Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?

ssummonerOS about 18 hours ago 23 comments

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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!

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Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

lordkrandel•about 14 hours ago

Yeah, it's become such a boring AI marketing outlet.

red-iron-pine•about 6 hours ago

HN 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?

andyjohnson0•44 minutes 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

sagrd•about 14 hours ago

Was thinking the same thing. I love Hacker News, but perhaps an AI filter on the site would be really useful.

JCSlim•about 10 hours ago

I 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.

Leena-ch•about 13 hours ago

Lobste.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•about 3 hours ago

Did you mean https://lobste.rs ?

maryamshafaqat•about 6 hours ago

I 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.

Maledictus•about 13 hours ago

I'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•about 13 hours ago

Ironically you would miss the articles proclaiming your new invention is the next big thing! /sarcasm

chistev•about 12 hours ago

I think one was posted a while ago.

JCSlim•about 9 hours ago

I’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.

faangguyindia•about 13 hours ago

Everything on HN these days get downvoted to Oblivion. And people are heavily pushing ai and cloud products, the builder/hacker mindset is gone imho.

Ecys•about 9 hours ago

Everything that's not AI is just irrelevant. AI is diverse enough to replace the other things you'd talk about.

piuvas•about 8 hours ago

subpar ragebait, try harder.

pogue•about 14 hours ago

lobster?

aqsa_sajjad•about 11 hours ago

I agree, Lobsters is probably the closest alternative

summonerOS•about 13 hours ago

You're referring to https://lobste.rs/ ?

pogue•about 13 hours ago

Correct

deflator•about 4 hours ago

I like it, thanks for recommending

summonerOS•about 13 hours ago

Had a browse and it is definitely reminiscent of HN's early days! Thanks for the recommendation :)

dundunUp•about 13 hours ago

boring AI marketing outlet.

ChrisArchitect•about 5 hours ago

Hard 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

Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919

On a skim just now one that jumped out at me was https://tildes.net