zlacker

>>uuilly+(OP)
As far as I can tell, this is the third major shift in the tone of the site. When it first started out there was a lot more technology discussion, but quickly the whole VC/fundraising aspect became very prominent. Recently, legal issues have become very prominent.

I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to take off after the Wall Street meltdown, after other financial avenues darkened (remember all those articles a couple of years ago about "why we're in a bubble/are we in a bubble?"). Right now, a number of legal issues are impacting technology (software patents, NSA spying, etc) and hackers are unsurprisingly interested in discussing them.

I don't think these are necessarily bad trends. I think you're seeing a bit of the maturing of tech industry and you're seeing that reflected in the discussion. But there is still a lot of great technical discussion on the site (the front page right now has a great story on a scanner bug, a compilers blog post, a theorem-prover as programming language article, etc).

And at the end, what happened to Slashdot is that reddit happened and all the smart people left, and what happened to reddit is that Hacker News happened and all the smart people left. Until there is a credible alternative to HN, I think you'll still see a lot of signal, even if there is more noise than there used to be.

>>rayine+P1
The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical, intelligent tech+business discussion.

>>nerfha+92
HN needs tagging or even general categories, so we can filter topics out.

>>zalew+m2
SOLVE IT WITH TEH TECKNOlOGIES!

>>grogen+vb
Heh. But to be fair, different technologies encourage different usage patterns, and it's reasonable to investigate how, given a goal, technological solutions could be applied. I'm plenty leery of "solutionism" [1], but that's not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] Evgeny Morozov's coinage, see: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/evgeny-morozo...

>>jfb+vc
I'm a fan of Morozov too, and yeah, topic organization on discussion boards is a task that can actually be solved with technology :)