Browsing the front page feels homogeneous these days.
It seems like what gets voted to the top these days are no longer "things people find interesting" but are all either boring "big industry news", or common-denominator topics that people have contentious opinions about rather than any real novelty.
Does anyone else feel similarly that there are hardly any interesting or different or quirky topics that gets voted up these days?
“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 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.
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
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!
Agree. I used to enjoy the nerd or technical articles on how stuff works, why it is optimized for speed, why it is not secure etc...more on technical stuff and the startup world ecosystem. Now a days I only see breaking news type of articles which I can easily find in any other websites.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Worth discussing.
I kind of agree with you; I had to dig too deep to find interesting topics.
I feel the pool is often way more fascinating than the actual front-pages nowadays.
Because they ban all the fun 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?
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.
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.
just like any other monopoly
Fully agreed.
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?
https://lobste.rs/ feel more like old-HN
I'm a fan. It's an excellent site
I really dislike how politicized it feels, or rather, how multipartisan the HN community is. It's like Hacker News, but the audience is from BlueSky. Thanks, but no thanks.
boring
It's very different these days. I've said similar things a number of times.
~15 years ago HN was full of really interesting deep dives into technical topics. There used to be articles about different algorithms, frameworks, programming languages, etc. Back then I even used to write tech posts and tutorials myself and share them here with some success.
The other thing I miss are the entrepreneurial posts... My friend introduced me to HN because I was interested in business and tech, but I didn't really get the appeal of HN for a while. But I remember when I was like 19, browsing HN during my lunch break at my crappy retail job and found this,
https://sofamoolah.com/2011/07/14/the-conclusion-a-6-figure-...
That post at the time got me totally hooked on HN... It was these real world posts about the struggles, successes and failures of normal people starting businesses online with their tech knowledge that I loved.
I literally never see articles like that here anymore. Although, I'm not sure that's just HN... I suspect the world has just changed. Those days when someone could start a successful company from writing some code in their bedroom has more or less gone.