Back in the never days.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-02-01

I agree that HN has for a long time been focused on interesting and illuminating posts. The past several years, though, have been marked with reddit refugees, far fewer interesting posts, and far more average midwit discussion.

If you go through the comment section on posts from 10 years ago, you'll find a higher concentration of posts from C-level execs, startup founders, and experts with deep domain knowledge.

From the guidelines:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Nov 6, 2009 | on: Ask HN: Is it just me, or are HN comments becoming...

> I'm at a year and a half. Hacker News is turning into Reddit. It's following the exact same path, albeit thankfully slower, and the causes behind that path—influx of users, need for attention, karma lust—aren't causes that Paul is looking to fix.

> Reddit's not the worst thing in the world, but make no mistake, we're headed there.

I can't say I disagree.

I was curious about the history of this, so I checked on the Wayback Machine. Originally (at least as of July 2014, the earliest archived date), this rule had an "if your account is less than a year old" clause. The rule went away entirely in August 2017, and then came back again in November 2018 without the clause.

I think if the person commenting truly believes it and has other substantive points the rules can and should be bent.

I agree, this place has turned to trash.

HN has always allowed non technical news. The only criterion is that it gratify intellectual curiosity.

Actually, this particular type of article (sensational business-related blog post, let's call it) used to appear a lot more than it does today. Note that it got flagged in this case.

lol that's what I tell my friends: "imagine reddit with good moderation with much improved signal to noise ratio". Which I guess upon reflection of typing that isn't reddit at all, but my powers of description are very limited as I didn't do well in my writing classes.