Eh, somewhat. There are definitely more articles and projects created by AI tools nowadays, and those just feel uninteresting to me.
But at the same time, I have to question whether I'd feel the same way about any other era of Hacker News. Like on Reddit, a small percentage of submissions will interest me on any given day. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the others are bad, they're just not for me.
I do have to wonder if you're mostly just noticing that the majority of content here simply won't be something you're interested in, just like in any other community.
Fully agreed. It's also that the interesting stuff quickly falls off the front page, and you have to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active to find it.
It's interesting the dynamic here of people that like /active more. I remember someone strongly argue that the frontpage is all censorship and /active should replace the frontpage. I wholeheartedly disagree and find lower quality but clickbaity stuff stays longer on /active and has low quality discussion.
Unrelated but I've noticed a surprising number of submissions with 100+ comments that have zero or very few good comments, recently.
Forgive me for assuming you’ve only been reading a handful of years based on your registration date. I think everyone gets up to speed with it and finds less to read as topic familiarity, muscle memory, knowledge of community tropes matures. Everyone is different as far as how many articles will interest them. If you joined when a topic that greatly interested you was popular, then you’re especially going to feel that falloff. Regardless, there must still be many stories of the type that interest you. My recommendations are to slow down reading a bit, so you see more new stories when you read HN, and to subscribe to something like Hacker Newsletter that’ll pull together the most interesting stories every few days.
Individual account signup date is an unreliable proxy for lifetime HN experience :^)
Further, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 suggests HN is facing a sea change unlike any past fad (Big Data, VR/AR, NFT, Web3, ...). Due to Brandolini's law, it cannot simply be disregarded with the "semi-noob illusion as old as the hills" cudgel.
agreed. I previously spent like the last 15+ years checking hacker news every morning at the start of the day but within last year I've found the content to be less interesting and hacker news has lost its stickiness.
I've not been here long enough to judge but for the last 2 years, interesting articles in the front page (page 1 to 5) are always found.
A lot of topics have changed to the topic-du-jour: AI, yet I find good discussions on other topics when browsing frontpage, and then switch to new to find interesting submissions to read without user commentary.
I find the preponderance of AI topics pretty dull myself. Doesn't interest me. Tell me about markup languages, weird science, fun games, interesting presentations, old programming languages, new programming languages, accessibility ...
And there's stories where the first comment is "reads like it's written by AI", it will make me far less likely to read the actual article, because I find AI writing somewhat nauseating.
As always: Be the change you want to see in the world. That means:
- Submit interesting links
- Write interesting comments
- Upvote interesting links and comments
- Especially you should upvote interesting links on the New tab
- You can send an e-mail to the moderator (as the other commenter mentioned) if you found an especially good link that didn't get enough attention.
You are not a mindless consumer of whatever is presented to you. You can also be creative and make a change in the world. Life is not for doing time like jail and sitting around and complaining on the sidelines while other people do stuff.
“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”
I just wish there were more articles about <EU government agency> moving to a European version of <workplace productivity tool>. 10 a day just isn't enough.
I share your take, but I think from the other side of the coin -- I am frequently finding interesting topics [flagged] by the time I click through, and it's mildly infuriating.
The thing is - people here find industry news and contentious topics (and AI) interesting. A lot of people here only find that interesting and would vehemently oppose anything else as "off-topic." I guess you could check the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) for decent stories, IDK.
You can email good submissions to Dang and see if he'll put them on the frontpage. I did this and it was a success here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608645
Eh, somewhat. There are definitely more articles and projects created by AI tools nowadays, and those just feel uninteresting to me.
But at the same time, I have to question whether I'd feel the same way about any other era of Hacker News. Like on Reddit, a small percentage of submissions will interest me on any given day. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the others are bad, they're just not for me.
I do have to wonder if you're mostly just noticing that the majority of content here simply won't be something you're interested in, just like in any other community.
Fully agreed. It's also that the interesting stuff quickly falls off the front page, and you have to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active to find it.
It's interesting the dynamic here of people that like /active more. I remember someone strongly argue that the frontpage is all censorship and /active should replace the frontpage. I wholeheartedly disagree and find lower quality but clickbaity stuff stays longer on /active and has low quality discussion.
Unrelated but I've noticed a surprising number of submissions with 100+ comments that have zero or very few good comments, recently.
Thanks for the tip!
Forgive me for assuming you’ve only been reading a handful of years based on your registration date. I think everyone gets up to speed with it and finds less to read as topic familiarity, muscle memory, knowledge of community tropes matures. Everyone is different as far as how many articles will interest them. If you joined when a topic that greatly interested you was popular, then you’re especially going to feel that falloff. Regardless, there must still be many stories of the type that interest you. My recommendations are to slow down reading a bit, so you see more new stories when you read HN, and to subscribe to something like Hacker Newsletter that’ll pull together the most interesting stories every few days.
Individual account signup date is an unreliable proxy for lifetime HN experience :^)
Further, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 suggests HN is facing a sea change unlike any past fad (Big Data, VR/AR, NFT, Web3, ...). Due to Brandolini's law, it cannot simply be disregarded with the "semi-noob illusion as old as the hills" cudgel.
Sure; this isn’t my first account either. I did ask for forgiveness for the assumption!
agreed. I previously spent like the last 15+ years checking hacker news every morning at the start of the day but within last year I've found the content to be less interesting and hacker news has lost its stickiness.
well you are not lying about 15+ years its great
The values are not what they once were. Curiosity and creation have given way to summarization and generation.
I've not been here long enough to judge but for the last 2 years, interesting articles in the front page (page 1 to 5) are always found.
A lot of topics have changed to the topic-du-jour: AI, yet I find good discussions on other topics when browsing frontpage, and then switch to new to find interesting submissions to read without user commentary.
I kind of agree with you; I had to dig too deep to find interesting topics.
I find the preponderance of AI topics pretty dull myself. Doesn't interest me. Tell me about markup languages, weird science, fun games, interesting presentations, old programming languages, new programming languages, accessibility ...
And there's stories where the first comment is "reads like it's written by AI", it will make me far less likely to read the actual article, because I find AI writing somewhat nauseating.
As always: Be the change you want to see in the world. That means:
- Submit interesting links
- Write interesting comments
- Upvote interesting links and comments
- Especially you should upvote interesting links on the New tab
- You can send an e-mail to the moderator (as the other commenter mentioned) if you found an especially good link that didn't get enough attention.
You are not a mindless consumer of whatever is presented to you. You can also be creative and make a change in the world. Life is not for doing time like jail and sitting around and complaining on the sidelines while other people do stuff.
would be interesting to see the number of daily users over the last 10+ years, homogenization is a result of appealing-to-the-masses, is it not?
“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi
I feel the pool is often way more fascinating than the actual front-pages nowadays.
Worth discussing.
I just wish there were more articles about <EU government agency> moving to a European version of <workplace productivity tool>. 10 a day just isn't enough.
Tons of this on Lemmy, which generally sees more European traffic.
just like any other monopoly
Fully agreed.
https://lobste.rs/ feel more like old-HN
I'm a fan. It's an excellent site
https://skimfeed.com is literally the best frontend to HN.
Yes but that fizzled out too. I used https://hckrnews.com a little too, to capture front pages from out of your timezone.
I share your take, but I think from the other side of the coin -- I am frequently finding interesting topics [flagged] by the time I click through, and it's mildly infuriating.
Any examples?
The thing is - people here find industry news and contentious topics (and AI) interesting. A lot of people here only find that interesting and would vehemently oppose anything else as "off-topic." I guess you could check the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) for decent stories, IDK.
boring