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Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
I'm not the first to opine that recently 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 and other terrible decisions coming out of the US.
While I do often have the instinct to completely bury my head in the sand and try to forget it's all happening I'm more concerned with the psychological impact it's having. I'm basically sick and tired of being so sick and tired and exposure to so many continuously miserable headlines isn't helping. What I would like instead is a return to the days when HN was a forum that still showcased cool things people were working on and included discussions on topics outside of the AI-saturated lens that now dominates.
If any good alternatives exist I'd like to join! Or perhaps there are some means of using HN that would allow me to filter the AI noise a bit better. If anyone has had any success with this please let me know!
- rhythmshahriar 5mo agoLobste.rs is worth trying. Invite only, which keeps the quality up, and the tag system lets you actually filter what you see. Much less AI noise in practice.
- pogue 5mo agolobster?
- summonerOS 5mo agoYou're referring to https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ ?
- pogue 5mo agoCorrect
- summonerOS 5mo agoHad a browse and it is definitely reminiscent of HN's early days! Thanks for the recommendation :)
- deflator 5mo agoI like it, thanks for recommending
- aqsa_sajjad 5mo agoI agree, Lobsters is probably the closest alternative
- chengyongru 5mo ago[flagged]
- sagrd 5mo agoWas thinking the same thing. I love Hacker News, but perhaps an AI filter on the site would be really useful.
- lordkrandel 5mo agoYeah, it's become such a boring AI marketing outlet.
- red-iron-pine 5mo agoHN 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?
- keiferski 5mo agoBoth of things were true 5 years ago, and yet 9/10 topics weren't about AI then. I'm hoping it's just a trend, but...I'm still waiting.
- red-iron-pine 5mo agothere were tons of AI discussions on HN 5 years ago. I first heard about GPT 1 here! They key difference is that now AI is taking over -- why would 90% of all tech discussions be about it? AFAIK based on stats the only real economic growth globally right now is AI...
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago“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.”
- lordkrandel 5mo agoIt'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?
- faangguyindia 5mo agoEverything on HN these days get downvoted to Oblivion. And people are heavily pushing ai and cloud products, the builder/hacker mindset is gone imho.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo agoDo 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.
- mattmanser 5mo agoYou've literally been here 4 months.
- Maledictus 5mo agoI've been thinking for a while to create an AI tool to classify articles (not just on HN), and filter the ones I'm not in the mood for.
- summonerOS 5mo agoIronically you would miss the articles proclaiming your new invention is the next big thing! /sarcasm
- chistev 5mo agoI think one was posted a while ago.
- Leena-ch 5mo agoLobste.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.
- gabrielsroka 5mo agoDid you mean https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs ?
- dundunUp 5mo agoboring AI marketing outlet.
- JCSlim 5mo agoI 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 only Robotics or Show HN/PH as an example. So not quite what you’re going after, but maybe a better overall experience for you.
- summonerOS 5mo agoThanks 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!
- JCSlim 5mo agoThank you for the feedback. It’s a fair point about feeling like it’s mostly based on HN. I started it thinking it would be cool to have a Digg style HN feed. I remember how alive Digg felt in a static web world. I quickly realized as I broke the feed down by categories there wasn’t much content in some areas and started adding feeds that could bring in more articles I liked. The challenge is not to bring in too much where the site just becomes overwhelming. Brutalist is a good example. It’s has a huge list of great sources, but my brain turns off as soon as the scroll bar never ends. Currently, I’m pulling from HN, Algolia, Product Hunt, and arXiv. Appreciate your point about comments. I do agree it’s not ideal, and I’ve been tossing around what the right path is. Thanks for the reply!
- JCSlim 5mo agoI’ve updated the RNKFlow.com filter to use a comma separated list of terms. Using a negative term will filter out stories you don’t want to see. If you sign in, you can save a default filter list and I’ve made it part of the free tier. Hope this helps a bit.
- Ecys 5mo agoEverything that's not AI is just irrelevant. AI is diverse enough to replace the other things you'd talk about.
- piuvas 5mo agosubpar ragebait, try harder.
- maryamshafaqat 5mo agoI miss the old look what someone built vibe too. There is still good stuff in Show HN threads but it does take more digging now than it used to.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoHard 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708 Ask HN: What are some communities like HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919 On a skim just now one that jumped out at me was https://tildes.net https://tildes.net
- andyjohnson0 5mo ago> 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
- okutan 5mo ago[flagged]
- ra0x3 5mo agoCan someone invite me to lobste.rs ? HN user since 2014. Would love to try something new :) Email is on my profile
- rizkimurtadha 4mo ago[flagged]
- annagio_ 4mo agoEverything is pushy AI nowdays, and some people don't even realize it. Hacking with AI, tools with AI, AI agents and goes on. I for example, when I see AI, I don't even read them, easy as that. Wasn't an announcement No AI, couple months ago here?
- tangxia123 4mo agoI built something for exactly this — HN Filter, a Chrome extension that hides AI-related posts by keyword. All features free (50 posts/day), $9 one-time for unlimited. No subscription, everything runs locally. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/iahdcbapbcffdanegccdlpfkhlkdndif https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/iahdcbapbcffdanegcc...
- ctdinjeu5 4mo ago> What I would like instead is a return to the days when HN was a forum that still showcased cool things As someone who used to share interesting projects, I stopped over the years due to mods favoring YC companies and hiding my work, and other bottom-feeders who were basically jealous trying to discourage me and downplaying the novel work I did. I found places like HN and Reddit to only really approve of mainstream status quos and try their hardest to utterly destroy the reputation and confidence of any “indie” type who would ever dare to make anything cool. I don’t even build up accounts here anymore, or do I attach my identity to stuff anymore too much. By 2026 this censorship/hater problem is so bad it’s not worth sharing anything with anyone. All I want to do now is figure out a way to destroy big tech and profit off their mistakes. I want to eat academia alive and end college and classism. HN is not your friend but an enemy to be destroyed.
- waterspring66 4mo ago[dead]
- wganshadouxing 4mo ago[dead]
- kantodtech1 4mo ago[flagged]
- sourav4002 4mo ago[flagged]