I have the exact opposite experience. When I started reading here maybe 2 or 2.5 years ago, it was mostly about starting and running software businesses - all aspects of it, from interesting programming problems to HR and taxes. It was a refuge from the JoS 'Business of Software' boards when they started going down the drain.
Nowadays, it seems like there are much more people complaining about how articles about economics or making money aren't 'hackery' enough. It's what I dislike about Reddit for the few time I read it; HN is (used to be?) full of people who either run or want to run software businesses, and want to provide actual value with software (and have it validated by getting people to pay for it) rather than doing some code experiments for the fun of it with no other users than themselves in mind. There are many 'programmer' forums, the amount of 'software business' forums is minuscule.
Okay, point taken. But now ask yourself whether the following are things that you're looking for in the "software business" forum you describe:
advertising, or "SEO" in various guises, people selling their useless web app, pushing their own affiliate links, breathless chortling over the lastest gray areas to investigate for reducing their taxes, or promoting their own blog
- advertising: yes (I'm assuming this is 'how to do advertising', not 'advertising for someone else's product)
- SEO: yes (same)
- people selling useless web app: this is just how you look at it; in many cases, it's people who want feedback on their experimental ideas. Which I think is fine.
- ppl pushing affiliate links: no, but they didn't used to be here, either
- tax optimisation: yes
- blog promotion: as long as they're blogs on the topics of the forum, yes
Many things on the list are described in a negative way, so it's only natural that they're undesirable. But I don't see them that often (like affiliate links - they're quite rare as far as I can tell) and I used to think that Youtube was useless, too.
Nowadays, it seems like there are much more people complaining about how articles about economics or making money aren't 'hackery' enough. It's what I dislike about Reddit for the few time I read it; HN is (used to be?) full of people who either run or want to run software businesses, and want to provide actual value with software (and have it validated by getting people to pay for it) rather than doing some code experiments for the fun of it with no other users than themselves in mind. There are many 'programmer' forums, the amount of 'software business' forums is minuscule.