Comment by throw_m239339 2 days ago
I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it mildly...
Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.
The whole western world is different and not for the better since 2015. Erosion of public trust since then is tremendous and regrettable so it is not surprising that we miss the communities that once were.
So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a shift away from business to tech.
Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.
The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it.
Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a different matter altogether.
Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how companies operated and now most businesses follow those models and they're not yet ripe for change again.
I honestly don't know. On the one hand you're right, we were in a time when startups were doing things like experimenting with holocracy. On the other hand, companies and cooperatives are still today experimenting with more efficient, equitable ways to get things done. I feel quite disappointed that so much of the anger over inequality in this community gets aimed at US or international politics rather than discussing things like corporate or cooperative structures which is both more grounded and more easy for many of us as practitioners to action.
To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at something you can't control and so is more of a way to air out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and requires more rigor to engage with.
Been here since 2011 and reading for a few years longer than that. I don't think the site has changed, more that the world has changed (a lot). There isn't that general excitement around consumer tech and programming that there was 15-20 years ago. We've gone from talking about how we need to start teaching coding in schools to how we shouldn't bother because AI will be doing it anyway.
The fun has been sucked out of it all. It wasn't all that long ago that we were excited by simple but fun devices like the iPad Nano and Flip camera. Now we all have phones that can shoot Hollywood films, we can access all art every created on them, and we have watches that can save our lives...and we've got a bit too used to it.
On top of that around here we used to get excited about scrappy startups raising funding and trying to change the world. Unfortunately because a number of those companies went on to dominate the world in negative ways, exploit users and hoard wealth, people have become jaded and scrappy startups are less exciting because we assume they'll eventually do something loathsome 10 years from now.
I'd love more framework debates, excitement, and creativity - but until the wider world is happy and positive again I'm not going to hold my breath.
I think HN has been gradually losing what makes it unique. The net is filled with BOFH-style pro-FOSS tinfoil hat tech content and has been since the early '90s. The joke among my college cohort about Slashdot was that IT Helpdesk 1 will have strong opinions on how MSFT execs were engaged in crazy conspiracies. You can find that kind of content anywhere that tech people talk. HN's value proposition for me has always been informed commentary; industry insiders, academics, and practitioners weighing in based on their domain expertise. Today's HN feels a lot more like a rumor mill for random people interested in tech. Along with this shift has been a widening of scope where we don't just talk about tech but also general politics. In general, HN has been gradually trending to be just another big tech subreddit.
These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early 2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore because there just aren't that many people working on interesting tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.
I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill feel rather than informed commentary.
I've been here since around that time and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a change for the worse. The world around us has changed, political life may have gotten slightly more complex, but the community feels just as friendly, curious and insightful.