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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

>I keep seeing threads on HN about

Gmail alternatives. I’m not sure if anybody else noticed this but every week or every other week there’s the same thread about alternatives. Sure I can flag it but I don’t get it, the suggestions are always exactly the same, no difference whatsoever. Is it so that people just don’t like to use the search function?

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Hmm - not so many big threads as far as I can tell, although there was a major one in the last year.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

In the last month:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30223538

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128198

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071730

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30004468

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725018

And the fairly related discussions, where the original topic was not asking for recommendations, but that was what a lot of the discussion ended up about:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30248203

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30025276

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29997776

For one month, that is starting to feel quite repetitive.

Ah, that's where they all were :)

Good point!

HN has fallen into a bit of a rut on a few topics lately, e.g:

- macOS “failing” and Linux on the desktop

- Mozilla and Firefox death spiral

- Electron and yearning for native applications

- And the aforementioned topic here

That said, for the most part it’s really only one at a time on the front page so it’s easy to skip if you wanted to.

As to why this phenomenon exists, I dunno. Reddit has the same problem, though I think it’s more pronounced there due to scale.

"The year of the Linux Desktop" is sort of an in-meme that transported to HN over from Slashdot and has been around since the very early 00s. Nothing to see here on that one -- every year is the "year of the linux desktop"

I mean, I agree with you - I was on /. way back in the day, and was a writer for Linux.com. I've lived the meme. :)

My point (which might be better re-worded) is that I've noticed it's picked up more on HN in the past year. No idea why.

Well slashdot has editors. HN is all upvoting without real editorial selection going on, so instead of seeing the regularly scheduled yearly "year of the linux desktop" post you'll see it 2-3 times a month because it's a popular idea and many are still encountering it for the first time (given how rampant mac use has become in the dev community)

And shell script, there is a sudden interest in shell scripting here last month

I've been on this site for 11 years, your mention of a search function baffled me. I see it now.

It has bad discoverability because of its placement. I am sure placing it on top would seemingly be an obvious resolution here but looking at the age of HN, I feel @dang must have had some reasons for it to not be on top already.

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