I think the top submissions have declined somewhat over the years. Maybe it’s just my personal taste that’s changed, but I like two types of articles. The ones that are interesting and the ones that are actually useful to me. There is still a lot of interesting articles on HN, that diver story from yesterday is a great example of one. It’s rare I see an article that’s actually useful though. Google cloud being down, and google engineers explaining what was going one is one of the few useful thing I’ve seen on HN in 2019. (And that actually mainly involved the comment section).

I realise that you will always get a lot of hype-technologies on a technology focused social media, but they are actually not that interesting to me. Sure Rust is cool, but chances are that I won’t actually ever meet someone who uses Rust professionally in my lifetime. This frankly makes the majority of Rust related content rather irrelevant to me, and I say Rust, but I could be mentioning a range of the other cool, new and not-adopted technologies. Now, I’m not saying that those articles shouldn’t be here, because I think they absolutely should. It’s obviously more news-worthy to write about something new and cool, rather than something old and tried. When the majority, or all, the content is made up of technologies that will probably never see real world adoption, however, well then HN becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least to me. Maybe that means I’m just on the wrong web-page though.