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
That's an interesting way of putting it. I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business. What you're seeing is simply that at scale, politics is inextricable from tech+business, just as, at scale, business is inextricable from tech.

>>rayine+i2
I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business.

It was tech+business before it was tech: The site started out as "Startup News" (which is when I personally have my fondest memories of it).

>>abstra+I4
I like that name better. There's nothing "hacker" about this.