> You can downvote me all you want: I have a shitload of this useless karma stuff that I built up on the old HN.

I, on the other hand, have built only a few small open source things. My karma consists overwhelming of political-related posts.

But I still liked HN better when I had nothing to contribute to the conversation, as there was always a comment to upvote which had already said what I had wanted to say.

It's a social site. HN members find those stories relevant.

Perhaps some people (including, you, I presume) don't care about surveillance, privacy, freedom of information and the like enough to want to highlight those issues on HN.

They'd rather talk about Google buying some company, how someone learned Golang and Node.js all day.

But I wouldn't call those people "hackers".

Not in the traditional cultural sense.

I don't understand the mental processes that lead you and others to think that if I don't enjoy politics taking over this site, then I must not care about the issues in question.

Another site I read often is www.cyclingnews.com - they have great coverage of professional bicycle racing, which I love to read about and watch.

You know what, though? I find politics annoying there too.

You know where I like to read about politics? The Economist is pretty good. www.corriere.it is pretty good for local stories. And there are other sources I read from time to time.

This site is a great place to talk about startups and tech. There aren't many of those. There are approximately 343244329165 sites where people can have inane discussions about things like whether the US is really "exactly like China and Russia".

>I don't understand the mental processes that lead you and others to think that if I don't enjoy politics taking over this site, then I must not care about the issues in question.

It's a very simple process.

People that like sites like this "segmented" and "pure" are mostly apolitical and don't care about the issues they want to expunge from them in the first place. I've seen such people in lots of other places.

Hackers tend to be all over the place. They tend to appreciate tech, science, politics, philosophy, Star Wars, startups, what have you, and to want to discuss it at the same time.

Kind of like PG discusses tons of things in his essays, not just tech or startups all the time.

>You know where I like to read about politics? The Economist is pretty good.

Not really the outlet for a hacker interested in politics, and especially the stuff we're discussing here. Actually, it's as far away from the traditional hacker culture as you can get -- and quite far from caring about privacy, surveillance, and the whole EFF spirit too.

It's basically a status quo rag for rich folks and middle class wannabes.

So you presume to know what I think and to judge me "not really a hacker" because of what I read? That's certainly the kind of open-minded thinking I'm a fan of.

PLONK

I think the point that the OP and others are trying to make is that there's plenty of places all over the world that satisfy those interests. Just because this site allows un-moderated user submissions and comments doesn't mean it's for general news. The OP and others (me included) are lamenting the fact that the popularist stories about social liberties are replacing the perhaps less popular stories about hardware design or compilers or new research in computer science. Unfortunately it has been demonstrated time and time again that popularity destroys communities.

On contemplation of Archive.org, I actually do agree with your first point. There wasn't 10 stories about the libertarian case du jour, but equally there wasn't a flood of interesting compSci stories. I guess my memory is selective!

>That makes no sense. Except if you take it to mean: the guys that were there earlier don't get what they like anymore, and more (and newer) people get it. Which is a pretty hipsterish sense ("Oh, that band was cool when only I liked it").

I really can't agree with this. In 10 (12?... Getting old I guess) years of online participation, I've seen time and time again relatively small forums and websites grow in user numbers and the quality of the popular submissions/threads/posts decline.

Perhaps a good example is Reddit. At one point it was a site for submitting links to news articles. The userbase was fairly heavily skewed towards tech and programmers. Looking at Archive.org from 2007 the front page is perhaps 1/3 programming related, 1/3 "interest" articles and 1/3 current events. There's not a single link to an image.

My belief is that when a site grows in popularity, and so the interests and backgrounds of the users expands, the posts that consistantly attract more interest or votes are those which appeal to the largest common aspect of the community - the community itself. Once Reddit was large enough to have its own in-jokes and themes, submissions related to those tended to receive lots of attention. I think many people enjoy belonging to online communities with injokes, and so once it started that shift the demographic of new users changed as well. In 2007 nobody would have strongly defined themselves as a "redditor" in the way that people do today because at that point it was nothing more than a site for sharing interesting news articles.

As someone who enjoys reading thought provoking articles (and sometimes commenting on them), I find it frustrating to see websites I like move towards lowest-common-denominator submissions. I'm no fan of "it was better in my day" baseless nostalgia, but Archive.org provides us a fairly effective window into the past and it is clear that many sites are today demonstrably different than they were a few years ago. I don't think it's elitist (or "hipsterish") to want to maintain the spirit and submission quality that was the basis for this sites popularity.