It seems like what gets voted to the top these days are no longer "things people find interesting" but are all either boring "big industry news", or common-denominator topics that people have contentious opinions about rather than any real novelty.
Does anyone else feel similarly that there are hardly any interesting or different or quirky topics that gets voted up these days?
And there's stories where the first comment is "reads like it's written by AI", it will make me far less likely to read the actual article, because I find AI writing somewhat nauseating.
― Trevanian, Shibumi
Unrelated but I've noticed a surprising number of submissions with 100+ comments that have zero or very few good comments, recently.
Further, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 suggests HN is facing a sea change unlike any past fad (Big Data, VR/AR, NFT, Web3, ...). Due to Brandolini's law, it cannot simply be disregarded with the "semi-noob illusion as old as the hills" cudgel.
- Submit interesting links
- Write interesting comments
- Upvote interesting links and comments
- Especially you should upvote interesting links on the New tab
- You can send an e-mail to the moderator (as the other commenter mentioned) if you found an especially good link that didn't get enough attention.
You are not a mindless consumer of whatever is presented to you. You can also be creative and make a change in the world. Life is not for doing time like jail and sitting around and complaining on the sidelines while other people do stuff.
A lot of topics have changed to the topic-du-jour: AI, yet I find good discussions on other topics when browsing frontpage, and then switch to new to find interesting submissions to read without user commentary.
~15 years ago HN was full of really interesting deep dives into technical topics. There used to be articles about different algorithms, frameworks, programming languages, etc. Back then I even used to write tech posts and tutorials myself and share them here with some success.
The other thing I miss are the entrepreneurial posts... My friend introduced me to HN because I was interested in business and tech, but I didn't really get the appeal of HN for a while. But I remember when I was like 19, browsing HN during my lunch break at my crappy retail job and found this,
https://sofamoolah.com/2011/07/14/the-conclusion-a-6-figure-...
That post at the time got me totally hooked on HN... It was these real world posts about the struggles, successes and failures of normal people starting businesses online with their tech knowledge that I loved.
I literally never see articles like that here anymore. Although, I'm not sure that's just HN... I suspect the world has just changed. Those days when someone could start a successful company from writing some code in their bedroom has more or less gone.
But at the same time, I have to question whether I'd feel the same way about any other era of Hacker News. Like on Reddit, a small percentage of submissions will interest me on any given day. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the others are bad, they're just not for me.
I do have to wonder if you're mostly just noticing that the majority of content here simply won't be something you're interested in, just like in any other community.