AI, politics, and discussing how HN isn't what it used to be. That's all that's here now. HN isn't what it used to be.

I started coming here in the early 2010s, and honestly I like its mix now better than the late 2010s, when SaaS was stagnating and every new company was Uber/AirBnB for X and people were trying to hype crypto constantly. It's still worse than the early years though.

> AI, politics, and discussing how HN isn't what it used to be. That's all that's here now. HN isn't what it used to be.

Are you spending your time patrolling /newest and upvoting good submissions, then? There are relatively few people doing this and it's easy to have an outsized impact.

Nah, we occasionally spice it up with a thread of [Apple/Electron/Mozilla] bandwagon hatred.

Open any thread on these topics lately and you will see the same thing written for the 14,000th time as if it’s novel discussion.

HN was 10x more political 15 years ago.

Less party partisan stuff being sneaked in then (I think it's the parties themselves sometimes doing it now), but more meaningful discussions on politics, especially/primarily having to do with how they crossed with tech.

But everything crosses over with tech: finance, the current state of the market, importing and exporting, taxes, surveillance, censorship, encryption, copyright, patents, freedom to tinker, wars, weapons, government contracting, military contracting, corporate structure, etc. etc.

There wasn't this random immigration outrage bait pointing out 1 of the 80 people in a particular month who were shot by law enforcement for no good reason, but there was plenty about immigration because techies are immigrants and hire immigrants, and outsourcing, and working with a remote team in the middle of the night, etc. etc.

The only thing that was absolutely deemed "politics" and excluded eventually was discussions of women and black people in tech.

AI is just the new Rust, is the new X in javascript, is the new concurrency/Erlang, and so on. All of those things are still important; none of them went away or are going away.

I think heavy moderation serves to keep some variety, and to simply throw away the 9000th iteration of the same thread that never goes anywhere. AI stories aren't bad; it's the same AI stories, again, that are bad.

HN has always had political discussions as long as I've been here.

Discussions about open drug use and Bay area housing policy and California highspeed rail are political.

Discussions about Snowden and the NSA are political.

Discussions about the FSF and copyleft are political.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." -- Heraclitus

I’m guilty of some political debates here no doubt but man it seems like there have been a lot new accounts lately coming in red hot and starting fights