im ignorant here. What was HN like initially? I assumed since it was the discussion board of a startup accelerator that it was always pretty focused on that.
Yes and no. The question/answer is of degrees.
I can't point to a categorical set of submissions/comments to provide you with some perfect bouquet of HN circa 2008 vs 2012 or such.
Essentially it started out more as hackers figuring out how to hack becoming entrepreneurs or making things work - to entrepreneurs or startup founder babies figuring out what to do. So HN was more geeky initially, and the techie perspective of what startups are doing.
Now it's slightly more towards the startup side looking at the tech perspective.
This is all relative. If you compared HN crowd to the WSJ and it's consumers, this site would be far and ahead a site of techies talking tech stuff.
I hope this helps, because this is making a risky argument since it's subjective.
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Part of this is covered by basic theory of websites - initially a site has a simple good or utility, (information, expertise) and attracts only people in the know. They come to discuss their field.
Eventually, if the knowledge allows people to get ahead, your culture shifts, as more people come to the site. Your experts to normal concentration shifts. PG has a good article on this, he identifies what he calls midbrow arguments.
I bet it's more focused on geeky interests and less focused on entrepreneurial topics than it was originally. Longtime readers might sense that it's more dumbed down or diluted now, but I suspect that's really just those longtime readers themselves getting more knowledgeable over the years, and HN seeming less revelatory than it did in the past. :)
Example: it seems like everyone I know used to read Slashdot but stopped at some point when they realized how much the discussion quality had deteriorated. What's funny is how different people's timelines are. I thought Slashdot was a great resource in 1998 but felt like the quality of the comments had descended to mostly garbage by 2001. I know other people who are way smarter than me (but a few years younger) who will swear that Slashdot was awesome in 2003 when they started reading it, but lament its downfall circa 2008 or something. The biggest factor in an individual's Slashdot timeline seems to be, they loved it when they were younger, less mature, and less knowledgable, then as they got older and more experienced they started getting annoyed by it. But really, Slashdot's demographics didn't change nearly as much as they did.
Forum history and human behavior on the web is my hobby subject.
In this case I'm not saying it's become smarter or less earth shattering. I'm saying that the average focus has shifted, as a cultural shift in the community which come so here.
> Front page stories from today so far, ordered by time spent there.
> To see other days, add a day to the above URL in yyyy-mm-dd format. Example: front?day=2016-06-20.
But not to find out what HN was like initially (which was the GP's concern); try a date before 2014-11-11 and you get "We don't have this data before 2014-11-11."