Comment by Karrot_Kream

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.