I feel like there's been a slight creep in people posting articles about recession, polictics, current events because they believe that these things are important to this audience. It all still falls within "Hacker News".
I think people may have formed an internal model about the sort of things they think appropriate for this (or any such site) and get concerned when a submitted article doesn't conform to this. I feel it occasionally on programming.reddit.com, sometimes there are articles there that seem to be on there purely because it mentions the word "computer" or "internet".
But to my surprise when I visited archive.org and pulled up the front page from just over a year ago I see:
Thanks for pulling up that page. I have to take the opposite viewpoint, though, and say that I like that page much more than the ones I've seen recently here. Of course, back then, it was all startup-related, so that makes some difference.
I'm in the US, but I'm fed up with our politics and recession, and seeing how flawed the system is is just depressing. That's why I only visited the politics sub-Reddit for about a month before I quit going, and now I see some of the same discussions here in submissions and comment threads.
I also think you're right about the internal model. For me, though, my internal model of Hacker News isn't just about what I think is appropriate in a website, but what I think adds value to my life. When the site doesn't meet the model, it is inherently less valuable to me.
I will not go anywhere instead of Hacker News. I might pop in a couple times a month to see the "hacker sentiment" and to be referred to some interesting blog posts, but my overall goal is to waste less time on the computer and spend more time getting real things done.
I think people may have formed an internal model about the sort of things they think appropriate for this (or any such site) and get concerned when a submitted article doesn't conform to this. I feel it occasionally on programming.reddit.com, sometimes there are articles there that seem to be on there purely because it mentions the word "computer" or "internet".
But to my surprise when I visited archive.org and pulled up the front page from just over a year ago I see:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...
There really isn't much change at all in the sort of articles being posted.
Out of curiosity, where will you go instead of HN? I've not encountered anything better than this place yet - the high comment quality especially.