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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

I really need to go back and get some old HN posts and see if Hacker News always had LinkedIn style content. I feel like it didn't, but people are always claiming "things have changed; it wasn't like this back in the day". I feel like this is true on this count, even ten years ago.

Then again, did LinkedIn always have LinkedIn content? Perhaps some future LLM will ingest everything and capture trends for us in a pretty Google Trends way and we can say "yes, that's the moment image macros became a thing!" and "oh yeah, aug 27 2013 is when disillusionment posters died".

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The tone on HN used to be that “Hacker” was synonymous with “VC backed startup founder”, there used to be whole discussions centered around the founder persona and its nature, the more traditional definitions of “hacker” got paid lip service.

I’d say that LinkedIn speech was born right here.

At the time hacker meant informal programmer, among other things. “I’m hacking on my book review website” “I’m hacking on a desktop filesharing app.” Those hackers sometimes got a nice swing at it and this place has indeed always been a finance-friendly venue for these nerds to commingle.

It’s 2025 and things move along. People still post their file sharing tools here, but yeah I agree that it does hit different now.

I feel like it did, it was always a weird combination of hacky things and entrepreneur things, and people writing to learn how to write.

I find the tone of the posts also changes by time of day. I often wake up in the middle of the night for about an hour or two, if I browse HN then I find the new posts to be completely different (and a little antagonistic)There's a bunch of stuff that briefly climbs the page between the hours of 2am and 4am for me. It's usually gone by morning. I often wonder what time it is in what part of the world influences that tone.

May I ask which timezone?

I don't remember so many non-tech or random posts on HN 10 years ago or so. I think now, as long as you're a self-proclaimed hacker, you can post basically anything. It's less consistent than most subreddits I've seen which is a shame - on the bright side Reddit's tech subreddits seem to be much stronger than 10 years ago and serve fairly well.

"I was socially awkward in an event and mad an unpopular blog post about it - here's what it taught me about managing customer accounts"

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