It was always an "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" forum (at least since I was first aware of it), but it grew out of a startup incubator, so the early focus was inevitable.

No, I would also say that it definitely used to be far more focused on starting a tech startup, with tech as a sideline, now it's the opposite.

I feel the shift started happening around the time product hunt got popular, so a couple of years before you joined.

You repeated what I said with different words. We're in agreement. And my original account was from 2010. I lurked long before that.

Two days ago....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988065

But yeah, it got very little comments and they were mostly negative.

Oh, I missed that one. But the frontpage used to be full of posts like that.