[mtalantikite]

Well, HN used to be much more technical early on, so I'm sure some would argue it's already happened.

Long gone are the days of waking up to a front page full of Erlang posts in an attempt to scare off the general public whenever there was press about HN. I think it's been accepted that HN is more just general interest about startups these days.

[dang]

I don't think that HN is less technical than it used to be. It has always had mixed content. Perceptions of it are perennially mixed as well—someone was just asking me why there hasn't been much startup news on HN lately.

[johnward]

I still think HN is full of mostly relevant discussion and a good bit of it is higher quality than you find elsewhere. I really think it's still reddit before reddit became mainstream. Reddit was technical/intellectually focused from what I remember. Now it's a bunch of trolls in most places (some sub reddits seem to avoid this). Hopefully HN is niche enough to stay about where it is now.

[mtalantikite]

I don't know, as I'm writing this there are about 7-10 posts that are actually technical on the front page. The rest are product announcements or fluff tech articles from Wired. Actually, some of these technical posts (like GHC passes in Coq) are feature announcements as well.

That's not to say I don't enjoy HN, it's great, but I certainly could use less of the "Show HN" startup announcements on the front page or techcrunch articles that are about nothing.

[dang]

I really think this is whatever that bias is where we rewrite our memories to match how we feel about the past.

As long as we're taking random samples, let's see what, say, November 2010 looked like:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101119073443/http://news.ycomb...

How about March 2008? (I'm picking these arbitrarily...)

https://web.archive.org/web/20080327223917/http://news.ycomb...

If either of those front pages showed up today, people would be complaining very loudly about HN's steep decline.

[mtalantikite]

Yeah, I guess the takeaway is that Wired and Techcrunch have been terrible for a long time ;)

I still find both of those archive grabs more interesting. They're certainly not all posts just for the neckbeards, that's not what ever drew me to HN, but they don't lean so heavy towards "Show HN: Please look at my startup".