The light has gone out lately. I can't blame AI for all of it. there are a lot of AI stories, sure - but something else has changed. Even the show hn section doesn't sparkle anymore. That seem to be all libraries for doing complex stuff. Like everyone is pivoting to deliver more complex work in the face of vibe coding.
Where's the fun stuff? Where's the joy?
HN is still one of my favorite sites, though. Even when I get downvoted, at least it's primarily by people who can understand the subject matter. Every other site has people absolutely talking out their ass, especially when it comes to... ugh... AI.
https://x.com/hackernews
We wanted to do things like this for ages but never had time. Justin at YC has been nailing it (I'm biased, of course) and a bunch of us have been enjoying nominating candidates for this treatment - a bit like HN's own second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), but through this different channel.
Anyone who wants to send a nomination, please do! hn@ycombinator.com is best.
Would you consider including a mastodon feed for this for those of us who don't habitually include the X formerly known as Twitter in our diet?
I don't understand mastoverse mechanics, so perhaps someone could suggest the most HN-friendly way to go about it?
Those real needs won't go away. Until addressed.
What are they? Find out add address them.
There’s this post from a few weeks ago, if you just wanna filter out all the AI content
I know it's the nature of HN to be centered (nay, fixated) on the latest things, but I think I'm the wake of so much AI content, the people who would have otherwise done something else are doing AI things or posting elsewhere
As others have pointed out there are still fun things, but I feel like there are quantifiably fewer things that I enjoy on here, every week.
I used to love scrolling hn first thing in the morning and now I rarely do
It's there, you just have to look harder.
Like this story about Vecos, which fits your definition of "fun stuff", was posted earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984984
It tends to cycle, just like many relationships. The flush of novelty is exciting; it contrasts positively with what's available elsewhere. Then you notice the annoying things, then the dismaying ones. Eventually that too becomes background, which other positive-again things can stand out from. At some point you realize it has all been there all along, if in fluctuating proportions.
It's affected by macro trends (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and the swings going on in the world at large. It's affected by what's going on in a person's own life. Perhaps most of all, it's affected by the impact of the most recent things you happened to see that made an impression. There is a strong component of randomness in the latter.
People in an 'up' cycle with HN don't tend to make posts about it, so posts like this—through no fault of any one poster—are dominated by the 'down' cycle. There is a long tradition of these, going back about as far as HN itself. It produces a paradoxical "things have always been getting worse" sensation if you zoom back far enough.
Back then, from my memory, it was far more focused on solo entrepreneurs bootstrapping their own tech startups, blogs and tutorials on new/interesting tech, and some discussion around starting/running businesses.
Today HN is basically just a tech news site, focused largely on new AI announcements.
I don't really blame HN for this, but the thing I personally loved about this site is basically gone. The world has moved on though... I joined HN back when a dude in his bedroom with some tech and business skills could potentially build the next Facebook. This kind of thing doesn't really happen anymore.
I also think the commenters here have changed. It feels less tolerant than I remember it. I notice that downvotes are now commonly handed out to people who share differences of opinion. This was something HN was very intolerant of in the past.
I'm still here though. At the end of the day HN is still more interesting and less toxic than most communities online.
pg said that was okay early on so that's not a new thing but maybe there have been changes over time in how often that happens
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585931
Now it's people talking about how they orchestrated a bunch of agents. Its not fun.
It began several years ago. Now, this place is filled with a certain type of person...
There are many reasons for it but part of it is that the moderation team actively curtails all discussion of progressive or political topics even as the world tilts into chaos and strife due to technological issues that are relevant to this community and its parent company.
They claim it is in service of maintaining a conflict-free community and that they are "apolitical" but that is a deception, a straight up lie - censorship of speech is INTRINSICALLY political and the class whom it benefits the most is the class in power. That means the censorship policy here is literally authoritarianism in action. Just dressed up as innocent old "moderation policy". It's a lie. And anyone and everyone who has ever spoken out against Trump, Sam Altman, etc, on this site finds out very quickly that they are subject to thought policing. Either explicitly with moderation actions or implicitly with the threat of a ban -- or, more insidious, the shadow ban. Which the mods here are known to use. (You are silenced without knowing it.)
So, naturally, the only kind of personality who would condone or enjoy such authoritarian suppression of speech which benefits the rich and stifles all opposition to their will would be -- you guessed it -- people who are themselves uncritical authoritarians. The "top down authority" model makes sense to them.
These people may not recognize themselves by that label. Nevertheless it is a psychological type and it has to do with the structure of the parent-child relationship. It is still prevalent in America, especially in red states (though it isn't limited to red states -- other cohorts might be religious families, families of european descent, families with old money or strong patriarchal figures...) where the parent is the "boss" and the child must conform to what is expected.
Those people internalize a "whatever the boss says is right and who am I to fight it" attitude.
Those are the ones who are left behind when all the sensible adults recognize that the speech here is cooled, stifled, or outright silenced in service of the VC's who are actively burning the world to the ground.