Browsing the front page feels homogeneous these days.

It seems like what gets voted to the top these days are no longer "things people find interesting" but are all either boring "big industry news", or common-denominator topics that people have contentious opinions about rather than any real novelty.

Does anyone else feel similarly that there are hardly any interesting or different or quirky topics that gets voted up these days?

You can email good submissions to Dang and see if he'll put them on the frontpage. I did this and it was a success here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608645

Forgive me for assuming you’ve only been reading a handful of years based on your registration date. I think everyone gets up to speed with it and finds less to read as topic familiarity, muscle memory, knowledge of community tropes matures. Everyone is different as far as how many articles will interest them. If you joined when a topic that greatly interested you was popular, then you’re especially going to feel that falloff. Regardless, there must still be many stories of the type that interest you. My recommendations are to slow down reading a bit, so you see more new stories when you read HN, and to subscribe to something like Hacker Newsletter that’ll pull together the most interesting stories every few days.

agreed. I previously spent like the last 15+ years checking hacker news every morning at the start of the day but within last year I've found the content to be less interesting and hacker news has lost its stickiness.

The values are not what they once were. Curiosity and creation have given way to summarization and generation.

Fully agreed. It's also that the interesting stuff quickly falls off the front page, and you have to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active to find it.

I just wish there were more articles about <EU government agency> moving to a European version of <workplace productivity tool>. 10 a day just isn't enough.

I feel the pool is often way more fascinating than the actual front-pages nowadays.

https://lobste.rs/ feel more like old-HN

I find the preponderance of AI topics pretty dull myself. Doesn't interest me. Tell me about markup languages, weird science, fun games, interesting presentations, old programming languages, new programming languages, accessibility ...

And there's stories where the first comment is "reads like it's written by AI", it will make me far less likely to read the actual article, because I find AI writing somewhat nauseating.

Fully agreed.

Worth discussing.

https://skimfeed.com is literally the best frontend to HN.

I share your take, but I think from the other side of the coin -- I am frequently finding interesting topics [flagged] by the time I click through, and it's mildly infuriating.

“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”

― Trevanian, Shibumi

The thing is - people here find industry news and contentious topics (and AI) interesting. A lot of people here only find that interesting and would vehemently oppose anything else as "off-topic." I guess you could check the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) for decent stories, IDK.

boring