> derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads

And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments.

Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part of the culture and some channels discourage social activity entirely. Reddit is enshittified and, because the standard input device is a phone screen, so hostile to long-form text that posting just a couple of solid paragraphs marks you out as a weirdo who will get downvoted.

You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN. For a site based on “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”, most people who are working hard to develop a startup simply don’t have the leisure time for a wide range of interests. That’s why posts on the humanities here often draw some less-than-informed responses, even though many nerds would see them as important a part of the life of the mind as hacking computers.

> You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN.

I'd be much happier with an HN that actually talks about tech and nothing else. It's unclear to me why the 3000th thread about social media being evil needs 1000 posts of armchair opinion or how every thread about Meta devolves into declarations about how the company will implode (why? Because God will smite it for its sins? Lol.) Or whether or not AI will doom is all. The gravity of activity on this site is tech culture. It's not really tech. Obviously a certain person really enjoys this culture. But I'm not more intelligent, aware, or even better informed because of it. My take is the folks that enjoy this culture don't care much in the same way nobody cares about these things at a sports bar or cafe.

My guess is the reason I joined HN (this is my 2nd account, my first was in 2007) and why someone joins the site now is very different. Back then I was interested to see the developments on web tech. We watched Javascript build and mature into today's browser language. We watched the rise of dynamic languages, a rebound to static languages, and now interesting developments like Rust and Zig. TCP got improvements, now we have things like WebRTC, QUIC, Homa, and gRPC. But I suspect today people join here because they want to talk about whether AI will steal their jobs and are only tangentially interested in how LLMs and transformers actually work.