Yes it has seemed to change quite rapidly in the last 12 months.
I think Hacker News used to be mainly Start-Up, tech and business starters. Whereas now it is mainly start-up porn.
I think Hacker News used to be mainly Start-Up, tech and business starters. Whereas now it is mainly start-up porn.
Even more sad are the periodic proposals to "improve" (i.e. fix) HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5042403
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488561
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4399108
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404718
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842554
And PG randomly chimes in throughout.. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920
And then there is the complaining: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747
None of these things seem to be working very well. They may alleviate a portion of the pain temporarily, but the baseline level of quality throughout the community still feels way off to me compared to what I see in the old threads.
As a sidenote, I like the explanations in this post about why digg, reddit, and slashdot went sour:
i saw this in one of the posts: http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
looks like a good intermediate step.