I still used to frequent it all the way up to last month, for some interesting discussions. But now… it’s really become AI-pro[1] and any post that even hints about AI existentialism gets immediately cut down.
I find it hard to browse the site anymore, and lament the loss of expert tech discussion in my weekly routine.
Yes, I know it’s been that way for a while, but either I’m feeling it more or the bots have gamed the website to the point that all you see are announces from big tech companies or people going on about their AI solutions ↩︎
I’ve always found HN to be tech bro centric but I do end up clicking through to there sometimes from the lemmy repost bots. I was always surprised at the anti ai sentiment. Maybe try to find one of the repost bots and just click through for the open source and hn makes (or whatever they are called when people show their projects) threads? Not surprising that the major posts are all taken over though. I feel like a forum run by a VC firm is the ideal place to test ai engagement and comment bots.
It was inevitable in that respect that the VC’s interests would start to reflect on how the forum was managed due to the financial incentive, but I just assumed that they were smart enough to not boil the frog like every other for-profit media site because they would lose the tech crowd who are the first to notice when they’re being boiled.
I do wonder who their audience is now. I can’t see them going the way of reddit and enticing in the non-tech crowd, because then… what would HN’s identity even be?