I used to read HN because as an engineer it gave me some insight into startup culture, of which I'm not a part. Now I'm close to giving up on HN because of what

I used to read HN because as an engineer it gave me some insight into startup culture, of which I'm not a part. Now I'm close to giving up on HN because of what raganwald is describing. In some ways HN is becoming like Usenet, which I still sorely miss, but without the ability to have different groups. A large chunk of HN commentary squarely belongs in the x.y.z.advocacy bucket and the fact that we have voting but no comment scores gives us the worst of both worlds. The only reason I'm still reading HN is because it's HN, not because of the actual content. There's an opportunity to use the user base and combine it with a tag and user based algorithm to create a custom view into content. Not sure how hard it would be to implement but if I could pick the users I like and the tags I like, give each of them a specific weight and see a sorted view of topics and comments I'd be happier.