I don't think they're different issues. I think there's a bunch of people who want to be spoon fed arstechnica/torrentfreak/extremetech/etc just like they were on digg and reddit who cannot even pretend to be impressed by weekend projects or early stage startups.

That's why I like the idea of going after the users and sites that are better suited to other social news sites - the crossover in stories and topics between HN and http://www.reddit.com/r/technology is significant when it should be incidental.