HN Explorer

Ask HN: Have submissions shifted subject?

10 points by nightcracker ↗ HN
When I started reading hackernews 2 years ago there were many things that caught my interest. Math, programming and other technical subjects. There were quite some posts about startups and blogs, but nothing overwhelming. I could usually find ~10 out of the shown 30 links per page that caught my interest.

I feel this has changed. (For the worse, but this is my personal opinion.)

Nowadays I'm hard pressed to find more than ~2 out of the 30 links that catch my interest. The technology related posts have been reduced to a minimum, and have been replaced by content containing:

  * startup success/failure stories
  * NSA
  * economic events as company buyouts
  * lawsuits
  * opinion/rant blog posts vaguely related to technology
  * new releases of software (often downright shameless plugs/marketing)
  * politics
  * old software rewritten in new language without extra features
  * the 1000th variation on game (flappy bird, 2048)
I don't know if anything concrete can or even should be done about this, but I'm wondering if someone else is experiencing the same.

EDIT: formatted the list proper.

7 comments

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LoneWolf
My feeling is similar, as I understand it there are trends, there are some ups and downs on the interest I have on the posts. IMHO the worst time was then jobs died, that is an example of those days where I could not find anything interesting (Disclaimer: I don't like jobs, and I don't understand why people idolize him, I feel like I may be downvoted to hell because of this but it's my opinion)
27182818284
There are definitely trends that I've seen as a six-year user. The bullet points you listed do seem to be current trends, but I also remember the days when it seemed like there were all sorts of Ruby on Rails posts that you just couldn't get away from.
andrewtbham
I agree there are too many politically posts. The NSA story, although relevant to HN, has imho been exhausted.
dmux
But repeated exposure is what it takes for actual change to take place. Is this whole NSA scandal one of those heat of the moment topics that we're prepared to move on from so easily?
wwwhatcrack
Agreed. Content here these days is weak.
enkiv2
As someone living outside of the west coast, I've noticed a ridiculous number of essentially non-technical stories about living in California. Does HN currently skew so unevenly in terms of geography that a majority or significant minority lives in such a small part of the globe, and is this actually a trend (non-Californians dropping off HN, long-time HN users moving to the valley, significantly higher adoption amongst California residents)?

Between living-in-California posts and posts focusing on commercial rather than technical concerns, HN is rapidly becoming less interesting to me, despite having used it consistently for less than six months -- unfortunate since there's a notable minority of extremely interesting technical posts that I need to dig through the 'new' section to find!

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