It's called experience: before you discovered HN, you knew less. HN lifted you to a certain level. But now that you have reached that level, you are no longer impressed, you feel like it's all repetitions.
Be assured that there are hundreds of people who were like you two years ago, who are discovering HN today, and are benefiting immensely.
What HN can't provide you is a community that will grow more and more specialized as yourself grows.
It's funny because in my latest startup (http://letslunch.com), we have a very strong notion of reputation, so we match entrepreneurs with increasingly experienced entrepreneurs, as your reputation rises. I believe it works for in-person interaction, but I doubt it can be built for an online forum.
I was going to say something very similar. I've been irritated by repetitive content / themes, but a lot of that is simply because I've read it many times before - it's not necessarily a sign that the community is getting stale, it just means I've been reading it way too much.
Interesting point about the community growing more specialized - I thought that HN losing its focus on startups (circa the Startup News -> Hacker News rename) was overall a negative thing, since that's what attracted me in the first place, but in retrospect it's probably not. I think I would've got bored much faster reading effectively the same posts about startups over and over again. The wider scope has probably helped to keep the site fresh for me, at the cost of somewhat lower signal/noise.
Be assured that there are hundreds of people who were like you two years ago, who are discovering HN today, and are benefiting immensely.
What HN can't provide you is a community that will grow more and more specialized as yourself grows.
It's funny because in my latest startup (http://letslunch.com), we have a very strong notion of reputation, so we match entrepreneurs with increasingly experienced entrepreneurs, as your reputation rises. I believe it works for in-person interaction, but I doubt it can be built for an online forum.