HN has its problems for sure, but I think it's currently the best general tech/interest site on the Internet at the moment. If I find I'm getting jaded with the mindless groupthink here, I just usually take a couple weeks off. Usually by then, whatever hot topic that was irritating me is out of the news cycle and the hive mind has moved on.

At least once a week I find something on the front page that is unique, intensely interesting, and I haven't seen anyplace else. It's often not a programmery/businessy/startupy topic. I come back for that more than anything. But I really enjoy the conversations here, the polite (if sometimes heated) debates, and the kinds of personal anecdotes that often fill up the comments here.

I agree that the Apple fanboyism here can be pretty intense. I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I have a couple Macs and find them to be fine general purpose computing devices. I'm noticed though that the real hardcore fanboy voice that used to be very vocal and dominate every thread (even if it wasn't about Apple) has started to dilute. I don't know if it's because the great conversion wave of Windows and Linux people to OS X has abated and people are getting over their honeymoon period, or if the userbase of HN has expanded outside of SV enough that the Apple echo chamber isn't as loud and annoying as it used to be. I rarely see a vapid Gruber post on the front page anymore (filled with comments about how insightful he is). The death of Jobs seems to have taken a lot of wind out of the Apple lobby here.

Still there's a very pro-Apple bias to the moderation powers here. Many of the main Android news sources are autokilled on submission here for example. I'm sure there's some sort of history and reasoning behind it, but it's kind of annoying whenever Apple changes a power plug to have the front page filled with submissions about it, but when Microsoft or Google do something honestly ground breaking to have submissions to all the news sites about it insta-killed.

One of the biggest changes to this site that I'm glad to see is the removal of scores. It was super controversial (and still is I imagine) when it happened, but it seems to have entirely eliminated the rockstar effect, where people with high global karma scores got hundreds of upvotes simply for writing a normal, nothing special comment. That, combined with downvote caps on comments seems to have civilized this place quite a bit and put down mobs before they happened.

I completely agree with the anti-corporate and out-of-touch nature of much of the community here. But I don't think that's an evil as much as the nature of the younger-skewed SV-centric demographic here. When I was 20 or whatever, and didn't have a family to provide for or a career to manage, I thought it was a totally sane idea to not even bother with an apartment or car, sleep on a cot in my office and shower in the gym. Today, at my age, I think it's the sign of a person with a mental health disorder. People simply think differently at different ages and in different circumstances.

I am bothered by the weird anti-tech, anti-business vibe that sometimes percolates up on certain topics, on a site about tech business -- no doubt typed up on brand new MBPs and right after a comment extolling the virtues of Tesla's upwardly moving stock price. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that I find troubling. There's actually a large contingent of the HN community that seem to be almost impossibly naive ideologues. But again, all this might be because of the skew towards young people. The college-aged protester is a real thing, for a wide variety of demographic, experiential and sociological reasons. It's no doubt just bleeding over into this community.

However, I do find the international discussions here particularly enlightening.

One thing that I do find a bit sad is the lack of pure tech, pure startup discussions. There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech stack discussions etc.) and ShowHN/AskHN posts. But those have either been overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the *HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a tragedy).

If I had to change 1 thing though, it would be to force an explanatory comment on downvote. And have those comments not necessarily be required to have the same contribution requirements as normal discussions. In fact, I'd be fine if they were anonymous and unreply-able. I'm not hit with downvote brigades often, but when I am, I'm genuinely curious about why, and I'm rarely offered explanation. When somebody does provide one, I usually find it to be informative in some way.