Then why do esoteric conlangs reach front page? I hope most people on HN find tech interesting regardless of practicality

Because they are funny and tongue-in-cheek. If people were always seriously advocating that programming in PowerPoint was the future, they would probably be less popular.

I hope the future definition of ‘hacker’ is not making slightly more performant line-of-business applications. New languages that run over decentralized systems are cool regardless of utility, and I hope can be appreciated as such rather than having bear vs bull comments

People aren't talking about crypto currencies in the same way they talk about esoteric languages - those are consistently framed as practically useless for-fun side projects. Crypto, on the other hand, is instead framed as a large scale revolution of our existing systems and pushed as something that should be used be people worldwide while having significant problems they many believe are very damaging on a societal level.

TBH a (few) hundred votes are very far from "most users are interested in this". The more popular posts have upwards of 4k votes.

https://hn.algolia.com/

A large number of techs on the front page here every day are useless by any reasonable standard, so you're not really speaking for this community as a whole.

And if any one of them would have gone on for 13 years people would be sick of the damn thing.

A lot of us got into tech as teens just fiddling around taking things apart and writing "useless" scripts.