I think there was a lot of pressure building in our community because the ballot box has been no outlet for many years. We've had an increasingly burdensome and insane political environment worldwide and people dealing with unmitigated suffering. It leaks into HN and Reddit in different ways. People here are very plugged into policy and national circumstance and so they can't help but color their opinions.

I’ve also noticed a steady increase in what I call “empty sneering”, where they don’t really have a point to contribute but they just want to dunk on somebody. It’s especially noticeable for any hot button topics – yeah, we get that you don’t like Musk/Trump/AI/whatever but do you have an actual point to contribute or not?

I’ve been saying for years that spite should be viewed as a primary metric for social media. The higher the volume of spite, the more harmful it is and the less useful it is. Hacker News is heading in the wrong direction.

I've noticed very, very little politics on HN, even recently. Despite being in a very... tumultuous... political climate, I see close to zero politics. I mean, I haven't seen Trump, or ICE, or the GOP, or the midterms, etc mentioned on the front page at all in months. The only kind of politics we get is the intersection of technology and politics, like Flock. But even that is flagged to hell and back and generally suppressed.

What I see on HN is AI, AI, AI, and then some more AI. Basically nothing else gets any traction, which is frustrating.

I think, in general, the optimism towards tech has degraded a lot in the past couple decades. Which is to be expected, as everyone who sells technology is finding new ways to abuse it every day. Especially for things like AI, it doesn't help that the most optimistic people are basically saying "yeah this is world-ending". The culture-shift isn't unique to hackernews, it's top-down from the entire tech industry, as the tech industry shifts from "cool stuff for nerds" to "tools of mass oppression". That's just sort of what happens when you pump enough money into a sector in our type of economy.

I just want tech news and some discussion. Sure, tech has some downsides on society and the planet. I can, and do, hear about that in many other places. It’s not what I come here for.

I understand younger generations are feeling very disaffected and hopeless. I feel for them. I don’t really have a solution for them and don’t have the power to change it so I’d rather tune it out. Yeah, that makes me a selfish jerk. Ok, cool.

Twitter is the one for me. Almost every popular thread immediately turns into arguing and slurs.

That’s because the Hacker News crowd has finally found a topic on which it is willing to engage with the same level of outrage that has long defined Reddit. That topic is AI.

Turns out the clienteles of the two platforms aren’t so different after all. The only difference is what triggers them.

I've noticed the exact same thing, and I've cut back a lot on how much I contribute.

I'm hoping it's bots doing that, and not my fellow, because I don't like to think that my fellow humans are actually this full of hate.

But either way, contributing to HN has become rather unpleasant these days.

It's always funny going through the recent comment history of people who complain about politics, as if such complaints aren't political in and of themselves:

> I truly hate what HN has become. It has all the expected comments about Musk, fascism, etc

> HN has turned into reddit. It's highly political with strong anti Israeli and anti USA views.

I could completely understand if you wanted to just read about technical topics rather than say more coverage/condemnation of Israel's genocide that's already covered in many other places. But when you start characterizing the existence of such discussion as "anti Israeli", or criticizing people for merely having the temerity to discuss contemporary fascism, you've gone solidly into politics yourself.

So it would seem you're being disingenuous with this comment - you do like politics, rather you just don't like people discussing glaring elephants in the room that clash with your own political views.

The constant drone of AI psychosis and slop is a thousand times worse than politics.