Honestly, I’ve always appreciated how much of 2007 Hacker News is still intact. It remains one of the few places on the internet where discovery still happens organically without trending algorithms or clickbait optimization. It's just manual submissions, one by one.
There’s only one other community I’ve encountered like it, run by a small liberal arts college.
From a signals perspective, HN is incredibly valuable. You get to watch in real time what’s capturing the minds of technically inclined readers. Sure, that means lots of lurkers and a few dominant topics (right now: AI). But that’s also kind of the point. HN works as a reflection of where the collective attention is, whether we like it or not.
Anyways...just two cents.