As someone who was here from day two, this is not how old HN was. It was many things to many people, and it’s very difficult to break out of the illusion that rose-tintedness tends to give us. (Guilty of it myself.)

HN has been consistently contrarian. That’s about all that you can say without quickly becoming mistaken.

>HN has been consistently contrarian. That’s about all that you can say without quickly becoming mistaken.

until recently. Just like reddit, it has become less niche and more mainstream. For eg: HN majority opinion on covid's origin. It matched the official US govt lines as it switched back and forth between market and lab.

Presumably, HN will turn into reddit, but nobody will believe it's happening because people have been predicting it's turning into reddit for over a decade.

I've been around for a while too, and I've learned a lot from this forum. I can't tell if now I'm learning less here because I've leveled up or if there's just less tech talk.

As far as hn being contrarian, the only thing I see hn being consistently contrarian on is crypto. Any other examples?

But it's still the case... Stallman is quoted every day around here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=Stallman&sort=by...

What fascinates me is that for many here software and tech is their livelihood. You should be able to take care of access and ensure future generations still have the same opportunities.

Sure, you can sell yourself and make good money with software on some proprietary app store with proprietary tools. You are a freelance employee of the company providing that infrastructure at that point.

It is short-sighted, lazy and stupid in my opinion. There is merit for such security mechanism, especially for cloud applications, but it should be crystal clear that there are secondary motivations here. And that the security argument often falls short if you take a good look at current threats.

The community has long forgotten those roots the day they started pushing for anti-GPL licenses.

> Damn, now I'm nostalgic for the older days of hacker news where RMS was quoted every other post. The community is forgetting it's roots.

Keep in mind that now many of the people who post on HN earn a lot of money by working a company for which it is part of the business model to track users and collect data about them (officially for advertisement purposes).

Top-voted comments are linking directly to Right to Read and The Coming War on General-Purpose Computing, so I don't think the community has forgotten its roots.

You really wanna be scared? Go look at the multiple comments on the EU DMA announcement complaining that having a sideloading option is just a ploy for malware vendors to get into their iPhones. Or that someone else being able to sideload or jailbreak somehow hurts their security. These are coming from actual HN users!

Well, my comment that linked to RtR was highly voted... But now it's near the bottom and what's at the top is, for lack of better phrasing, a corporate mouthpiece.

Was it voted so high it triggered some bot detection? That would only explain the former, not the latter. Either way, there's something funny going on.

That sounds more like /. than HN.

There was a time when someone ran a bot on /g/ where every post that mentioned just 'Linux' would get the full 'Excuse me...' copypasta interjected. Good times.