I think the long form is really good actually, but it needs to be done by people who wrote it out of love. HN will sometimes lead you down that path, like that story about the diver who survived for many minutes on the floor of the North Sea without oxygen after his umbilical cord was severed. Mostly though, almost everything linked to by HN didn’t really need to be written and was likely written for clicks.

HN is still valuable for me because it sometimes leads to me discovering new frameworks I can actually use that I wouldn’t hear about anywhere else because people in my part of the world use JAVA, PHP or C#. But HN is mainly a social media and all the attention seeking that comes with that.