Yeah, it's become such a boring AI marketing outlet.
HN is the news aggregator for an incubator / startup factory. The guy in charge of OpenAI used to run HN.
With respect, what did you expect this place to be?
Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#22Hard to meet the criteria exactly but maybe poke around some of these older threads for some ideas:
Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708
Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919
On a skim just now one that jumped out at me was https://tildes.net
Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#23Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#24Lobste.rd for general tech, specific subreddits or Discord communities for narrower topics. HN is probably not coming back from this one the AI industry is too concentrated in the same demographic that posts there.
Did you mean https://lobste.rs ?
Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#25> there seems to be an effect on HN whereby the AI hypetrain has essentially drowned out discussions of anything other than stories either directly or indirectly related to AI
As a data point, 7 out of the current‡ top 30 submissions are AI related - just under 25%. Doesn't doesn't seem that excessive to me.
‡ 2026-05-20 20:00 UTC
Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#26Yeah, it's become such a boring AI marketing outlet.
“it’s a technology that i don’t like therefore its marketing, but I am apparently blind to how HN is a boring marketing outlet in every other respect, too.”
Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#27Everything on HN these days get downvoted to Oblivion. And people are heavily pushing ai and cloud products, the builder/hacker mindset is gone imho.
Do you need to be reminded that you’re on a “news” website run by a venture capital company? If this isn’t a “dead dove do not eat” situation then I truly do not know what is. You are just becoming disillusioned.
Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#28Yeah, it's become such a boring AI marketing outlet.
“it’s a technology that i don’t like therefore its marketing, but I am apparently blind to how HN is a boring marketing outlet in every other respect, too.”
It's not that I dislike it. It's just the emptiness of conversations around it. Most discussion is not about the technology itself, or real takes, it's just "blablabla"
It used to be more on point, like, 1 year ago? Even the Musk/Twitter times have gone now :D And that rich dude is even more richer now.
"Money is a problem for those who don't have it", "Google declaring war on the web", "AI didn't invent slop, it scaled it", "Declining America", "Linus Torvalds says he has a love-hate relationship with AI"... I mean... Ok, but ... who cares?
Re: Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
#29I would agree. While not quite what you’re looking for, I recently built a site, RNKFlow.com (Rank Flow), to bring in multiple tech/science feeds including HN and Product Hunt to pull in more interesting posts. There is a filter option so can search across all feeds and only see what you’re interested in. Also an alerting function where you can add keyword tags and get an email digest. And Categories to limit posts o…
Thanks for sharing! Definitely like the ability to filter and incorporating multiple sources although from what I could see stories are all from HN. One thing I will say though is the UI is challenging to use on mobile, would recommend the layout used for things like comments that you see on Harmonic/lobst.er. Very nice project keep it up!