylists" are really just machine learning suggestions.

Would you disqualify Uber as a tech co, saying they're just a taxi co? Kinda same umbrella, imo.

raxi
If only business news. A few months ago HN was flooded with articles about Navalny. There is quite a lot of this kind of political spam, from different countries.
oblib
There's a lot of stuff here about software that doesn't make the front page. I tend to scan the front page first and then go look at what's in the "new" section. There's a lot of good stuff there that doesn't generate a lot of comments that I follow the links provided.

I'll come back and leave a comment on some of those. But by the time I do they may be a page or two deeper and not much makes the front page if they haven't already by that point. A later post on the same subject might make the front page though. I've seen that happen a lot here.

That said, there's still a lot here about "software, hardware, computer science". As far as "hacker culture" goes I'm not really sure what that is.

mattowen_uk
I do this too. If there was a simple enhancement I'd like to see to HN, extending how far back you can go on /new, /ask and /show would be it.

/show is currently capping out at only 41 entries, and /ask is 61. Looking at them both it seems the cut off is -48 hours. Extending this to 72 hours would be trivial and prevent older posts ageing off too quick - not everyone looks at those pages every day.

I'm hoping dang has this on his long list of to-do items!

amelius
Yes. Posts like "How to make $1 million with embarrassingly little work" are always going to make it to the HN frontpage.

Which makes me wonder. Are we here to discuss technology? Or are we here to daydream how we get rich while sleeping?

Also the "hackers" on HN are increasingly buying systems that are built to resist hacking and that have a target audience that can be described as "mom, dad and grandparents". Something feels not right.

0des
This is a website run by a venture capitalist org, ycombinator.
amelius
Yes, and they called it "hacker news".
0des
Believe it or not, at the time, the term had a different connotation
throw_m239339
I always thought is was about "growth hacking"? No?
desas
Nope. I'm not sure that growth hacking was even a term then.

It refers to hacking as in messing about with technology to do exciting, fun, unexpected or novel things

birtoise
The other day I saw a post here asking people about how much they had saved and what their age was. A completely pointless dick-measuring thing, that I thought I wouldn’t find even in the likes of Reddit.

I follow HN on and off, usually just lurking, since 2017. But lately I’ve noticed a surprising amount of people humble bragging about their crypto wallets, their no-work-million-dollars startup, and how good their lives are since they left Facebook.

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dang
HN has always had those sorts of articles, though you're caricaturing it a bit. More like "how I made $X in $Y months with my $(SaaS|eBook)".
tomc1985
There is an alternate defintion of hacker, that of the "startup hacker" or "growth hacker," that this site seems to follow more closely.

Disappointing, for sure.

birtoise
Yeah. It is less of a “roots” definition of hacker and more of a “how can I hack the system to get rich with technology”.
drfxyjhdyfrhgc
>To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not. [0]

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

cushychicken
You might enjoy lobste.rs more for straight tech content.
blondin
you don't happen to have a spare invite? it still works on invite right?
cushychicken
Anyone can view. Need an invite to post. I just lurk.
dougmwne
I think it may be time for a userbase fork. All the politics, policy and economic, and general business news to one side, all the hardware, software, science, startup, and tech business news to the other.
geon
So you want subhackernewses? Like /h/business ?
30minAdayHN
i actually like this idea, but would be hard to execute as comments might intermix them
ItsMonkk
No, don't group by content - group by people. Let the people decide which group they want to discuss things with.

Going from subreddit to subreddit where each one has its own community only breeds anonymous behaviour - toxicity. What you ultimately want to do is find the ~1k people that want to discuss the things that you want to discuss.

djur
I don't want to read about startups and I do want to read technology-related political news (I have other sources for non-technology political news). I'd rather skim past the things I'm not interested in on a single site than two.
z3phyr
IMO Startup and Tech Business come in the first category.
jiggawatts
Something I noticed about Slashdot was that it started out talking about the latest processors, software, and Linux kernel patches. Then the conversation ever-so-slowly started drifting towards CEOs, the sharemarket, politics, and the like.

It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers!

Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.

Justsignedup
I genuinely wonder if HN has been stagnant with the same people visiting it as 5 years ago. And thus your statement is accurate.
datameta
Surely with the influx of people early in the pandemic this isn't the case?
1_player
Why would the pandemic send more users to HN?
asdff
at home unsupervised browsing during working hours versus working in a cubicle, or god forbid, an open concept office, where bossman patrols the hallways like a prison guard.
datameta
I think there was a large migration of users onto all sorts of forums and social networks everywhere.
chrispeel
> Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.

As I age I am less interested in business topics, and more interested in technological advancements

pier25
I don't think it's a matter of becoming bored, but about being able to better discern the truth.

Eg: Most new things will be completely irrelevant in a couple of years.

H8crilA
Most tech, even the overhyped stuff, seriously outlives the news cycle. Type into trends.google.com something that was popular a few months ago, you'll see what I mean.

For example, remember Cathie Wood? She's already forgotten. The "Facebook whistleblower" will be forgotten in about a month.

lottin
Good point. A few years ago, the big thing was AI. Everybody was talking about how AI would put half of the population out of jobs. Nowadays it's all about cryptocurrencies, which are being hyped as nothing short of a revolution. It's always the same nonsense with a different name.
AnimalMuppet
Older people learn that, even if you have zero interest in politics, politics will still be done to you. And older people learn that they often don't like how that works out, and therefore conclude that they'd better start paying at least some attention to politics, whether they want to or not.
dotancohen 

  > Older people learn that, even if you have zero
  > interest in politics, politics will still be done to you.
This was the big take away from the first few chapters of Mein Kampf. The author implores the common man to become involved in, or at least aware of, the politics in his country because if he does not then the politicians will abuse him.
0134340
And ironically the author became the abusive politician.
dotancohen
I wouldn't say that. He pulled his country out of the very abusive Versaille treaty, had he stopped there he would today be regarded a hero by all sides. I'll leave it at that!
jacquesm
He didn't stop there.
dotancohen
Right, that is why I had to word my comment very carefully.
na85
You wouldn't say Hitler was an abusive politician?
dotancohen
Abusive, yes. Abusive politician, not in the context of what he started with.
na85
Defending Hitler is a weird flex but ok
bena
I don't think it's a function of age, but of size. As Slashdot got larger, it attracted more people who didn't or couldn't talk about those things.
beebeepka
Larger? I feel like Slashdot has shrunk tremendously over the last 10 years and I believe the shift to politics is the main reason.

I have screenshot that I took a couple of years ago where the entire "Most discussed" section had the word "trump" in it. Every single one. That was the tipping point for me.

Maybe the site is larger now than it was a decade ago but it sure doesn't feel like it.

usrusr
Usually when people talk about the rise and fall of Slashdot they are not referring to anything that happened on that domain in 2011 or later. Slashdot was great while it broadened in scope, but the wide scope made it vulnerable to both even more open competition (e.g. reddit, where absolutely every niche can have its niche) end more specific specializations (e.g. kuro5hin, for a few years), leaving the site with a broadness it could not really fill anymore.
dotancohen
I think that the old adage is very apt:

The commoners talk about people. The learned talk about things. The wise talk about ideas.

hnfong
I was a regular reader of Slashdot in the early 2000s. There were loads of discussions about politics, open source politics, flamewars, Microsoft EVIL, etc... Maybe not as much business and stock, perhaps because tech wasn't worth that much money yet, but it wasn't like all oooooh shiny tech news. IIRC 911 was one of the top commented posts, and US elections were probably up there as well.

These days Microsoft kinda mellowed out (at least with regards to its attitude to open source and the non-MS dev community), and new tech giants came into the fray, but at least to me, the mix of news topics don't really seem that much different.

[dead] superflit2
Slashdot got bought by a (((company))) linked to porn.

The reason these companies buy news/comment sites as slashdot is to command and manage the narratives.

Something bad about my companies? Downvote 10x. shadowban.

Lets make that product feature in popular..

Thus the sites dwindle and loose the reputation.

There would not be a site with news or popular that can have free discussion or "fairness". That would be too dangerous for a lower/middle class to start realizing they are being milked and will not have any social security.

PS. I use the ((())) as a hack on elisp to cancel threads. The more I use ((())) with a pronoun inside more chances the thread will be cancelled. I think PG loved lisp too much..

0_____0
Uhhhh just FYI the triple parenthesis means something specific on fora these days.

Brief rundown: It was initially used by neo-nazis to tag Jews (names highlighted by triple parenthesis). Now it occasionally sees use by Jewish people as well, who might put their own name in triple parenthesis as a middle finger to the neo-nazis.

huwnang
I hadn't heard about that. Is it widely recognized? I just remember that once upon a time I would see single parentheses used as hugs.
0_____0
depends on what part of the internet you inhabit, apparently.

it was definitely notorious on twitter for a while, but i think it's being forgotten.

rnjesus
sorry, non-native english speaker asking: what’s “a hack on elisp to cancel threads” mean here?
wintermutestwin
Seems like a trivial solution to include a mechanism for categorization. Good ole Slashdot has had this forever...
mberning
It is a stark contrast to 5 years ago.