Web Development, Writing, Philosophy, Gaming, Marketing, Technology
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I'm a gamer, web developer and modder from London. Currently working on a site to revolutionise gaming journalism, though it needs a lot more features and development before it can be posted here on Hacker News.
Working on https://gamingreinvented.com and http://warioforums.com at the moment.
Eh, somewhat. There are definitely more articles and projects created by AI tools nowadays, and those just feel uninteresting to me.
But at the same time, I have to question whether I'd feel the same way about any other era of Hacker News. Like on Reddit, a small percentage of submissions will interest me on any given day. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the others are bad, they're just not for me.
I do have to wonder if you're mostly just noticing that the majority of content here simply won't be something you're interested in, just like in any other community.
Probably a week or two ago, since I clicked on a Google result that led there. Don't think I've ever specifically seeked out Stack Overflow though, especially not in the last five years.
Not too surprising unfortunately. LinkedIn is all about the hustle, and for most people that's about putting as little as effort as possible into 'content' you hope will pay off. Mix a platform known for the get rich quick mindset with a piece of tech designed to make creating things as effortless as possible, and you get LinkedIn.
That said, I think there are two things worth noting about that site:
1. The content was mostly slop before AI became a thing, AI has just increased the amount of it tenfold.
2. It's still not the worst content on the site. As one check of LinkedIn Lunatics shows all too well, there's a depressingly large number of people who seem to treat the site like a personal diary, and rant about their political views on what's supposed to be a business focused network.
At this point, LinkedIn is basically Twitter/X wearing a suit and tie.
As for the other sites mentioned... yeah, those track too. Medium and Reddit were already being gamed like there was no tomorrow before AI entered the picture, now it's just become even easier for the parasites to flood them with garbage. Twitter/X is basically the wild west at this point, and Substack seems to appeal pretty heavily to the types of people that absolutely love AI and everything about it.
I haven't exactly counted it, but I'd say I've almost certainly have access to more than 1MB of my own writing. I've written articles about a variety of the topics for the last decade or two, posted far more on forums than is probably healthy, and have an untold number of my own emails in my inbox.
Only 1 at the moment. A media platform for posting articles that you could charge people access for, sorta like Medium or Substack. What I realised pretty quickly was the following:
1. Getting paid to pay for text based on content was extremely difficult, and there's a reason things like Blendle didn't work out.
2. UK investment into B2C startups is minimal compared to in the US, since the former tends to be a lot more... substainable than the moonshot focused investment landscape in Silicon Valley.
3. While I had some experience as a web developer at various agencies, I wasn't really technically skilled enough to implement the kind of features and systems I'd need for a system like this.
Use it to figure out faster than light travel and efficient space transport. The economic benefits of being able to quickly move resources between Earth and space would be immense, and open a lot of new opportunities.
This is one reason I'm kinda fond of a lot of fan media related communities. Since things like fanfiction, mods and fan games are in legally murky territory, you can't really make money off of them, especially not directly.
It's a great deterrent against grifters and optimisers, since you can't sell your work and you can't set up a company to commercialise it, so anyone uninterested in the community or series has no incentive to get involved.
Sadly, it's really hard to achieve something similar in most fields, due to the incentive to turn everything into a side hustle.
I do feel they've got a good point about notable sources in 2026. Wikipedia seems to have reliable source rules straight out of the 80s or 90s. In the internet era, the most reliable sources aren't usually old school journalists or media outlets, they're enthusiasts and specialists publications dedicated to the topic.
For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite the site being A: credited by all the news outlets Wikipedia does consider reliable and B: being reliable and long-term enough that the Pokemon Company themselves uses it as a source, and has the founder do AMAs/interviews at official events.
And it's a big problem with any topic (games and media, programming languages and frameworks, internet happenings in general) where internet blogs and YouTube channels are the main authority.
The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.
But Wikipedia struggles to deal with that. Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape.
Do I feel like Odin in particular is being hit hard by this? Maybe, maybe not. I've not personally come across Odin when looking for programming languages or frameworks to learn. I haven't seen it discussed much on social media, on YouTube, or on Hacker News.
However, the issue still stands. If the 'wrong' sources are the ones covering it, then their notability and popularity is treated as irrelevant, and the language as not worth covering.
Wikipedia needs to figure out a new system for this. Maybe some sort of trust system where a source that's treated as reliable by enough existing 'reliable' sources is taken seriously in its own right. If a blog is treated as a reliable source by the New York Times on multiple occasions, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say it's basically equivalent to the author writing for the newspaper.
I'm done on mobile when this happens. I can't stand the new Reddit UI, and it's so buggy in mobile browsers that it's damn near unusable. Like, why is it so bad at remembering what pages I previously visited here? I shouldn't be kicked from a post to Google search, or have to specifically click the subreddit name to view the list again.
LinkedIn doesn't really reward meaningful content. People there are just looking for meaningless business related platitudes at the expense of all else.
Well, that and based on my experience, most AI 'evangelists' tend to be pretty bad at coming up with creative ideas in general. Many of them are basically the same grifters that tried to cash in on crypto and NFTs, except with a new fad of choice.
It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.
Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.
For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.
It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.
They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.
I think if I had to find any defence for AI, it's that it provides an efficient way to create things that don't matter, but which society desperately tries to pretend are important somehow.
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
I've sometimes suspected it's an investment thing. A Discord server or subreddit is free, can be setup or abandoned at any time, and (on Reddit) can be taken over by the site or another team whenever you move on.
So, there's a not much of a reason to care how badly you're running the place. You didn't put any time or effort into its setup, and you're not losing money if the community dies out.
Meanwhile a standalone forum costs money to host, and it feels bad to pay $X per month for a ghost town. So, there's at least some level of interest in keeping it running smoothly and fixing issues, since otherwise you're wasting your time and money.
Alternatively, having to pay might just mean the average forum owner is an adult with real world experience rather than a kid or teen or internet shut in that's running the community for laugh/sees it as a quick way to get power over people.
Eh, I think both formats have their pros and cons. For example, a standard forum discussion tends to prioritise the last post, while a Reddit one tends to prioritise the first few posts.
This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried. The earliest posts will probably have racked up dozens or hundreds of upvotes by that point, and it's hard to dislodge them, no matter how poor they may be compared to later replies.
The standard forum setup at least means you have a chance to get your opinions out there if you don't live in the same time zone as the topic creator, or don't have hours to spare for online discussions.
The Reddit format also seems to heavily minimise user identities too, which can make it harder to have a community rather than a bunch of random names commenting into the void. I literally don't recognise anyone I see on Reddit, since the only thing I have to go off are names and maybe post flairs, and the site is so vast that the chances of bumping into the same people over and over again is pretty low.
A standard forum can feel like a group of friends hanging out, while a subreddit just feels like a blog's comments section.
And the upvote/downvote setup feels like a mixed bag in of itself too. On the one hand, prioritising posts the community considers good can be seen as a positive thing, and help them get noticed. But it can also make communities even more of an echo chamber, because a post that might say "hold on, are we sure this is correct?" is almost certainly getting buried rather than taken into consideration.
But I'd say that subreddits, forums and social media are really just different discussion formats with their own pros and cons, and which one you prefer is probably going to depend a lot on the individual. The former is the most content focused, the latter is the most user focused, and the forum is sorta in the middle.
Like GOG? Yeah, I'm a bit more accepting of those, since they're DRM free. Being able to just copy and paste from one computer to another or what not is how I feel digital games should work, and how I know they don't work on console.
Well, if Nintendo and Microsoft go the same route (and sadly, I see that being almost inevitable at some point), that's probably the end of my interest in gaming as a whole. I generally refuse to 'rent' or 'license' things on a temporary basis, and have decided in this generation that every game I'll get for Switch 2 will be a physical game on cart version, without exception.
And the reasons for that are pretty simple. I like being able to resell games when done with them. I like being able to lend them to friends, or play them on as many consoles as I want. I like the idea of having something that companies (generally) can't remove due to licensing changes or an always online requirement.
This sort of change just feels like yet another step towards constantly renting rather than owning, or streaming games and media without any control over how or when you can use it.
Donkey Kong Bananza is probably my Switch 2 game of choice. Like it may not be marketed as such, but it's probably somewhere on par with Super Mario Odyssey in terms of game design and mechanics, and has the craziest ending sequence I've ever seen in a video game. It is a really solid 3D platformer, and does to Donkey Kong what Super Mario 64 did to Super Mario Bros/World.
The DLC is really fun too, though whether it's worth buying is almost entirely dependent on how much you get into Emerald Rush. Personally I found that mode incredibly addictive for the longest time, though it's definitely not for everyone.
As a general rule though, the Switch 2's library is kinda niche right now though. What games/DLC are worth it heavily depends on your taste in games.
Cozy/sandbox game? Pokopia could be a good choice.
Fan of the Zelda series in general? The upgrades for BotW and TotK are nice, as is Age of Imprisonment.
Prefer Kirby? Air Riders and the Forgotten Land upgrade are a good bet. More of a Mario fan? Well, there aren't as many options there outside of Mario Kart, though the Wonder upgrade has been pretty well received, and Mario Tennis Fever is a decent game.
Generally you'll find one or two niche spinoffs you'll really get into, though nothing on the level of a big new 3D Mario/Zelda/Pokemon/whatever game.
They also make quite a few more changes than expected when localising games. Or at least they did in the olden days, where the American versions of games sometimes had different/extra features compared to the Japanese originals.
I think some of the localisation team are also regular voice actors for the games, on a worldwide basis.
I mean, the old internet still exists if you want to use it. At least, in many places online.
There are still forums, and people either discussing how to run them or setting up new ones today.
There are still personal blogs out there, and some are even bringing back things like blogrolls and webrings.
Heck, there's arguably a bit of a trend to try and recapture some of this era for a modern audience now. Sites like Neocities let you host personal websites like you would in the 90s, and I saw a human curated website directory for gaming blogs pop up on Bluesky the other day, complete with a webring you could add to your site once featured in it.
The issue isn't that this stuff isn't out there, it's that most people have chosen social media and big tech platforms over independently run websites and communities. If more people were like the author, social media could be made almost entirely irrelevant.
It's possible to live online without social media and apps, just as it is to support mum and pop businesses rather than Walmart or Amazon. It's just the majority of the population seem to prefer the convenience offered by the mass market solutions.
Interests:
Web Development, Writing, Philosophy, Gaming, Marketing, Technology
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I'm a gamer, web developer and modder from London. Currently working on a site to revolutionise gaming journalism, though it needs a lot more features and development before it can be posted here on Hacker News.
Working on https://gamingreinvented.com and http://warioforums.com at the moment.