Comment by 650REDHAIR

18 days ago

Are there viable alternatives to HN? I'm pretty sick of PG and Altman's influence.

They aren't good people.

Lobsters probably comes closest. But still invite-only (AFAIK) and you also don't bump into random programming superstars (who programmed that one childhood game you absolutely loved) there every now and then.

Besides, I feel like HN is dang's kingdom, and compared to how it used to be, pg is barely mentioned nowadays. Based on feelings only, it doesn't feel like HN skews pg/altman friendly, I'd probably say it's the opposite if I had to say anything.

PG and Altman don't have editorial influence on Hacker News, and current moderation policy is to not kill topics partaining to YC. (which is why I suspect this blogpost got rescued from being flagkilled)

100% agree. They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people.

  • > They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people

    Become? I've read at least one of pg's books, and probably 10s of the essays, and even when I first read it (probably close to 2012 sometime) it was evidentially clear he is mostly about money. If the job (VC) didn't make it clear, the essays makes it even clearer.

    In short, most people involved in the VC/startup ecosystem are mostly about money. They will say they care about other things too, but they mostly say that because they care about money. If there is no way to make money saying/doing a thing, then they won't do that thing.

Ycombinator is of course, involved to some extent with the creation of HN. So I get it. Tech leaders cultism sort of infests the space.

But I do tend to find HN pretty broad in topics. I do think they end up on here because they’re good at making news for themselves (not a compliment) and the sort of people posting on here, are posting tech news. I don’t see ending up on HN’s front page as any indicator of goodness, but more so, it’s at least something people are talking about and sparks some discussion, goodness-neutral on the specific topic at hand.

dang is really good at his job!

That said, I really like mastodon! Obviously it’s a different sort of platform, but you can get a similar but less-tech-thought-leader-centric experience with some light curation. (And participation by yourself!)

With Meta, X and Hackernews right wing American now I am also struggling where to go. Sure it won't be much here or the aforementioned networks anymore.

Reddit? Not sure why you decided today is the day to move

  • I stopped using Reddit after the 3rd party app massacre. I don’t even do it out of protest, it’s just I don’t feel like it anymore. I guess that’s how powerful habits are.

  • Really? In a thread discussing PG's most recent brain fart you can't understand why today would be the day?