Remember when everyone used to praise Google (deservedly) about its "do no evil" motto? The problem w/ sites like HN is not inherently about the quality of community or the content, but that aggregation is philosophically antithetical to the openness of the web.
The charm of the web of old is that you could own your space and if you wanted your pages to have animated gifs of rainbows and unicorns, you could. Likewise if people wanted to customize their view of the web, they could via things like RSS.
Contrast to nowadays, where we collectively consider experiments about omitting noise from HN API via AI something that is "cool". The very aggregating nature of HN that brought people together in the first place can also be a limitation against branching out onto your own directions/subcultures (e.g. the comments about echo chambers).
The charm of the web of old is that you could own your space and if you wanted your pages to have animated gifs of rainbows and unicorns, you could. Likewise if people wanted to customize their view of the web, they could via things like RSS.
Contrast to nowadays, where we collectively consider experiments about omitting noise from HN API via AI something that is "cool". The very aggregating nature of HN that brought people together in the first place can also be a limitation against branching out onto your own directions/subcultures (e.g. the comments about echo chambers).