[brudgers]

I think the change in proportion of news devoted to startups is at least partially driven by changes to business journalism and business in general. Covering startups as startups is much more common in mainstream business journalism. Culturally, "startup" has become associated with a larger cluster of concepts than it was five years ago and it is not surprising when I see a new small business referred to as a startup. A few years ago, 10 Strategies for Marketing my Startup would be more likely to fall in the intersection of useful and actionable and interesting. These days the level of general knowledge about startups is higher (e.g. Altman's Stanford class and recent handbook). There was a time when "growth hacking" was an HN "trending topic". Today, we live in a time where it's been dissected and found to be a poor fit for a startup's core business strategy.

The third factor is that I think the standards of HN have become higher. Many of the VC blogs that used to make the front page look a bit flat compared to today's median...it used to be that the the 200-500 word daily thoughts and opinions of "important" people made the front page despite lacking supporting evidence. These days that seems less common.