[angersock]

If you actually value technical content, there are better sites. HN has been catering primarily to entrepreneurs for the last several years. The community normalized political discussion and content marketing a while back, and from those depths it is difficult to return.

I have theories on how sites like this evolve, but will refrain from brain-dumping unless folks are interested.

[ceterum_censeo]

I'd like to hear your theories. Also, a few suggestions for the sites that you mention.

[angersock]

Sure.

When I joined this site 5 years ago, I justified my viewing it at work as a one-order-removed from my job. I learned a lot, I was exposed to web development and other things for the first time, and I eventually caught the entrepreneur itch and pursued it because HN had given me both the knowledge and the inspiration. I thank pg and YC for that.

That said, over the last few years I've noticed some things:

Content quality is getting drastically less technical. In the submission guidelines, the rule is nominally "Anything that good hackers would find interesting.". The problem is that people are focusing on "interesting" not on "good hackers". Often stories that seem like good reads but are utterly unrelated to computing get posted here, just because somebody wanted to read about politics or history or nifty product demos or popsci clickbait. Things that should never make it here are put up just because they are interesting, not because they are interesting-to-good-hackers. This is an anti-pattern.

Content marketing clutters up the submissions. A lot of stories here are basically junk "Hey check out our API (and buy our service!)" or "Let me write some platitudes about vaguely software-related stuff so that you'll click my company links at the end of the post". This sort of growth-hacking is exactly the playbook espoused by YC-style startups, which is fine, but in this case they're making HN less valuable for all of us by treating it like a cheap clearinghouse for advertising to devs. At times the frontpage feels like a less green, easier-to-read feed of TechCrunch (and that sucks!).

The users don't respect each other when submitting stories. A lot of users clearly see the site as a way of throwing up links to self-promote or to ask dumb questions or to navel-gaze on Valley drama that doesn't affect everyone else. They don't really contribute outside of their own submission threads, they post clickbait, they do drive-by advertising, and generally waste bandwidth.

The users don't respect each other when writing comments. It's very difficult to have a civil discussion in most threads these days when you have a significant difference of opinion, because you get downvoted remorselessly. It also seems to me that the default attitude of assuming good-faith posting and engaging with the same courtesy has gone away, being replaced with lazy baiting and ad hominem attacks and namecalling--things which people get away with as long as they are following the HN crowd orthodoxies, which makes it even more harmful.

There is active suppression of user opinions from other orthodoxies. Flag-killing and heavy moderation serve to create an echo chamber, but here more importantly to radicalize and make even more obnoxious and disrespectful rude posters. If somebody has had multiple threads detached because they rubbed the mods the wrong way (hi dang!), they're less likely to actually try and write good replies. Instead, you end up with a bunch of garbage sockpuppet accounts or just outright spam as people get frustrated at being ignored and no longer feel like they need to craft words and be polite. The site doesn't respect the users, so the users don't respect the site. It's rubbish.

Anyways, as for other sites, I could probably give you some via the email in my profile. For obvious reasons--e.g., I don't want to make it easy for the same bad posters and culture that has pervaded this site to spread--I won't mention them here for the lazy.