alt Hacker News(OP is not asking about the frontpage, but rather about https://news.ycombinator.com/ask, which shows text posts, mostly questions that usually begin with "Ask HN".)
The answer is that not enough posts are getting upvoted on https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew (or https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) to clear the small threshold necessary to make it to /ask.
This has been happening for a while. Not sure what the solution is. Sometimes I go to /asknew myself and upvote the ones that seem good enough to make it to /ask, if not the frontpage, but that's a manual operation and I rarely have time.
I suppose we could fill in the empty slots with posts from /asknew but then not sure how we would pick them...
Replies
I've thought about submitting a "What are you listening to" question to get conversation about music and podcasts going, would that be an acceptable question to ask?
> Not sure what the solution is
Is it a growing pattern or cyclical in some way? Does it need a solution or will it work itself out in time?
is there any place to find a full list of HN's lists? obviously there's the "lists" link at the bottom of the page but that is missing some, e.g. the above /ask (but /asknew is there?) and some others i've heard of but don't remember the link for e.g. a list of comments detected to be anti-ai
edit: just noticed /ask probably isn't there because it's in the navbar, lol. but still