HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago

david927

HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.

Bender

The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and enhancing them assuming LLM's can do such a thing. The voting ring detector probably needs some tuning as well. I can't tell if the goal is to poison the search engines and AI platforms so nobody can find the original open source programs or what else may be going on. Robert Hanlon said, never attribute to malice... , well I do.

dang

This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016) Examples are legion. Here are a couple others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020) I don't know of any good way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.

lellow

As someone who has been coming here for the past 8 years, I can't comment on "10-15 years" ago, but my experience hasn't changed a bit. This is and has been the only place where I visit almost daily (new account if you are looking at my profile) - and this is during vacation, during work, during weekends, etc. There is ALWAYS, literally, always an interesting discussion happening on topics that I would never be part of, if it wasn't for someone starting the discussion here. Yeh, today there is a bunch of AI, bla, bla, bla... so what will be next?! Not sure, but I know it will be here.

mirmor23

recently, you were rambling on-and-on about how netbsd was not a good desktop setup, even though netbsd primary usecase is embedded systems. nobody owes you anything; so just read threads that are interesting and ignore the rest; if that is not acceptable, why don't you be the change you wish to see in the world?

opan

The LLM stuff is tiresome, but how is retro stuff even comparable? Maybe I'm not seeing what you're seeing, but I generally think people tinkering with old Mac OS stuff is cool. Though I'd rather OS X than Classic, as the unix-y bits are part of the cool factor for me. I do like the fonts and visuals of Classic, though. LLM posts are like when a new meme template comes out and gets run into the ground everywhere you look, but someone tinkering with old computers just seems like normal human hacker interests. Perhaps you could argue that too much nostalgia is a bad thing. I have been hearing "frutiger aero" a disturbing amount the last year or so.

Ancalagon

My account is nearly 10 years old (wow). I dont think its more dead afaict. It is more full of AI posts than ever, and AI-built slop show and tells.

bellowsgulch

I wouldn't say it's dead, but the commenters are noticeably of lower quality compared to a 15+ years ago. I think that's natural given HN's age and popularity, but I don't recall so many confidently incorrect posters frustrating SMEs and Dan and whomever is left moderating can't police it all.

brudgers

I used the HN |Past| feature to go back 15 years. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-06-08 There are three articles about Steve Jobs. To me LLM's are a more intellectually interesting cargo-cult than that cult of personality cargo-cult, but YMMV.