[thr0w]

I don't know about this analysis and its conclusions. I'll just use this as a jumping point to selfishly spout my own human observations.

For context, I'm someone who uses HN to search for topics I'm interested in, rather than something like Google or Reddit.

- For anything SF community-related, most hits are from 10+ years ago. Lots of "hey we have a space in soma, any local startups want to hang and drink beers?" or "we have an empty desk in a space in the mission, any hackers want to grab it for free?" - all from around 2012 or prior. Nothing like that seems to happen anymore.

- Starting from around 2016, a heavy anti-technology sentiment appears. Cloud, crypto, AI - all are nonsense propagated by VC types and overzealous engineers.

- Similarly, any thread involving money/labor invariably has an anti-capitalist and/or "unions would solve everything" tangent.

Would be interested to hear if others have observed similar.

[Karrot_Kream]

Yeah that’s roughly been my read too. I think the audience of the site changed. The user base has grown significantly. The site has gone from being about hacking (“hey here’s an empty desk”) to the culture of hackers at large (“tech was a mistake when it got invaded by VC hucksters”.)

TFA’s sentiment decrease tracks very closely with the huge uptick in user creation that started in 2022. HN isn’t really a tech site anymore, it’s about vibes. That makes sense given that in 2024 there’s a million places online talking about tech so HN only has its culture to distinguish itself. This wasn’t the case in 2008. The vibes here, along with the older demographics of the site, are increasingly nostalgic and cynical.

It'll all probably go the same way as Slashdot did which went through the same cycle (replace "VC huckster" with "Microsoft" and "surveillance capitalism" with "three letter agencies") until it too gets replaced by a site/community with energetic younger users creating new things.