At any time there are multiple articles about “obscure hacking” topics on the front page. Right now there are 10, by my count - though others may count fewer of course. But when I talk to hacker types about HN, they always comment on the cool obscure articles they find here.
All the content can’t always by obscure, can it? Surely if everything is obscure, nothing is.
This seems like a non sequitur from your original complaint (not enough obscure tech content).
But still, this is not my perception at all. HN gets many fantastic comments from people sharing their perspective of their home location and culture. I’m in Melbourne and over the years have written plenty of comments about life in my city and country that were solidly upvoted and well received.
It’s natural that a lot of the discussion on a tech forum will focus on SV being the place where most of the biggest tech companies are, but the real value in HN is the long tail of unique content and comments from all over the world.
As I mentioned in another comment [1], the “notice-dislike” bias, often mentioned here by dang, is a powerful phenomenon, which can lead us to focus too much on what we dislike and overlook the stuff that we do like and that is right there to be found if we take a moment to notice it.
A lot of discussion is US centric. Even to the point where people will bring up esoteric Prop-xx legal references and be upvoted as if that is at all relevant in a global context.
I don’t believe the 10% number of SV participation. If it really is 10% I want to know the percentage of contributing commenters.
For instance, I have seen very little Melbourne centric content at all here. Perhaps Canva (though that’s Sydney) and only because of their insane valuation and relationship back into the valley.
Given the Timezone difference, there should be a time period where Australian content dominates, but I don’t even see that.
There is absolutely a time window when you’re more likely to see articles about Australia here; late afternoon and evening when people in the US should be asleep (notwithstanding the number of insomniac hackers likely to exist in a country of 330M people).
Recently there have been big discussions about the Vic earthquake, the Vic/NSW pandemic response, the new military alliance, and there are always big discussions about new Australian laws relating to surveillance and tech/media interference.
You won’t get a time where Melbourne or Sydney dominates every day, as there are many other major cities awake during the same time (there are plenty of big stories about Europe during the US quiet period). And big stories about FAANG companies will always get a lot of traffic/discussion as they affect people around the world fairly equally.
> A lot of discussion is US centric
I didn’t and don’t dispute that. But the claim was that content/discussion about/by topics/people elsewhere is almost completely drowned out, which is not accurate. It’s an understandable perception, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you look closely at the stories and comments.
There is just as much tech/innovation/startups happening in China… but you wouldn’t know reading HN.
And there are always plenty of Show HNs and other discussions from elsewhere in Asia, particularly India of course, but also Japan and Singapore.
Much of it you may not be aware of, as it's often not explicitly stated in titles or intros.
I don't see that person making that point.
> It’s natural that a lot of the discussion on a tech forum will focus on SV being the place where most of the biggest tech companies are
It isn't from a hacker perspective. Hacker culture is about what you can do yourself. If the homebrew computer club had been the IBM club things might have looked very differently.
> but the real value in HN is the long tail of unique content and comments from all over the world.
The complaint is that it isn't unique but usually the same narrative. You'll find plenty of Europeans on hacker news complaining about Europe. The reality is that most things are easier in Europe than in most of the US. That isn't a hard case to make. It just isn't popular.
> As I mentioned in another comment [1], the “notice-dislike” bias, often mentioned here by dang
That there is a given explanation isn't that surprising. Like when someone thinks there is a political bias on hacker news they always got in response that there can't be one because both left and right thinks there is. But that is just how a liberal bias would look like. Those more to the left would think it's too economically liberal and those more the right would think it's too culturally so. Yet the same explanation continues.
If you look at the front page now most of the technical topics aren't really current. "SSH Tunneling", "HN 15 Years ago", "NSA (2014)", "Lisp", "ScummVM", "V-USB", "Super Mario 64", "Amiga 68000", "Amiga 3000T". Those aren't really topics that requires current knowledge to discuss. On the other hand there are 3 current stories about Facebook. It's hacker nostalgia combined with a SV narrative. Which would be fine if it didn't result in current technical and hacker perspective topics clashing with that narrative.
I do realize that this is meaningless. I don't even read hacker news that much anymore. But there is my 2 cents.
Is that even true? I feel (as in: likely a misperception) that I learn more about life in Berlin these days on hn than from real life, and I have visited many times, trains run twice an hour and I have friends and family there. Sure, there's the occasional council level politics topics about some SV thing but that's rare.
Plenty of platforms offer hard focus on a topic, for any topic, no scarcity on that front. The achievement of hn is broadness of scopewithout losing identity. It's great.
In US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918
Which US state: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370
Worldwide: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647
https://imgur.com/a/xOAvftj for charts https://pastebin.com/77KGTfwe for data
If 90% of usage is outside SV, that leaves plenty of room for content/discussion that is not focused on SV, which is exactly what we see.
But let’s not get into a debate about the meaning of vague terms like “heavily” :)
This is of course a subjective view coming from my observations that I often learn new management/marketing terms that i shouldn't be learning, being constantly perplexed by the career ladders mentioned, and learning about tools that are useless to anyone but google.
Also don't forget the constant shilling about various paid services that are the second coming of christ until the next second coming.