HN was originally called "Startup News". It was founded by tech business people and originally its userbase was largely startup tech people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

I've been here 12 years and I don't remember HN focusing solely on technical topics, unless the word "technical" has widened to mean "anything one engineer finds intellectually stimulating".

Unfortunately Lobsters might claim to be non political but is actually quite political. Because the moderators and increasingly the remaining community identifies with American progressive left values, a pretty common thing to see on the site is political posts along those lines getting upvoted and other political philosophies being flagged as political.

It's probably the most deeply unpleasant part about the site IMO. I don't think there's anything wrong with moderators all sharing certain politics. On Lobsters though, there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture where the political ingroup can break rules while the outgroup can't but it's never explicitly acknowledged by the moderators or the community.

They are also aggressively anti-AI

edit: If you are downvoting because you are also anti-AI, my comment is not about whether supporting AI is good. I'm only remarking that they are aggressively negative about the topic. The aggression is obnoxious and less tolerated with other topics.

Conversely, hn gets a lot of content which simply isn't intellectually stimulating. Like on the front page atm is pocketbase—a git repo which currently has 53k stars which I've known of for many years, and a surface level article on RAG titled 'So you wanna build a local RAG?' ~~which seems to mostly just exist so the author can plug their company in the first line.~~ which doesn't really contribute much niche knowledge you can't obtain anywhere else. As a blogger myself I can't claim superiority—I've done this plenty, but this content just doesn't seem to do as well on lobste.rs as compared to really niche content which is directly relevant to very few people, but as a result required a great deal of research and time and very possibly is of great utility to a rare few.

Edit: though to be clear this is a spectrum with heavy overlap. Just general biases I've observed. Like on Lobste.rs there is an article titled 'Electron vs. Tauri' atm.

Personally I enjoy that content a lot. My guess is that HN is read by tech interested people these days not just programmers. The risk of being more generalist is losing your distinguishing lens. If I wanted generic news with a techie take there's sites like Ars and The Verge that already do this. If HN becomes those sites it's only a losing game.

A lot of good contributors to Lobsters have been banned for poltical reasons. Lobsters (laudably) has a moderation log that shows the reasons for user bans among other moderator decisions, but typically when when a good contributor is banned for poltical reasons (as opposed to e.g. a spammer), the actual posts that made the moderators decide to ban have been removed and replaced with a moderator message pithily asserting that the post was offensive; so it's hard for someone to see exactly what the last straw posts were and decide how reasonable the moderator was being.

And the moderators and most of the remaining userbase of Lobsters are American political left-progressives, and this dramatically informs how they choose to moderate.

Can you really not see the irony in posting this comment? Have you no self-awareness whatsoever?

Peak HN, absolutely hilarious!