this is my first account, and i understand your perspective. i did sometimes come to HN from 2015 onwards, but not enough to really get a feel for the level of content and conversation that happened. 2015 is still much later than you first started using it, so i can see how your older first impressions of this site led you to the conclusion that present-day HN is a shadow of its former self.so i think we agree on everything, except that you're comparing pre-2016 to now, vs. me comparing 2020 to now, which leads to the opposite conclusions. excuse me for being a part of the less interesting era of posters ;-)
Karrot_Kream|1 year ago
When I joined HN, hacking was mostly for nerds. The real important tech people worked on chips or devices and the money makers were in finance. This has changed. With it has come an interest in lurid tech coverage, like the existence of sites like "Techdirt", and something about software has led to the growth of a tabloid style news interest in it in a way that never happened for hardware (probably an artifact of the rise of tech being concomitant and convergent with the evolution of the Internet.) There's also been a lot of other changes going on in the greater world as the internet has become a larger part of our lives. I suspect those changes outside "in the real world" that eventually finding itself into here.
For me the antidote has been more focused conversations on other sites like Discord or BlueSky but this is all very personal.