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by gue5t 2912 days ago
Glad to be able to upvote an article like this.

The prevalence of articles about things that aren't software or hardware hacking, combined with the site's increased popularity lowering the bar for technical content to be considered worthwhile, and its occupancy of a critical position in the cultural namespace ("hacker news" is a really good name but not descriptive of the actual focus of the site--the hacker ethic is anticapitalist rather than neoliberal), make HN a really tragic institution these days.
1 comments
badcede 2912 days ago
"Glad to be able to upvote an article like this."

"The prevalence of articles about things that aren't software or hardware hacking"

"tragic"

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jschwartzi 2912 days ago
What's your point?
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ghostbrainalpha 2912 days ago
I think he is saying that he original comment is hypocritical.

The person is glad to upvote this particle non technical article.

But they think its tragic that non technical articles are bring down the quality of the site.

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gue5t 2912 days ago
Yep. I think the site is in a tragic place, but it's not for a lack of technical articles (or I'd submit them) but instead for cultural reasons (the majority of the userbase doesn't want HN to be a purely technical forum). Changing the culture has to be done via concerted effort in that direction, not by simply voting for the things I want to see in the end. Second-order effects and so on.
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dang 2912 days ago
HN has never been a purely technical forum. Its DNA is in the overlap between "anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity" and "anything that good hackers would find interesting": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The word 'anything' appears twice in the 'On-Topic' section. HN's early years amounted to "anything that pg would find interesting", and he finds a lot of things interesting. So when I read your comment, what I hear is that HN is staying true to its original mission. That doesn't seem like a tragic place for the site, nor a new one.

For example, people sometimes have the perception that HN has grown more political over time. The opposite is true, as I tried to show here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. Such perceptions are externalities that exist for other reasons.

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