> I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my age who are making a lot more money than me.

I'm certainly not getting depressed from this - but I find this trend fairly annoying as well. There is fairly dominant sub-community on HN who try to communicate as often as possible how extremely smart they are and humblebrag about some start-up or how they declined an offer from Google.

But I think this sub-population is actually minority. The majority of HN readers is just curious about the subjects itself - those contribute the highest value on here in my experience.