I wonder how many more weeks in a row this will be posted.
Stuff is endlessly re-posted even in the same day, and with the most uninformative clickbait-y titles that seem purposefully structured to make you go "...okay, and what exactly is Fruutluup, which apparently just hit version 3.0?" Due to fear of missing out on something cool/interesting, you click on it. Because the submitter knows damn well that if you knew Fruutluup was a MOD tracker written in Scheme, you wouldn't give two shits about it.
The vast majority of posts here are either reposts, fall firmly into the category of "less than a hundred people give a shit about this", "yet another implementation of ____ but in some programming language nobody uses", the ever-popular "nerd getting all philosophical", or some random subject where the post is just the means to an end, letting HN commenters engage in extensive navel-gazing and "intellectual .
A great example of the latter would be a recent submission about agriculture where the author of the news story noticed the traffic and jumped into the comments to ask "uhh, this is a computer tech site, right? How are so many of you qualified to discuss this subject?" and she got absolutely hammered by HN neckbeards going "well ACKSHUALLY, we're programmers and that means we're VERY intellectual people. And some of us are autistic, even. Thos people are EXTRA qualified to talk about shit we just googled an hour ago."
The author asks "isn’t this a tech/VC blog? How is it that so many of you are so interested in and knowledgeable about agriculture?"
She asked why people were interested and were so knowledgable about a subject she didn't expect to appeal to this crowd. People explain the premise of HN and she then asks for other things this readership might be interested in. She didn't get hammered; she asked a question and got a number of honest, personal responses.
Not every website has to appeal to every person. The people who enjoy things that are presented here enjoy them. The people that don't are welcome to find a community that works for them.
I assume you were referencing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279
Those are the best posts and are why I'm here
If there's an article I don't care about, I don't click on it. There are 29 other things to choose from on the front page.
Maybe you could try reddit, and then just subscribe to the subreddits about topics you care about? Redditors may not have a great reputation, but the the niche subreddits have nice communities in my experience.
Absolute numbers mean very little BTW. Recently some (but not all!) of the most interesting articles are those that are flagged or mysteriously disappear from the front page.