I'm interested in almost every item on the hn front page from 3 years ago. Now I'm usually interested in only about 25% of them. I wonder what's changed, me or hn?
Probably half and half. I read less than half of the stuff on HN now.
Part of it is a lot of it is not new now. I've read a lot about the lean startups, or joel's ben and jerry vs amazon, or mel the programmer, or the 500 mile email. I've been here long enough to have seen repeats of the same themes. As you grow, the less things surprise you, and hence perhaps less interesting.
And the other part is that I don't really care for the apple gossip, or a picture of woz, or the lighter stuff, but then again, I've only sporatically submitted stuff too.
I've noticed you've submitted less stuff and don't participate as much. The edw519 era has gone, where you submitted stuff and commented. Nowadays, it's the patio11 era, where he submits his own stuff and comments.
Oh I sure hope not. I love building things. I love hacker news. And I love talking about building things on hacker news.
It just seems that lately, I've been doing a whole lot more building than talking. Whenever I take my hn breaks, not much on the front page jumps out at me, so I just get right back to work. (This is a good thing).
It's probably just another phase. For the edw519 era to be truly gone, they'd have to pry my keyboard from my OCD hands.
A lot of people whose karma otherwise rate leaderboard status have been manually removed (especially pg).
In nickb's case, it's likely because his account has been dormant for almost a year. He may have passed away (http://markenomics.com/item?id=395) but it's also likely he just decided to take his leave of Hacker News and a number of other online communities.
When I first found HN I would eat up every design and technical story. I was all "w00t new knowledge!". Now I look at half the stories and go "bah, I bet that guy just discovered closures" or whatever. Amusingly, at that time I had been looking for a new "way technical" community to learn from, and now I'm here going "man, either HN sucks or i need to level-up". Looking at the 3 years ago page, I realized I need to go level-up.
If you're comparing your current interest in two iterations of hn, presumably it's hn that's changed.
For myself, if anything I'm more interested in today's front page, but there's not much in it. And I'm more into the hacking aspect than startups specifically, which might be relevant.
> FWIW, I've seen no discernible drop in quality since I registered here about a year ago.
It already changed by the time you joined. News.yc used to be primarily about subjects that interested entrepreneurial programmers. It still is to a degree but now it's mainly another variant of Slashdot.
A search on Slashdot for "lean startup" returns zero relevant results. Maybe Slashdot's search is just busted, but I suspect your comparison is a tad hyperbolic.
I went to Slashdot recently and there were a bunch of upvoted posts defending the Enterprise Robustness of JavaEE and sneering at those Ruby-using fools, so I'd say HN is (fortuantely) not quite Slashdot.
PG: "As of today we've expanded the focus of news.ycombinator.com from news about startups to news interesting to hackers generally. To reflect that we've changed the name to Hacker News."
"The goal is not to have just articles about hacking, but articles of interest to hackers. We're not trying to make something like programming.reddit.com, but something like www.reddit.com was in 2006."
Exactly what I was thinking.
--
Update 4/4/07: We haven't launched yet, but we are admitting people into the beta. We'd be happy to keep you posted about the beta program and launch (your email won't be used for anything else.)
Also interesting to note that there are 50 stories on the front page instead of 30. Was loading 20 more stories really that inefficient that this had to be dropped?
I'm glad it's not called "Startup News" any more. I probably would have just glanced at the page and left. And then where would I find the kind of techy, software development article links that I regularly add to my company's wiki?
Ah how times have changed. Two of those top stories were submitted by me (albeit, not very interesting ones). I haven't submitted a front page story in ages.
Did anyone else open the page in a new tab and forget about it, and then later on wonder why the heck every link on the HN front page went to archive.org?
It was crazy confusing until I noticed the address bar.
I have some occasional complaints, but I like it how it is now, and it seems to be handling growth reasonably well. I vaguely remember reading it when it was Startup News, but I feel like I've absorbed most of the "common startup knowledge" already, hence those articles are ones my eyes drift pass. There was also a lot more overt pg-fandom in the early site.
While there are less "start a thread without a URL" discussions on the HN front page these days, I still value greatly the HN discussion about the links.
Quite a lot more emphasis on startups. I like the current mix of news more (I wasn't here back then), but the original crew apparently doesn't like it that much (I've seen complains about us new readers turning this into the new Slashdot/Reddit/whatever)
The page back then feels like a small village community. There aren't a crazy number of comments, just a few tacit ones. Today, HN feels like as if the small village had a gold rush of visitors and "tourists."
