I'm a big fan of lobste.rs - similar structure, different vibe (it had nothing to do with rust, just a coincidence)

Is it better now? Worse? Just different?

About the same. Some of the snarky dicks didn't make it through covid, though.

I really like Hacker News for the most part. Commentary is well above the cesspool of the alien site. People are really knowledgeable and quick to share it. Sometimes there are comments that pop up from 'tech celebrities' too! Always awesome to see people like tptacek (Thomas Ptacek) or CliffStoll (yes, that one) sharing in the discussions there. Sometimes though, there is an echo chamber mentality where it seems everyone commenting is 'An American white male, making $300,000 annual salary + options'.

As a platform, I appreciate what the moderators do there to keep things on topic and following the guidelines like:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

I check at least once a day. HN is great for tech news. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to stream HN topics into posts in a Lemmy community to discuss here.

The comments at HN are generally high quality but seem heavily moderated.

Somebody shared a blog post of mine on hackernews a few months ago, which got to the front-page. I participated in the comment section and as far as I can remember I had a lot of really interesting technical feedback. I did not notice any of the issue you're mentioning, but there was nothing to censor or anything political about my post, and apart from this post, I do not frequently browse hackernews

I'm mostly lurking at HN, but I do like it. I find the submissions interesting and most discussions are high quality. There are some subjects that are... let's just say not HN-friendly and any discussion ends up in the same echo chamber. But overall a thumbs up from me.

It's cool for learning about tech stuff. that's all I use it for

I've always followed TechDirt in that space personally. I don't always agree with Mike and crew but its rarely the kind of problematic junk you see on most sites.

I go on there once or twice a day, I find I get to see posts about things I don't see elsewhere and I like that the conversation often has people from within certain tech-sub spaces or even within the companies being discussed.

I like HN. The only thing I avoid is anything to do with medical breakthroughs, antiaging or the current Silicon Valley fad (raw water, huge vitimin doses etc). Way to much misinformation, hyperbole and speculation (on all sides).... it's when it becomes the most "American".

Other than those subjects I find the level of discussion and signal to noise ratio to be very good.

To get tech news I found using RSS from different websites works wonders. If you have Android download the feeder app and use RSS from websites like Wired ,etc.