Over the years, software development itself has changed from having to know the low level details of the computer (hacking), to "AI writes my code for me" today.
This is reflected in the HN audience over many years with the influx of new developer generations, where what "hacker culture" meant also changed. I still feel the same hacker culture vibe, with many passionate engineers experimenting with tons of ideas. The culture is still here, but there's also a LOT of corporate noise too as HN grows.
If anyone remembers the cathedral and the bazaar analogy, here's a 25 yr article of mine on what "hacker" & "open source" meant back then :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20020806100014/http://www.2enetw...
Why read-only? I never posted anything online anywhere other than my own websites or blogs, and actively avoided social media mostly due to personal privacy and freedom concerns. Worth it? No :)
I think two years ago if I posted a scientific paper link to Mastodon somebody would reply with something like "this is way over my head" which makes me a lot more inclined to post links to phys.org there where there is a good summary image (important on social) and where people complain less about the ads. [1]
I think back then there were probably a lot of people on HN who would think "this is way over my head" but wouldn't say it because they didn't want to look stupid in front of a group of presumably smart people.
Recently I see HNers who see a reasonably well written abstract that uses technical language say something like "this is incomprehensible gobbledygook" or "an LLM could do a good job of summarizing this abstract", etc. No talk about how "I can't understand it", but rather how science is broken, the world is broken, anything but the reader is broken.
Maybe it is ableist thinking but personally I am really annoyed with the startups that want to use summarization to turn all content into A.I. slop because reading is just too hard... It's like they think 75% of people have dyslexia as opposed to 25% and they don't feel like they have to mask anymore.
[1] My RSS reader subscribes to phys.org, but because of complaints about ads, I'm inclined to post a link to the original paper on HN, especially if the paper is Open Access.
On reading; I feel like I don't have the time or the attention span anymore. I strongly believe this is due to the "short info-pill" overload in the last decade or so. I can easily get trapped into this type of behavior from time to time, unless I am actively fighting against it.
I feel like it's bypassing the "reasoning" part of my brain by directly targeting the inner lizard brain via my optical and auditory nervous system, eventually triggering powerful hormones that drive behavior. I cannot override my hormones by "thinking".
I always try to interpret the "attention is all you need" paper a bit differently to apply it to myself in the age of "generative" AI and other noise.
HN has always had a wide range of interest / topics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43166249
which got downranked, resulting in
There were always so many deep interesting topics from people with all sorts of interesting backgrounds.
Theres been a shift for a while but it I hate to say that it now feels like an AI, trump, Musk yap fest.
I don't hate AI, use it every day and work in the space.
The life has just been squeezed out of this place. It makes me sad that honestly I can find more interesting discussion on Reddit at this point which is truely disappointing considering that's not great quality either.
I've been using lobste.rs more recently and they do actually have pretty good active tech discussion there.
I don't know how / when it happened but it feels like HN is somehow becoming a tool for disinformation.... :(