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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Something I noticed about Slashdot was that it started out talking about the latest processors, software, and Linux kernel patches. Then the conversation ever-so-slowly started drifting towards CEOs, the sharemarket, politics, and the like.

It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers!

Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.

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> Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.

As I age I am less interested in business topics, and more interested in technological advancements

Older people learn that, even if you have zero interest in politics, politics will still be done to you. And older people learn that they often don't like how that works out, and therefore conclude that they'd better start paying at least some attention to politics, whether they want to or not.

  > Older people learn that, even if you have zero
  > interest in politics, politics will still be done to you.

This was the big take away from the first few chapters of Mein Kampf. The author implores the common man to become involved in, or at least aware of, the politics in his country because if he does not then the politicians will abuse him.

And ironically the author became the abusive politician.

I wouldn't say that. He pulled his country out of the very abusive Versaille treaty, had he stopped there he would today be regarded a hero by all sides. I'll leave it at that!

Errrrr ok

He didn't stop there.

Right, that is why I had to word my comment very carefully.

Is it Casual Hitler Sunday again?

You wouldn't say Hitler was an abusive politician?

Abusive, yes. Abusive politician, not in the context of what he started with.

Defending Hitler is a weird flex but ok

I don't think it's a matter of becoming bored, but about being able to better discern the truth.

Eg: Most new things will be completely irrelevant in a couple of years.

Most tech, even the overhyped stuff, seriously outlives the news cycle. Type into trends.google.com something that was popular a few months ago, you'll see what I mean.

For example, remember Cathie Wood? She's already forgotten. The "Facebook whistleblower" will be forgotten in about a month.

Good point. A few years ago, the big thing was AI. Everybody was talking about how AI would put half of the population out of jobs. Nowadays it's all about cryptocurrencies, which are being hyped as nothing short of a revolution. It's always the same nonsense with a different name.

I think that the old adage is very apt:

The commoners talk about people. The learned talk about things. The wise talk about ideas.

I don't think it's a function of age, but of size. As Slashdot got larger, it attracted more people who didn't or couldn't talk about those things.

Larger? I feel like Slashdot has shrunk tremendously over the last 10 years and I believe the shift to politics is the main reason.

I have screenshot that I took a couple of years ago where the entire "Most discussed" section had the word "trump" in it. Every single one. That was the tipping point for me.

Maybe the site is larger now than it was a decade ago but it sure doesn't feel like it.

Usually when people talk about the rise and fall of Slashdot they are not referring to anything that happened on that domain in 2011 or later. Slashdot was great while it broadened in scope, but the wide scope made it vulnerable to both even more open competition (e.g. reddit, where absolutely every niche can have its niche) end more specific specializations (e.g. kuro5hin, for a few years), leaving the site with a broadness it could not really fill anymore.

I genuinely wonder if HN has been stagnant with the same people visiting it as 5 years ago. And thus your statement is accurate.

Surely with the influx of people early in the pandemic this isn't the case?

Why would the pandemic send more users to HN?

at home unsupervised browsing during working hours versus working in a cubicle, or god forbid, an open concept office, where bossman patrols the hallways like a prison guard.

I think there was a large migration of users onto all sorts of forums and social networks everywhere.

I was a regular reader of Slashdot in the early 2000s. There were loads of discussions about politics, open source politics, flamewars, Microsoft EVIL, etc... Maybe not as much business and stock, perhaps because tech wasn't worth that much money yet, but it wasn't like all oooooh shiny tech news. IIRC 911 was one of the top commented posts, and US elections were probably up there as well.

These days Microsoft kinda mellowed out (at least with regards to its attitude to open source and the non-MS dev community), and new tech giants came into the fray, but at least to me, the mix of news topics don't really seem that much different.

So where do the 18 year old hackers chat these days?

Discord ime

discord.

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