HN Explorer

Has HN Changed? I assume it's just me

39 points by travisgriggs ↗ HN
I've been reading HN for a while. I made my first comment May 31, 2018. And have gone through cycles of engagement during that time. But for the last few weeks, even months, I still scan the top articles daily, but something has changed for me. Historically, there's almost always been at least one thing in the top 30 I would be interested in. Sometimes many. But of late, none of it interests me near as much anymore.

My guess is that this is just pretty much burnout/age me changing.

But I was curious if maybe it was a wider spread effect that others are experiencing. Perhaps the downturn in the tech industry has just led to less of a "this is the place to be and things to know!" experience in general.

77 comments

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ftxbro
they went to discords or mastodons
rubicon33
It’s definitely been less interesting overt the last few years.

Tech in general is just a little underwhelming as an industry

copperx
Tech is pop culture. As such, one often gets tired of it. Do you imagine never getting tired of reading TMZ?
retrocryptid
Meh. All the kids are chasing the AI money, so there's a lot of AI idiocy crowding out the good stuff.

You kids get off my lawn.

Just keep in mind hacker news is hosted by ycombinator, which helps match Stanford and UCB CS grads with slightly older Stanford and UCB grads (with a smattering of MIT and UIUC grads) who will give them money in exchange for shares in relatively poorly managed organizations pumping highly speculative "products."

The objective isn't to make anything interesting, it's to make money so the Stanford and UCB grads can continue the cycle. That being said, some of these companies do interesting things by accident. And not all of them are hell-scape "sincerity begins at 90 hours per week" code-monkey zoos.

The "interesting" stuff seems to come out of open source projects (See Dick Gabriel's "Innovation Happens Elsewhere.") But sometimes you get overlap.

But the venue is (largely, but not exclusively) for kids whose interest in their startup extends 18 months to the moment they can sell whatever ISOs they collected and move on to the next cash vehicle before eventually "retiring" as a Facebook or Verizon VP and write think pieces about how <foo> is a game-changer and will change the way we think about media for decades to come. (Where <foo> is: cryptography, corba, J2EE, SOAP, AJAX, P2P, Bitcoin, Mobile, Python, VR, AR, OpenGL, Swift, Go, RISC-V, Rust, THE CLOUD, <bar>-sharing, ML, AI, LLMs, CNNs, TensorFlow, ChatGPT, etc. and <bar> is ride, home, spouse, etc.)

But no, I'm not bitter.

(Seriously though... fads come and go. HN is sort of like the Soap Opera Digest for Sili Valley's amnesiac creatives. Dig deep enough and I'm sure you'll find SOMETHING, even if it's a rant. And the half-life of memory in our community appears to be a couple of years. So just wait a bit and you'll get another wave of recent grads who just discovered LtU or the Jargon file and we'll get more interesting posts. But the kids are all right and eventually they figure out why us olds did the stupid stuff we used to do but will re-create some pretty interesting stuff after realizing the constraints we thought were unchangeable are just illusions.

Sturgeon's Law applies here, but there's definitely some good stuff if you dig. Also, it's possible your interests have gotten more specific and what you're seeing is things that are either very general or... as you mentioned... outside your interest list.)

zh3
There's definitely a trend (and to my eyes a lowering of quality) on this site over the past couple of years. That's easily attributed to the downturn (possibly allied to the increasing social influence of the site) - so I'd suggest it's the "90%" in Sturgeon's Law waxing and waning over time (albeit it seems more waxing than waning when viewed over longer timescales).

Never forget, a lot of people on here weren't even born when "Accidental Empires" came out.

chomp
I've been here for over a decade, it's more or less the same. Instead of AI, we had #nosql, and instead of Substack hot takes, we had Medium hot takes. The only thing that's really changed is the velocity of posts, and volume of comments. Also, there used to be significantly more tech articles than there are now.
retrocryptid
As Jonathan Swift didn't say: "Everything new is old again."
retrocryptid
I now wonder if I made a mistake moving away from CICS and 370 Assembly as the focus of my career.
jawerty
The younger to older Stanford matching service part got me laughing, good one. Lots of truth there.
retrocryptid
I do it for the lulz. I do it for my audience. Thank you for taking my comments in the spirit they were offered!
nomemory
This is the reason I've decided to upvote only personal blogs of people that are actually writing about something that's not the next big thing, it's not trendy, it's not a buzzword. The random the article is, the arcane the subject is, the better.
mindcrime
All the kids are chasing the AI money, so there's a lot of AI idiocy crowding out the good stuff.

I don't get this take at all. AI is hardly something specific to "the kids". Hell, AI has been the part of C.S. that I've been most interested in dating back to about 1992. And I'm creeping up on 50 real fast here. And I couldn't be more excited to see all the progress we've made in recent years, on the AI front.

Now granted, there is a little bit of a "pop" in interest right now specifically around LLM's and the GPT-x stuff, and probably more than a few silly startups being spun up that aren't really contributing anything new. So if that's the "AI idiocy" you're talking about, then OK, that part I can get. But underneath all of that, there's some legitimately fascinating research going on and some really cool stuff happening. IMO, of course.

retrocryptid
You're almost 50. Like I said, AI is something the kids are doing.

And yes, I'm mostly talking about the idiotic things when I say "AI idiocy." In this case, "idiocy" modifies "AI," it's not supposed to equate the two. In other words, I think there's idiocy of an AI flavor that's pushing out legit content (AI and otherwise) on HN.

_virtu
I think that hacker news has become too popular. It used to be a little niche on the internet that few people were aware of. Like indie hackers, the site has been infiltrated by business lizards and marketers along with more of the masses leading to a lower signal to noise ratio.
the_only_law
> Like indie hackers, the site has been infiltrated by business lizards and marketers along with more of the masses leading to a lower signal to noise ratio.

Infiltrated? Have you seen the company that owns it?

ESTheComposer
It's turned into an ironic site where everyone always wants to lambast the newest tech, whether it's crypto or AI or even still web technologies like React. The irony comes from the fact that Y-Combinator funds all of these sectors and the original intent of this site was to discuss interesting new tech...
rchaud
The common thread between all your examples is that they are not the latest technologies, just the latest variants promoted by large, monied interests, that have highly prescriptive visions for how said technology can be used.
ESTheComposer
You could say that about almost any advancement in any field. I think your definition of "latest technology" is severely limited if something has to be completely brand new like a horse vs a car
Syonyk
> ...where everyone always wants to lambast the newest tech...

Yeah. Because there are a lot of people who've lived through 3 or 4 decades now of the hype cycle and want to see "less tech" in everyone's lives, having seen the result of "all the tech we can imagine" in everyone's lives.

It's not been good unless you're at the upper end of the attention accumulation pyramid.

ESTheComposer
> It's not been good unless you're at the upper end of the attention accumulation pyramid.

Very subjective and ignores all the great strides these technologies have made. React has made it infinitely easier for everyone to build scalable websites and web apps so I don't think I agree with your upper end statement.

Syonyk
And what are most of those websites and web apps used for?

To try, very hard, to keep the user on the site as long as possible, to shove as many ads as possible in front of their face.

Consider the opportunity costs imposed on everyone else as a result of tech.

Also, if "everyone" in your social circle can build websites with React, you need to get outside your bubble more - because I work in tech, and I don't know a single person who could build a website in React. Myself included. I'm happy with a Jekyll rendering pipeline these days.

We've done some neat stuff. I won't argue. But I also think that the current state of (suitable handwave) "tech" is long past the point of diminishing returns for most people, and well into negative returns.

ESTheComposer
I mean if you don't know a single person who can build a website in React than I would say that's more indicative of your unwillingness to learn new technology. There are tons of React developers so not sure why you think I'm in a bubble.

Also you have a very pessimistic view of websites and web apps, which is fine, it's your prerogative, but that's just your opinion.

Syonyk
I think it more reflects a very, very different view of what the web should be.

I went out of the way to purge any actual Javascript requirements from my personal blog, because I want it usable without JS. About all you get is local search and some image shadowbox sort of scaling with it, otherwise it's not needed.

I reject the notion that everything should be a responsive web application, and I make my living in the deep weeds of the kernel and below, so... it's fine. We're in different stacks, and I expect your idea of working on 90 year old cars and tractors matches my view of having to try to build a "modern" website when all I want to do is publish some stuff.

It may very well be "just my opinion," but it's a more and more shared one lately. Consumer tech is human-toxic, through and through, anymore. Despite the promises it once had.

ESTheComposer
I think you will find your anti javascript view is not a very common one and you might in fact be the one in a bubble.
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withinboredom
I've noticed its a bit of an annual cycle for me. It seems in the summer and winter, the best articles get shared, or at least the most interesting for me. In the fall/spring it seems like it's whatever is the latest hype, whether that is AI, crypto, whatever.

My theory is that a lot of smart people tend to have large chunks of free time in the summer/winter, thus write a lot of interesting things. In the fall/spring, people are busy and thus only low-effort or trending articles make it here.

Jtsummers
It's always been cyclical. There have been many days, even weeks and months it seems, when I have seen little of interest (to me) on HN. Hide (option under posts) ones you aren't interested in, check out the second chance pool, post something you're interested in, or just go for a walk. In a month or two it'll shift to either a broader set of topics or maybe something of more interest to you again.
7ero
I'm feeling the same way, I'm thinking it has to do with the amount of people wanting to have a career in tech (including the non-technical folks, business-types and such), the ease of sharing information online, and the notoriety of ycombinator in the startup space.
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magic_hamster
It sounds like more of an internal process you're experiencing. Personally I noticed more meta content is surfacing but I still see a lot of interesting links on here. Also, if you're burnt out or if you've been in the tech space for a while, some things may not seem as exciting as they used to be.

I'd say take a break, and also try some alternative communities. There are some places with a focused discussion on tech, like Lobsters.

soared
Obligatory when these threads come up - if OPs post rings true to you it’s worth spending a few minutes looking inward and identifying if depression might be affecting you. It might not, but loss of interest in hobbies/etc is an early symptom that Ive personally experienced.

Also possible your interests have changed, and what’s on HN now doesn’t align!

jacquesm
By the time you arrived the first time it had already changed quite a bit from when I joined so this is more or less expected. The big inflection points to me were 2009 (before Dec 2008 when I joined I was just lurking) and 2016.
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agumonkey
I wonder if my memory is correct but I joined HN after a long time on c2 and lambda-the-ultimate.. HN had a similar deep/esoteric feel. Some startup content too. Today it seems a lot more like a normal tech portal. More technical than the average but a lot less surprising.
thih9
> By the time you arrived

Do we know when grandparent has arrived? The description (i.e.: “I've been reading HN for a while. I made my first comment May 31, 2018.”) only mentions when they added their first comment and not when they started reading hn.

cloudking
What's annoying are the haters that add useless comments bashing Google on any post that is Google related.
ergonaught
No idea, but I have almost entirely disengaged from the site recently, myself, despite many years of it being probably my #1 website destination. I assumed "it's just me" rather than anything to do with HN per se, but who knows?
rcfox
I think once you've watched an online community for long enough, you start to see the Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

samtho
The tragedy here is usually that you don’t recognize you’re in one until it’s long sense past and you find yourself nostalgically remembering how it was and wondering why it changed so drastically and for the worst.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Yes. I joined the site and I'm sure I was part of some else's Eternal September yet now I feel like the site is changing. My personal crackpot theory is that the site isn't helped by all of the manipulation, agitators, and other inauthentic users.

Example:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's also not a great time to be in the startup game, economically speaking.

bvttf
It's mostly the same in my experience.

Less Lisp now, which is too bad.

jmclnx
Same for me, seems it has not changed much. I have had an ID for like 7 to 8 years.
JoelMcCracken
The intersection of my interests and that of hn ebbs and flows. My account here is from 2009. I wouldn’t worry about it.
bin_bash
I've been here since launch (with different usernames), and I don't think it's meaningfully changed at all.

btw this is sort of mentioned in guidelines (see the last one)

aaronbrethorst
I've been around since September 2007 (heh), when—iirc—Michael Arrington mentioned it on TechCrunch.

HN has definitely changed over the past 15.5 years, but then again so have I. That's just an inevitability, though. My perspective on technology, the world, and my own life have changed quite a bit from the age of 25 to 40.

testfrequency
I’ve noticed over the last two years a significant decline in the quality of the comments and front page posts on HN.

I blame this partially on the larger tech sites referencing and linking back to HN, so a new…demographic..of online users are now here.

Some days HN is really good, and I’m enjoying the commentary and creators posting, other days I feel like I’m on Digg with reddit quality replies and attacks.

I’m still here, I check almost daily, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the quality has gone downhill

pc86
No, probably not.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524184 (July 2010)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703 (Nov 2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099 (May 2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513 (April 2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254 (August 2008)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657 (July 2008)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057 (Oct 2007)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60767 (Sept 2007)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852 (Aug 2007)

antegamisou
This would be relevant if the user base and site content were the same as the ones in the dates of the links you've cited, the most recent being thirteen years old!

However, it's another obsolete BS etiquette HN has came up with so its userbase feels intellectually superior to Redditors, even though they both have been found to converge as is evident from observations by others similar to the ones expressed at the OP.

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