Hacker News ranks at #959 in the US. It didn’t get that rank from just being geared toward startups with Tier 1 engineers.
Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general.
We’re both making points based off anecdotal experience, so who knows. I have been a reader for the last 7 or 8 years, but my experience is just one subjective data-point.
Having said that, the most apparent change to me is in the tone and substance of the comments rather than the front page. And it isn’t a huge change. Just noticeable for me.
HN archives are stored in BigQuery, so it would be possible to do an analysis that was more rigorous than a human reading the thousands of front pages to see a pattern of difference.
Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general.
HN’s front page 10 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10
HN’s front page 5 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10