[PragmaticPulp]

I don't mind the political discussions coming through as long as they don't dominate the front page.

However, I am saddened with the diminishing engagement with actual hard tech stories (not tech opinion pieces) that reach the front page. Lately, it seems like links to stories about people doing cool software or hardware things with complete write-ups can barely muster enough upvotes to stay on the front page very long, if at all. The comments occasionally yield some fun further discussions, but not like they did 5+ years ago on HN. It seems the interests of the average HN upvoter (who ultimately shapes what we see on the front page) are shifting more toward the political and controversy type pieces.

[Sebb767]

You can use the classic frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

It uses the same algorithm, but only counts upvotes from accounts created before 2012 (iirc).

EDIT: I was slightly off, the deadline is 2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...

[pydry]

I was expecting that to be markedly different from the current front page but it looks very similar to me.

[tacitusarc]

Everyone wants to talk, no one wants to listen.

But it’s pretty obvious on “hard tech stories” that few people have the knowledge to meaningfully contribute.

As I get older, the saying “it’s better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” resonates more and more.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

On the other hand, it is difficult to learn anything if you are unwilling to make mistakes, that is, to be thought a fool sometimes. And on the gripping hand, I find that intentionally asserting something you think might be wrong in an effort to provoke someone into correcting you is often much more effective than asking a question.

[BeFlatXIII]

IMO, it's because it's easy to understand and upvote non-tech stories compared to actual tech discussion. Even if you're a technical person, the article may be about a niche on the opposite side of the industry from where your knowledge lies, so you can't parse whether it's brilliant or nonsense. Non-tech stories are typically much easier to form opinions over, for better and worse.

[mensetmanusman]

This is an interesting point, it would be cool if HN allowed arbitrary hidden tags to be added by users.

By definition, as the site becomes more popular, more obscure technologies/projects will be pushed to the edges, especially when it comes to the front page.

Having a more robust search and tagging system would help with that, it’s analogous to how Reddit had to move to a vast number of sub-Reddit‘s once it got popular.