I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.
HN does not have extensive server costs. Last I saw (~10 years ago) it was running off a single machine in a closet. Apparently they've since moved to two machines at a hosting company.
It's no more ironic than the thousands of Google-related topics on this site that focus on their technology, and almost entirely ignores their ad business that holds up the entire operation and drives their strategy.
If Google drops some pet projects we'll see the same predictable stream of comments blaming ladder-climbing PMs, MBA management, H1B employees, everything other than the simplest explanation, that the powers that be got tired of subsidizing it with the one line of business that actually makes money.
the relationship this forum has to the VC is similar to what a lot of forums had to their operators. There is little direct revenue gathering here - the VCs make money in other ways and spend a small fraction of it on this forum. At most, they advertise their other activities sometimes. The whole web used to be like this.
I come here largely to find out what VC money (and the culture around it) is doing because it affects me (and everyone). Don't mistake that for supporting what VC money is doing.
HN is only as good as dang makes it. There are a ton of other link aggregators out there, many more “free” than this. Yet here we are. Why? Because the folks behind this link aggregator pay dang to be here.
There is obviously also a network effect at play here that makes people unwilling to explore new options. But just like MySpace, Facebook or tumblr showed you can always ruin a good thing and eventually people will move onto greener pastures.
However, I love love love Hackernews and dang is one of the main reasons this little internet place became such an oasis for the intellectually curious, and interesting as well as serious conversation.
What are they? Can you link to them? Would love to see what else is out there!
Personally I don't care much for discussion about web programming really, but more general tech news(fusion, space and the related politics).
And yet no successful link aggregator has ever been "free" or "open" in a meaningful sense.
Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of people, with no recourse or accountability.
I've been listening to users lamenting "the tech to avoid centralized control doesn't exist" etc. for 20 years, but it definitely does exist today, and it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.
I think the problem is simply the network effect. Reddit and Twitter are just hard to beat, maybe threads, utilizing the massive Instagram user base managed but I haven't heard anyone use it and I don't think you can force it
The fediverse gets all those centralization advantages without being centralized. However there are not (yet!) the quantity of people needed to make it work.
Depends on what you want. some places you can find just as high quality. There is a lot of junk out there to wage through. They also have a "allergic reaction" to the thought of an algorithm to curate feeds which throws the good out with the bad.
More like which niche. I find transit advocates do a lot on mastodon. There are also a lot of great open source projects (the curl maintainer posts some interesting stuff). Those are niches I'm interested in though, YMMV in anything else.
Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?
