This is an important topic, but why post it here on HN? More and more posts are general news now. There are so many places for these discussions other than a technology oriented message board.
I've been reading for 10+ years and it seems to come in waves. Usually it clears up after a few posters push back. I rarely complain about it, but the past few months seemed to be especially high volume. I posted a few comments to signal that awareness. To me, that's participating in my community.
I've read the guidelines many times. The second paragraph seems to indicate this post would be off-topic.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I appreciate your caring about the quality of HN! With users who care, we can hopefully survive.
There's a fat but fuzzy area in the Venn diagram where these things overlap - for example some stories are both intellectually interesting and have a political dimension. Those stories, or at least some of them, can still be on topic for HN. Opinions inevitably differ about which ones belong vs. which ones should be excluded.
The feeling that HN has changed significantly in recent months or even recent years is often due to random (or maybe seasonal) fluctuations. It usually reverts back. For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
For what it's worth, I've been looking at HN front-page activity since 2007. I've recently classified the most frequently-appearing sites to give a breakdown of what type of content appears on the front page (as typified by site). Taking two arbitrary years, 2009 (after HN got reasonably established) and 2022 (most recent full year data), what's notable is that general news sites are less prevalent, and that programming content (mostly links to specific languages and/or source repos) more prevalent in the more recent period.
- The "(mean)" columns have bad data, I need to fix my code. The others should be reasonable.
- "UNCLASSIFIED" are sites I've not manually classified. They tend to follow roughly the same overall distribution, though more blogs and fewer news sources.
- "n/a" are posts without a site, typically an "Ask", "Tell", "Who's Hiring", or similar post.
Keep in mind that even "general news" is often about science, technology, or tech-adjacent business, legislation, court decisions, etc.
Update on the votes/comments/mean values: turns out that the votes and comments counters were also bad, given my accumulator code (I'd thought this was a reporting issue). The story counts are legit however.
(I was counting "stories" as both "votes" and "comments", which is obvious on eyeballing the values. The difference between "++" and "+= votes / += comments". Sigh.)
It is, however, very much against too much repetition of the same few topics, and this is probably one of those.