Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking? | Hacker News Reader

Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking?

63 pointsbrennannovak80 comments

Just a question for the people who have been here longer and contribute more than I do. It used to always seem I could find some of the most cutting edge links about many aspects of technology and hacking. Now there is a lot of content, most of which is awesome and I usually click on anyway, but it's not as tech/hacker centric. Is this good? Should it maybe be split into two news portals? I dunno.

View on HN

You can flag submissions you find inappropriate.

That said, I'd have to agree with you though, there is a lot of non-hacker stuff that makes the homepage and stays there.

What frustrates me more than that though is that there is plenty of hacker stuff that gets drowned out by non-hacker stuff.

Basically if a submission doesn't have 5 votes or so (on a normal day) before it scrolls off the 'new' page it will never make the front page.

That's not a bit loss for the submission itself (I use the 'new' page as though it were the homepage) but the discussion can be as interesting or more so than the submission, and that is a loss.

What frustrates me more than that though is that there is plenty of hacker stuff that gets drowned out by non-hacker stuff.

This is a good point. The chances of a "rate my startup" or a good discussion around a startup business idea making the main page are a lot less than they were a year ago. I've seen submissions roll off the new page within 30 minutes when the site is humming, drowned out by mass-market non-hacker stuff. That's simply too fast for HN'ers to spot and upvote good stuff -- and the number of upvotes required to have staying power on the main page has increased as well, compounding the problem.

ADD: The problem is, with a loose definition of hacker-worthy news and an increased audience, the field of potential material broadens immeasurably.

It's the same problem with humor: I love to make a joke or read something funny once a day or so. But if 10 thousand people each joked on HN once a day, the place would completely change character.

At some point, this paradigm simply doesn't scale. To me at least, looks like pg and others have been tweaking things under the hood for a long time. We might be reaching a natural limit.

Between the 'aggregation posts' (techcrunch, crenk.com, digg reposts, /. reposts, schneier.com, fastcompany, greenspun, gigaom, oreilly, wsj, stackoverflow and a pile of others) there is only so much room anyway. Those will get posted regardless (and usually by the same small group) and it's not as though people wouldn't know where to find them.

If general site dynamics hold here from other sites, a small number of folks are actively pushing as much mass-market stuff as possible into the site.

These are your golden users -- great people to have.

I simply think it's a matter of just too many people posting too much stuff.

I've toyed with the idea of a site like HN except it refuses to work with any domain that has too much traffic or submitters that submit too many articles. This would force folks a) to actually evaluate the material instead of the popularity of the source, b) be constantly re-tuning as certain sites grew in popularity, and c) spotlight some truly original thinkers/issues

I liked HN when we almost exclusively talked about startups: pitches, VCs, iterating, marketing, sales, etc. But that got boring to everybody (including me) because after a while it seemed like we were hitting the same material over and over again.

These are not easy problems to solve.

EDIT: You know what I'd like to see? Anonymous startup failure stories. I would pay to read a few insightful startup failure stories each day. The way it is, we get a good one about once a month here.

> it's not as though people wouldn't know where to find them.

Yes, but I'd rather not visit those sites and only read the best articles (the ones that get linked from here). HN as an aggregator works very well in that sense. I think the problem (if there is any) is just the number of users, nothing more.

You can flag submissions you find inappropriate

So long as you don't find too many things inappropriate, apparently. I've had my flagging rights revoked. The first time I made a case to get them restored. The second time I simply decided to stop being as involved.

I'm on the edge, still participate but a lot less since this voting madness started and lots of inane stuff started making it to the front page.

Just two examples:

facebook in latin ?

Why Does Facebook Want to Suck the Fun Out of Unfriending?

The interesting thing is that over the holidays the quality actually increased from 'normal' weekdays.

Do you think that there's a need for a HackerNews feature or maybe a separate site altogether that would allow one to add their favorite HN links ( both the original post and the HN commentary ) as public bookmarks?

One could then link to their faves list in their profile so that others can see these links. Like-minded individuals could then see what links their counterparts found interesting.

I suppose this wouldn't have to be a specialized site. Any HN member could build a page in static HTML or whatever programming-language listing their favorite links.

I wrote a quickie AWK script to demonstrate what I'm talking about. The first link below is my blog post about it. The second link is a very spartan list of HN links that I've saved in a text file.

http://jimlawless.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/preserving-my-fav...

http://www.mailsend-online.com/hnfaves.htm

It comes in cycles. Sometimes, there are just slow news days--or weeks. And then one of these meta threads comes up and people discuss it.

And then someone comes in and points to the guidelines and how it's a newbie mistake to feel like the whole board is going to hell.

Then edwin519 comes and tells us, flag and submit more what you find interesting and vote up things that you want.

So far, this community seems to be self-correcting, as long as we're self aware that we're not learning from the front page like we use to. We can all get our yuks and giggles from elsewhere.

I have the same impression - less hacker stuff, more startup/business/tech celebrity/drama/fun stories.

I am experimenting with something that may help. Here is a URL to the RSS feed of Hacker News, filtered to contain only hacker stories:

http://www.lemmatica.com/emit_topic?key=aglsZW1tYXRpY2FyDQsS...

There is an automated text classifier behind it and I'm continuously training it for hacker stories. The classifier and my definition of what are hacker stories are, of course, imperfect, so there will be errors (I'm training the filter with some delay, usually once per day). If you want to filter your own feeds like this please ask me for an account.

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.

"What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

I used to agree with these principles, but in the long run it will cause HN's demise. It was fine when we used to be a low-traffic website, but I think these guidelines don't scale very well. The most upvoted stories are the ones which everybody agrees upon, not the most interesting ones.

But who am I to complain? I don't contribute that much either.

This is exactly what I was thinking when I asked this question. It seem that since Hacker News has gained more traffic > more submissions > more activity the quality of interesting has got a lot larger... perhaps it's the point system that encourages people to submit any old thing that they think is interesting in pursuit of more points, community status, etc...

I think that's a rhetoric argument.

You could argue that just about any story was deeply interesting or a sign of some bigger underlying trend.

I think the rule of thumb should probably be 1-3 stories about none-hacker/startup related post per week...

And the deep story should be a hacker's perspective on a regular story.. basicly nothing that would ever make it to reddit's front page.

I dunno, I always wanted to see more startup stuff here. Maybe I'm in the minority.

Me too, I specially enjoy posts about monetization/customer acquisition etc. I was a little sad when it was renamed to Hacker News from Startup News.

Right on, Zaid. Andrew over at TechStars was setting up a more startup-focused, discussion-focused social news site under TS. Not sure what's going on with that lately, though. (btw, not to sidetrack, did you know that the article profiling me that was on the Boston Globe front page opened with you?)

Perhaps they figured out that copying both YC's business and their news site would be a bit over the top?

We set up something to play around with http://vanillaforums.com/. Not sure if we will open it up and run with it.

Interesting discussion on the direction of hacker news, I see value in both.

Was it Startup News before this? Wow, that name would have been great!

I interpreted Hacker News to be news for hackers, not necessarily news about hacking.

Edit: I see that sli posted the same thing farther down. My bad for not reading the whole thread first >.<

I am the opposite - I am more interested in algorithms, techniques and innovative approaches to problems. Though I do read some startup material - to see if the problems I have ran into are pointed out and how to avoid them.

For me it's the mix that does it, a bit more of the one or the other is fine.

I agree, I like the mix. Some stories are about hacking on cool new technologies, with some stories on startup problems, acquisitions, announcements, etc also.

I'm one of the people to blame. I came here less than a year ago after someone recommended this site as a smarter alternative to reddit. I haven't mentioned it on reddit because I don't want it to be dumbed down, but inevitably, non-programmers like me will shift the content away from hacking, because we're only going to upvote links that we understand... which will make the site more attractive to non-hackers, and so on.

I'd say yes. I'm not a major contributor and do comment some but I've been here since the beginning and have noticed a general decline in the content and quality of comments.

It's a reminder to me that I ought to vote more. Thanks for posting this.

What do you think about a feature that makes a vote from someone with an older account count more than a newer account? I know this sounds anti-democratic, anti-"one man one vote", but it could help preserve the original character of the community.

how well does "sign-up date" reflect "original participant"? for example, i've got one of the older signup dates, but only started using the site a month or so ago.

Is it not possible that the stock of quality items has been 'depleted'? When a site such as HN starts out there is a back log of posts people want to see.

You are assuming that your votes are actually counted, this is definitely not always the case.

Another interesting point, jacques. Either I'm brown-nosing or you're especially insightful today :)

As I understand the algorithm, a vote on a story that has been posted for an hour and is on the way down is not the same as a vote for a story that's only five minutes old and on the way up.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong in this

I wished it was as simple as that.

As a rule I now refresh the page after voting, if the vote does not 'stick' I don't bother voting for 24 hours or so.

Since there is no clear indicator of which votes are 'real' and which ones are 'dummies' and I refuse to be treated like a six year old pressing buttons that have no effect other than 'for me' (pacifier votes ?) there may come a point where I will simply completely stop voting.

Edit: hey there downmodder, whoever you are. PG is on the record about this, I don't know where you get your information but it doesn't get much better than that.

Sometimes it takes the server a minute to catch up; have you tried refreshing after a minute or two? I've noticed this as well, but usually the vote shows up if I wait a minute and refresh.

Yes, but that's a different issue.

Votes are definitely not always counted even though you get the illusion that they are.

Above you wrote,

You are assuming that your votes are actually counted, this is definitely not always the case.

I'm not seeing this. Some of what's on the site is "lazy loaded," as I recall being officially said, but to the best of my knowledge and belief a vote is a vote, and votes get counted. (There are two HN voters in my household, who visit different threads most of the time, and neither of us feel our votes aren't counted.) What would be definitive evidence of votes not being counted (as contrasted with some other possible explanations for what appears to be that condition)?

Whether you don't see it or not is not relevant, I'm seeing it and that's good enough for me.

Belief doesn't enter in to it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202

It persists to this date, you just have to work a bit to see it in action.

For the record, I am experiencing the same and I find it highly annoying. If the true voting policy is not known, this site's credibility suffers.

I remember early on, I almost exclusively visited links under the "new" link. These are almost always more diverse and usually interesting.

These days there is too much spam to make the "new" page work.

I wonder if PG could filter spam-tagged items out of the new page.

EDIT: wow, the new page also needs |flag| on the listing page. so much spam.

I think you can already do that by setting showdead to no.

But the rate of spam has gone up so as something's tagged spam, another untagged spam gets posted.

> EDIT: wow, the new page also needs |flag| on the listing page. so much spam.

I've asked for that many times, but since it seems that both my flags and votes are being ignored again I won't bother any longer.

mine comes and goes for no apparent reason (I was without votes for about a month at one point).

So I've given up flagging more than once a week and voting a more than a couple of times a day. Sadly all the older HN members I talked too say the same thing.

I wonder if the site algorithm is actually favoring newer / less active members?

I'd be fine with that, if it was disclosed.

same, it's annoying not know what im doing "wrong"

I wonder if [HN spam filtering] could filter spam-tagged items out of the new page.

It already happens, I'm quite sure. Every time I visit HN, I first visit the main page, and then visit the new page. I mostly only flag egregious spam. I see some of that disappear as I flag it.

I also like using noobcomments view

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

every once in a while to double-check for comments that plainly deserve flagging. It's too bad that noobstories view

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

doesn't also allow convenient flagging.

After edit: pg in the child comment below corrected me to point out that the noobstories view now does have flag links, and I can see them now as I follow the link.

I added flag links on noobstories about a week ago.

Thanks. My eye missed that just now as I posted the link, but there the flag links are.

Maybe we could have a trial week where a bunch of representatives prune out anything that doesn't conform to a set of rules that enforce a strict interpretation of what hackers news should post. Then the following week we can discuss or vote on whether the guidelines should be changed.

I'm starting to suspect that many more stories are being submitted just to get karma. One example is people dredging up old vaguely-related articles and just dumping them here to see if they can get a few points.

Pardon me if this is a noob question, but whats the point (value) behind karma points?

I ask because is there really a tangible difference between a poster with say 300 karma points and another with 500?

Also, since (typically) older posters have more karma points isnt the whole system skewed in favor of those posters who have been here the longest (you can make the same argument for those who post vs those who submit).

Basically what do HN users derive from having huge karma point tallies?

(edit: aside from the obvious that is)

After being able to downvote and change your topcolor, all you get out of having karma is proof that you spend way too much time here.

Hmm i see. A quick search on google tells me that you need 100 points to downvote. I only have 11 :(

Something to aspire too I guess.

I wish there were more search/filter functionality. It would be interesting to filter submissions by posters who meet certain criteria (points, trending info, etc.)

Well, there's http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

I typically use that to avoid the newbie fluff that's been increasing.

I suspect it's more mysterious than that. I have 182 and can't see a downvote thingy anywhere.

And to me a visible points system is part of the problem. If people 'try' to get more points then they'll post lots of stuff that might just get in. Then you end up like Digg.

it's not that mysterious. it takes more than 100 points to downvote now. pg keeps increasing the point totals you need to do various things, due to karma inflation.

Also the ability to create polls, which I usually find interesting but which are rarely posted.

I've thought sometimes that it might be interesting to weight votes by the logarithm of the voter's karma, so that the interest / approval of a highly-ranked member would be enough to promote a story from new to the main page.

Nothing except being able to downvote comments and change the color of the topbar. And of course the ability look at your username on the leaderboard with narcissistic love if you're that kind of guy :-)

This question asked several times before;nothing changed my habit of visiting HN daily. As long as i believe the quality of people in here remains as it is in the first day then i am ok.

What bothers me not the points,karma,content or improper comments; Its the number of fresh news that increased a lot.I started to use RSS reader and what i observe that there are so much news in HN(79) then Slashdot(13) even delicious(48)?! The more i spend time in HN the more i miss good links because given more choice to the people, they tend to put aside the quality and take all.

A bit thinking about the number of fresh news i think several problems lately addressed here(other topics) closely linked to this. More news leads to more comments and more comments creates more fuss(noise) Quality of a discussion greatly reduce as more participants, lengthy comments(self reference here) and deep reply branches.Like your favorite TV discussion program where after couple of hours everyone has a word and shouting each.The quality of comments may be,may be, increase if (high karma)&(register date) take precedence. Think about the anchorman of your favorite tv discussion program: does he start with people in the backseats or starts with some wise figure?

My point of view, being mostly a lurker for 1.15 years: I'm a programmer, musician, comp sci graduate, neither a Windows user nor a Mac user, and generally an all around geek. I don't remember how I came across Hacker News, but it didn't take long for me to conclude for myself two things:

1) the proportion of interesting (to me) links was high; 2) the comments revealed a community of clear-thinking, logical, rational, articulate individuals.

That hasn't changed significantly since last year, though I admit that I get the sense that the community has grown lately.

I don't have a big problem with HN's current state. If it has deviated from its original goals or gone through some other metamorphosis, that doesn't bother me; I still like what it is today. In fact, if it were extremely focused on entrepreneurship and startups and such, I probably wouldn't be interested. What I get out of HN is great tech/geek links and insightful, intelligent commentary.

If the percentage of links that interested me eventually fell below some threshold, and if the comments started getting inane, irrational, nonsensical or just plain stupid, I'd probably just leave HN and find another community, or start my own.

HackerHackerNews.com seems to do a good job of separating the more sensationalist articles from the drier articles. (This is what I perceive your complaint to mean).

Last updated at 17:55 on 15 October 2009 (PDT).

Shame, really.

He does supply the source code, though:

http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/src/

I see it as news for hackers, not news about hacking. You know, news related to things that likely interest hackers.

Personally, I think the point of view is that hacker-friendly jobs are hard to find, and thus founding a startup is almost a necessary evil for a good deal of hackers. I mean, let's face it: starting your own company so you can do whatever you want is the ultimate hack.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with this point of view. But the point of this kind of social news site is that the readers get to choose what is and isn't relevant to them.

That said, I personally would like to see more hacker-oriented type stuff. My advice: submit more hacker-related content and vote it up when someone else submits it. Remember that it usually just takes one vote to move things to the front page if you catch it early enough. So your one vote can make all the difference.

Meta-posting is not the answer. Especially when the questions you're asking are subjective and your own answer to both is "I dunno." At least have an opinion! Otherwise you end up with aimless and impotent discussion. That, more than anything, seems to be what kills sites like this. People start spending their energy talking about the one thing which is not new to any of them and equally familiar to all of them, not because it's so very important, but because it's so easy to. Sure, community standards are important, but discussing them without the power to enforce them or the will to drive them one way or the other doesn't do much for the site.

I'm an offender, in that I participate in these metadiscussion "What is the true best topic of HN?" discussions routinely, but personally I would like fewer of these topicality discussions and good suggestions for new filtering features to be on the main page. They could live as comment threads under the existing feature requests thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

and if participants aimed their comments and suggestions there at subthreads that have already brought up the same issue, it might be more clear which features are most in demand among regular participants.

You don't have to guess about this. Item ids are sequential.

How would he go about rigorously analysing them over the lengthy time periods required? Maybe I'm missing something obvious but automated analysis is necessary and simply looking at the distribution of keywords over time wouldn't be enough. And, for instance, a gradual change in the way YC headlines are composed might be enough to misrepresent any apparent changes in content over time. In this case, personal opinion is as probably as informed as any form of analysis.

yeah I kinda agree, I wrote a post yesterday about the emails we used and a copy of our press page from launch, thinking it would generate some discussion(hell you guys asked for them on the other thread), and maybe get tips on how to improve those for us and other people, and that didn't even get a single upvote.

And that post, just like all other posts was solely for HN, so why should I bother writing this stuff up and restoring an old press page, if I don't even get a single comment or upvote out of it on here?

It's like the twitter/facebook promotion we just finished, I was going to write a post with all the numbers, what worked, what didn't, what prizes are the best bang for your buck, the goals behind it etc etc. But now I'm not so sure.

Why? Because it'll take like 3-4 hours to put up a decent post with all the data, pics etc. So why should I waste my time, if there is a 90% chance the post won't even get a single upvote?

You want hacking? Here.

  // Hackerocity on a scale from 0 to 10
  // for each entry on the front page of hacker news
  // Hackerocity determined by edw519
  //
  Hackerocity     = []
  Hackerocity[01] =  1 ; // Ira Glass on storytelling
  Hackerocity[02] =  9 ; // Lisp OS: what has been lost: Kent Pitman
  Hackerocity[03] =  0 ; // They Killed My Lawyer
  Hackerocity[04] =  7 ; // MIT Open Courseware - Free Lectures
  Hackerocity[05] =  6 ; // Facebook marketing: one of the better campaigns I've seen
  Hackerocity[06] = 10 ; // JMatch: Iterable Pattern Matching
  Hackerocity[07] = 10 ; // Regular-expression derivatives reexamined
  Hackerocity[08] =  1 ; // Sorry, Shoppers, but Why Can’t Amazon Collect More Tax?
  Hackerocity[09] =  3 ; // Schneier on Security: Separating Explosives from the Detonator
  Hackerocity[10] =  9 ; // jQuery Plugins
  Hackerocity[11] =  0 ; // Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking?
  Hackerocity[12] =  8 ; // If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, You’re Sane
  Hackerocity[13] = 10 ; // Hello HN, take a look at my new (beta) app BonMp3?
  Hackerocity[14] =  7 ; // Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly
  Hackerocity[15] =  8 ; // Ask HN: How can I move to USA?
  Hackerocity[16] =  7 ; // Ample SDK - Open Source GUI Framework
  Hackerocity[17] =  9 ; // Palindromes (Clojure vs. Common Lisp)
  Hackerocity[18] =  3 ; // Incredible paper sculptures - many cut from one sheet of A4
  Hackerocity[19] =  9 ; // If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, Don’t Do It
  Hackerocity[20] =  5 ; // Why Does Facebook Want to Suck the Fun Out of Unfriending?
  Hackerocity[21] = 10 ; // Machine Translates Thoughts into Speech in Real Time
  Hackerocity[22] =  0 ; // Ask HN: If there was a bury/upmod brigade on HN, how would we know?
  Hackerocity[23] =  8 ; // How to commit brand suicide
  Hackerocity[24] = 10 ; // The Pmarca Guide to Startups: product/market fit
  Hackerocity[25] =  0 ; // [dead] Ajax on Rails
  Hackerocity[26] =  5 ; // One year of Redis
  Hackerocity[27] =  2 ; // New wheel for your bicycle: The Copenhagen wheel
  Hackerocity[28] =  0 ; // In 2010, Demand For US Fixed Income Has To Increase Elevenfold... Or Else
  Hackerocity[29] =  2 ; // Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety
  Hackerocity[30] = 10 ; // Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition
  //	
  TotalHackerocity = 0;
  for(i=1;i<31;i++){TotalHackerocity += Hackerocity[i]};
  //
  // Yep, TotalHackerocity aint what it used to be :-)
  //

You oughta throw this script up on a web server and style the front page like HN. Then link to the story and comments on news.YC

A certain amount of AI (sorry Ed ;)) seems to have scored the 'hackerocity' of the links.

That would be a tough act to follow without mturk assistance.

The number of users rised a lot... Now HN is becoming like the next Reddit.com (and may be Digg.com), some users use it to promote their content or just increase their points.

My resolution was to search for another community. Joel Community is also good, but there is few members. Still better, the day it gets a lot; quality will drop.

I emphatically disagree. I think that HN has done a great job of making sure it doesn't get reduced to the lowest common denominator.

When I looked at this thread, I counted twelve programming/technology posts on the front page, and seven directly related to start-ups. Of the rest, I reckon at least half were hacker-ish, though not directly related to computers.

That's a moments view though, if you monitor the site over longer periods, especially when it is busy (which right now it is not) you can definitely observe what the OP stated.

Agreed.

I'd be curious to know, however, what those ratios look like over time.

if you want moar hackz plz, check out http://hackaday.com

I came to Hacker News late and so I have only known it as an aggregator site with a better than average community participation. Certainly more valuable than Reddit and Digg. But I can see how it's not really hacker news or startup news any longer and you have to wonder at what point it's not even going to be technology news.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com