HN has lost the joy for me
There was a time I would come to HN to get some respite from the depressing state of reality. Ukraine war or climate crisis would drive me to despair, and I'd try to get a little endorphin rush by dodging those same topics here and reading about neat things people build or cool new technologies or products.
The light has gone out lately. I can't blame AI for all of it. there are a lot of AI stories, sure - but something else has changed. Even the show hn section doesn't sparkle anymore. That seem to be all libraries for doing complex stuff. Like everyone is pivoting to deliver more complex work in the face of vibe coding.
Where's the fun stuff? Where's the joy?
33 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadThose real needs won't go away. Until addressed.
What are they? Find out add address them.
It began several years ago. Now, this place is filled with a certain type of person...
There are many reasons for it but part of it is that the moderation team actively curtails all discussion of progressive or political topics even as the world tilts into chaos and strife due to technological issues that are relevant to this community and its parent company.
They claim it is in service of maintaining a conflict-free community and that they are "apolitical" but that is a deception, a straight up lie - censorship of speech is INTRINSICALLY political and the class whom it benefits the most is the class in power. That means the censorship policy here is literally authoritarianism in action. Just dressed up as innocent old "moderation policy". It's a lie. And anyone and everyone who has ever spoken out against Trump, Sam Altman, etc, on this site finds out very quickly that they are subject to thought policing. Either explicitly with moderation actions or implicitly with the threat of a ban -- or, more insidious, the shadow ban. Which the mods here are known to use. (You are silenced without knowing it.)
So, naturally, the only kind of personality who would condone or enjoy such authoritarian suppression of speech which benefits the rich and stifles all opposition to their will would be -- you guessed it -- people who are themselves uncritical authoritarians. The "top down authority" model makes sense to them.
These people may not recognize themselves by that label. Nevertheless it is a psychological type and it has to do with the structure of the parent-child relationship. It is still prevalent in America, especially in red states (though it isn't limited to red states -- other cohorts might be religious families, families of european descent, families with old money or strong patriarchal figures...) where the parent is the "boss" and the child must conform to what is expected.
Those people internalize a "whatever the boss says is right and who am I to fight it" attitude.
Those are the ones who are left behind when all the sensible adults recognize that the speech here is cooled, stifled, or outright silenced in service of the VC's who are actively burning the world to the ground.
It's affected by macro trends (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and the swings and fluctuations going on in the world at large. It's affected by what's going on in a person's own life. Perhaps most of all, it's affected by the impact of the most recent things they happened to see that made an impression, and there is a strong factor of randomness in the latter.
People who happen to be in an 'up' cycle with HN don't tend to make posts about it, so posts like this—through no fault of any one poster—are dominated by expressions of the 'down' cycle. There is a long tradition of these, going back about as far as HN itself. It produces a paradoxical "things have always been getting worse" sensation if you zoom back far enough.
Back then, from my memory, it was far more focused on solo entrepreneurs bootstrapping their own tech startups, blogs and tutorials on new/interesting tech, and some discussion around starting/running businesses.
Today HN is basically just a tech news site, focused largely on new AI announcements.
I don't really blame HN for this, but the thing I personally loved about this site is basically gone. The world has moved on though... I joined HN back when a dude in his bedroom with some tech and business skills could potentially build the next Facebook. This kind of thing doesn't really happen anymore.
I also think the commenters here have changed. It feels less tolerant than I remember it. I notice that downvotes are now commonly handed out to people who share differences of opinion. This was something HN was very intolerant of in the past.
I'm still here though. At the end of the day HN is still more interesting and less toxic than most communities online.
It's there, you just have to look harder.
Like this story about Vecos, which fits your definition of "fun stuff", was posted earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984984
There’s this post from a few weeks ago, if you just wanna filter out all the AI content
I know it's the nature of HN to be centered (nay, fixated) on the latest things, but I think I'm the wake of so much AI content, the people who would have otherwise done something else are doing AI things or posting elsewhere
As others have pointed out there are still fun things, but I feel like there are quantifiably fewer things that I enjoy on here, every week.
I used to love scrolling hn first thing in the morning and now I rarely do
despite everything, I think there are people out there who care a lot, and who are doing good work, and I'm hopeful that if we care enough we can sort of redirect this wave into something good for the world
[editing - bear with me...]
Would you consider including a mastodon feed for this for those of us who don't habitually include the X formerly known as Twitter in our diet?
I don't understand mastoverse mechanics, so perhaps someone could suggest the most HN-friendly way to go about this?
Now it's people talking about how they orchestrated a bunch of agents. Its not fun.
HN is still one of my favorite sites, though. Even when I get downvoted, at least it's primarily by people who can understand the subject matter. Every other site has people absolutely talking out their ass, especially when it comes to... ugh... AI.
Funny thing is that if you express any opinion which is not considered ultra-liberal, leftist, and absolutely politically correct it would be downvoted and ultimately flagged.
There is no more entitlement of having an opinion or agreeing to disagree, you’ll just be labelled as a nazi. I’m pretty sure this comment would be downvoted to prove my point