alt Hacker News> HN is still worth visiting, but it's getting harder to justify spending time here
I feel the same. Quality of both submissions and discussions have considerable decreased. It is still the best general purpose “aggregator” I know of, but it is not what it was. It is becoming more and more FotM hype and boring group-think.
HN was great due to the breadth of unique, interesting, nerdy topics, most of which I would have never come across on my own; and the insightful thought-provoking commentary, often by insiders with unique insights and perspectives.
Now it is just the same LLM agentic coding harness hype cycle astroturfing 100x engineer 37k LoC/day BS I could get from Reddit or LinkedIn or Twitter or anywhere else.
The moderators are still doing a fantastic job though! I feel like that is the last big differentiator from just being orange Reddit.
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I think it's a trend in the industry though. Engineering is known as a moneymaker and so a large part of the new generation is the kind of person that decades ago would have gone for finance as a profession.
Both the really old timey graybeard techies and the green haired alternative techie communities are reducing in numbers.
Since crypto and later LLM it got to its current state, everyone is trying to promote their stuff, sometimes in many covert ways, again, when money gets into anything it ruins it, same happened to YT and other sites.
I dunno, it's tough. I hesitate to say HN is "getting worse," even if I agree with that in my gut. I think that gives rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia-bait. Rather, I think the community is refocusing around something that I find uninteresting. If you find LLM output to be dull, as I do, it's less and less a place for you to be. I try to push the community in more interesting directions by upvoting articles with actual technical content, but yeah it's being drowned out by the ho-hum LLM output that I'm not interested in, and that means I want to be here less.