If you're not interested, don't read it. If you really think it shouldn't be on HN, flag it. Four other people feeling the same way will send it careening off the front page.
The least appropriate thing to do is come into the comments and bitch about how HN is turning into x.
It takes, iirc, 500 karma to be able to flag an article. So it would take 5 users with 500 karma each to knock it off.
It'd take a lot more effort than it was worth for a sockpuppeteer to do it, but I bet any company with 25+ employees could knock an article off the front page if they caught it early enough, and were able to marshall enough people to do it.
That, and I'm nearly certain HN has algorithms that will pick up on a group of people consistently flagging things together. PG hinted at it a while back.
It depends on what you expect to find on and get out of this site, I suppose.
If you're looking for "Hacker News", you're here. It's still here. It's still stuff that interests hackers and techies in general. Maybe I'm not a "real hacker", but both articles you've highlighted (MS CEO and EVE) are interesting to me.
If you're looking for "Startup News", I don't really know what to tell you. Perhaps that's what this place once was (and a lot of it still does cater in that direction), but there's a lot more interesting stuff out there than just that.
I didn't downvote you. Even if I had the capacity to downvote on HN (and I don't) I probably wouldn't have. I cannot say that your post doesn't warrant downvoting, but I am personally very strict when it comes to downvoting. It's not something that I do lightly.
But hey, thanks for the unwarranted assumption.
I think that your criticisms are fair, but I don't particularly appreciate the implication that those who vote differently than you don't belong here. Perhaps the type of content being posted here lately is indicative of a trend to you, but the fact remains that a lot of people on this site found the stories to be worthy of a front page spot. That's why they're there, and in the end they're really just a couple of "general news" articles amidst a sea of stuff I wouldn't expect to see on many other sites.
I won't tell you not to voice criticism - I think that's the wrong way to go about this. But do something other than compare HN to Site X and make snide remarks about downvotes. I see that you haven't made your own submission lately. Why not start there?
