I feel the same, but it's an unavoidable cycle IMHO. Any subculture that becomes popular gets diluted by more average people, and the content becomes more basic and banal. You can flag and downvote, but eventually there are enough people who treat a platform like HN as a general discussion board, without regard for cultural alignment. It seems that stuff like politics and random recipes are on the rise, but it's not against the rules, so maybe it really is just a general discussion board that's evolving into the mainstream.
Just because you might prefer coffee or soylent doesn't mean some other hackers don't like cocktails. Make yourself some https://entropia.de/Tschunk and relax!
Well, it’s our fault. We had forums with categories and those had some random / chit chat category to have off topic discussions with the community while staying on topic anywhere else.
And a lot of the time, this random section was the more active of the whole forum but that was ok because it didn’t impact the other discussions.
But those were less engaging than social networks i guess (which hn is) so here we are.
...whats "on topic" for HN?
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.