Ask HN: HN was much more interesting a year ago | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: HN was much more interesting a year ago

15 pointsfud10112 comments

If you click on 'past' you can choose a year back and the newsfeed is filled with all kinds of interesting and wonderful posts.

These days all you'll find are rehashed to death AI talking points but even a year ago, things were far better. What happened?

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> These days all you'll find are rehashed to death AI talking points but even a year ago, things were far better. What happened?

I hate to state the obvious but AI and bots happened, first slowly and then all at once (tm). Plus the usual conflicts of interest which are now the main driving force, this site is no exception.

10 years ago people were talking about how HN used to be more interesting.

Last year wasn't it all about X and Twitter? I would say 2 years ago :D I guess there's much more public now :shrug: Old traditions leave place to new ones.

Our industry (particularly SV) is extremely fad-driven, and HN naturally reflects that. It's always been the case that whatever the current hotness is tends to dominate the posts that appear here. It does make it suck if you don't share an interest in whatever the current thing happens to be, but the industry, and HN, will eventually move on to the next Hot Thing.

Maybe you just harbor a level of dislike for AI that makes discussion of relevant tech news unpalatable to you.

I don't know I dislike it, maybe numb to it after the years of hype. I was an early adopter like many of us so that may be a factor.

I thought my interests changed or I got more busy

And hence checked hn less

But maybe it’s just less interesting indeed

I was there long ago

https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/

The thing is that I don't really stand by that article and didn't really stand by it two years later because things really changed. When I wrote that there had been an Apple conference that I thought was particularly boring, today the Apple obsession is tamed and Apple news interests me more (and Apple fanboys turned from being uncritical to talking like one of those "Why X Sucks" videos that are big on Youtube, where X could be a fast food chain, video game studio, ...)

Looking at the list of hosts there I note that people still post articles from The New York Times despite them hardly ever frontpaging. I think phys.org (ScienceX) wasn't a thing back then, there was a time I thought I was the main booster (like I am for https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=coindesk.com) but it's a big source that many people post from and others complain about. (YOShInOn and I short circuit it and post the original paper if it is open access as much as we can)

BTW, I count four articles about AI on the front page right now, it's not like it is totally overrun.

Someone has the actual stats but it feels like there are 3 big categories:

Tech misused by the newly anointed US oligarchy - flagged

Self-promotional spam - flagged

Bland AI stuff - not flagged

Result - bland AI HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44484996

from Data on AI-related Show HN posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463249 - July 2025

But how do I search for "awful things the oligarchy does"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals

(llms are likely your friend for classification, emit output somewhere outside of the control of the forum)

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