For my money the answer is yes! What Techcrunch did well back in the day is that it covered the startup scene -- HN improves upon that by acting as a link toolkit of sorts. Also unlike Techcrunch which was top/down this site is really about the community (i.e. the quality of the comments) so you've captured some of the magic of reddit/digg. What's interesting to me is that this has nothing to do with the technology, but with the curation skills of the community.

No. Pass the word. HN is not the new Techcrunch. These aren't the droids you are looking for. Move along. Move along.

I'm not convinced. Isn't HN the new Digg, and Digg was the new Slashdot?

These 3 sites (HN, Digg, Slashdot) are all user submitted stories. Techcrunch is just one source of many for those stories.

Digg is nothing like HN. Granted, they are popular user submitted story sites with comments, but it's about the community. I visited Digg for a few weeks then stopped going because there was frankly lots of crap and trolls on the site. That is not to say that HN doesn't have some bad cookies here and there, but I got fed up with Digg when I saw lots of ignorant comments that were just meant to be hateful rather than for a positive discussion (particularly in the religious domain). HN for the most part, stays on the topic of startup/tech news, and has reasonable discussions.

True, but going back a few years, Digg had a very similar community to HN. As it branched out into other topics it really lost focus and is the site we never visit today :)

Many HNers are former Diggers. It's just been a few years.

Ah well I guess I saw the site post focus loss.

I would say no. For a while now Apple/Twitter/Facebook have dominated TC. TechCrunch has shifted from startup/funding focused stories to more mainstream tech news.

HN will always have an awesome community that TechCrunch never had. HN is a place to exchange ideas and read about what's going on in the startup industry.

I sure hope this place doesn't become the new TechCrunch...

If I end up at TC these days it's because of a link here.

I used to check web20.originalsignal.com multiple times a day to keep up with TC (and the others) but their constant forcing of crunchgear/etc exerts into their RSS feed turned me off that, and their topic-incest turned me off actually going to the site a long time ago.

Apples and oranges in my opinion. Techcrunch is not a community driven site but rather a contributer driven site.

I think Techcrunch is community driven because you read the comments more then the actual posts themselves.How many times have you ''Skip To comments'' on TC

Yes, unfortunately.

HN lately is much more about entrepreneurship and startup PR than it is about crafting software.

Not that it's bad, it's just that the ratio has gone out of hand. I question wether "Hacker News" is an appropriate name for this place anymore.

Are there bloggers here who primarily submit to HN for their audience? And if so, if you listed them all, how would HN stack up to the Techcrunch roster?

First Jeff Atwood kept posting all the links to HN in his blog. Now people are perceiving this is the new TechCrunch? Wow.

my level of agreement could be qualified as "strong" to "quite strong".

HN is HN.