> Two, fragmenting the community would just reduce engagement and risk making both feel like a ghost town.
I would rather hang out on a HN more similar in attitude and user count as when I joined than have it be "lively" with the user base it has now.
I would agree with #3 if it were the case that the technical side of LLMs were discussed more, and there was a focus on trying to run and understand them yourself; these are topics that I think make more sense for hackers to care about. The front page stories about LLMs are usually business news about LLMs, blog post about using (someone else's) LLM, the occasional blog post that says LLMs suck either for technical, social, or other purposes.
Obviously I'm missing a few categories here, but my point is that there is basically zero hacker spirit in the LLM posts. Since when is it part of the hacker ethos to plug into a SV machine that you pay $200/month for the privilege to use to do stuff? That's ridiculous...
It's hard to not feel like this is part of a bigger transformation of the culture and then absorbing that culture on HN. Hackers make things, and they are unlikely to settle for poorly made things, but routinely the chorus on HN is that you should never reinvent the wheel, etc., even though you could make a better wheel for your purposes than the wheel you've found online. Not to mention this hilarious "I hate writing code" sentiment that seems to have grown over time. In my opinion neither of these sentiments belong in any group claiming to be hackers.
But the user base of HN is not hackers, hence why they feel comfortable spouting these opinions, plugging into $200/month services that write code for them (badly and slowly, I've used Anthropic's Max plan with Claude Code), not understanding and/or taking apart the technology they use, etc.