zlacker

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+(OP)
You have it backwards. For the first few months of existence, Hacker News was called "Startup News."

>>rayine+(OP)
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+k
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.

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

>>rayine+(OP)
Yeah, from what I can remember political stories on Slashdot weren't narrowly focused on technology-related issues like they generally seem to be on here.

>>rayine+t
For me, the issue is that the legal and political (and to a growing degree, the business) discussions here are totally uninteresting; I'm not particularly interested in engaging in those sorts of conversations anywhere. But there are so many really great posters who have such strong, smart technical opinions that I keep coming back.

Tagging might help, at least at the story submission level.

>>nerfha+k
I can discuss politics with politicians and economics with economists, but I still like to discuss both with people I like for no other reason than because I like them.

It also offers a different perspective.

>>rayine+(OP)
I think this is all true, and I try not to confuse the inevitable drift of the zeitgeist away from my interests with a value judgement of the site as a whole. Things change; raging against the dying of the light isn't really worth the heartache; some place else will arise, organically (e.g. not through a "Show HN" link) and those of us who want to move on, will.

>>zalew+x
Almost like... subreddits!

>>zanny+s2
almost like every publishing media ever. the general design of HN is to be simplistic, but with the current popularity it doesn't scale.

IMO even [strictly tech] [everything else] would work, although I'd prefer a more advanced option to filter out stuff.

>>rayine+t
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).

>>zanny+s2
Indeed! This exact same conversation happened on reddit several years ago. The community became diverse enough that a large group of users didn't like the posts the other groups up votes to the homepage. There were initial suggestiona that tags were the best solution but the reddit gang put together subressits and it's been the greatest change to the site since it started.

Looking forward to subscribing to the best sub-hackernewses.

>>zanny+s2
Each Reddit post only goes on one subreddit, but if HN allows posts to have more than one tag, then it could be active in several sub-HNs, one for each tag.

This is the same difference as between traditional email folders and gmail tags.

>>rayine+(OP)
What was the theorem-prover as programming language article? I can't seem to find it.

>>zanny+s2
Maybe more like how lobste.rs allows you to filter out topics you aren't interested it.

>>zalew+x
SOLVE IT WITH TEH TECKNOlOGIES!

>>grogen+G9
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...

>>cabala+56
Wait, I can put a message in 2 IMAP folders... So how are tags different?

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

>>Housha+57
I was wondering the same. I think this is the one the OP meant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156016

>>nerfha+k
Where?

I can't think of anywhere that I can read a discussion on technology politics that's actually dominated by informed, educated technologists. With the best will in the world, the Guardian Comment Is Free section or /r/news doesn't have the quality of commentary.

>>zalew+x
You mean like hubski?

http://hubski.com/

>>abstra+T2
I like that name better. There's nothing "hacker" about this.

>>stock_+S8
It looks interesting, but, what is it?