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Comment by michael_nielsen | Hacker News Reader

I voted this story up. The question I try to answer in deciding whether to upvote a story is this: is the story important to hackers? Castro retiring is a major event. It's not on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, say, but it's more important than nearly everything that's gone on in the US Primaries, to pick an example. My guess is that it's more interesting to most hackers than the unoriginal me-too lists of "Top ten mistakes startups make" that still regularly populate Hacker News.

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I personally tend to try to apply the standard of whether it's of importance or interest to hackers in particular, rather than to human beings in general.

Major news stories are, of course, of importance to everyone, but I personally would rather have a hacker news which is focused on hacker-ish stuff.

Thank you, it is a nice Bayesian point of view.

Ok, but by that same standard, the following stories are important too:

- Vote in Pakistan. They've got nukes...

- Kosovo independence has important repercussions in Europe and elsewhere.

- A big tax scandal in Germany, one of the world's most important economies.

- Obama just announced some kind of protectionist tax plan to 'keep jobs in America'.

just to grab a few...

I think we have different standards. In 10 years, will anyone remember any of these? Only Castro and Kosovo might qualify. I certainly wouldn't even considering upvoting any of the rest. They're ephemera, and I agree with you that they're not of great interest to hackers.

They're all more important than the '10 things every startup should know' link in the grand scheme of things.

The other problem is that it doesn't pass the "make me smarter or inform me of something I didn't know" test. It's a piece of information I already knew, as did anyone else that is in any way connected to TV, radio or other news sites.

The test I'm applying is not whether the stories are more important in the grand scheme of things. I completely agree with you - that test is not the right test to apply. The right test, in my opinion, is how interesting a story is to hackers. And on that criterion, my original judgement was that the news of Castro's resignation merits an upvote.

With that said, your point about how widely distributed a story is elsewhere is an interesting one. I'm not sure I completely agree - the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo wouldn't have made it onto Hacker News under this criterion, for example.

Part of the reason for wanting stories like this to appear on Hacker News isn't so much to be informed of the existence of the story, but rather for the quality of the discussion provoked by the stories. There are certain commenters whose opinion of Castro's resignation I'd far rather hear than some talking head on CNN.

Aha! Now we're getting somewhere: I was thinking the same thing about commentary - that's the only valid reason to have a widely visible story here.

However, I think that commentary on MS/Yahoo is far more relevant here than anything about Castro can possibly be. Indeed, Castro commentary is very likely to lead down the reddit road.

You may be right. In the large, I'm optimistic that it's possible to set up a forum where sensible discussion of hot button issues like politics is possible. Certainly, HN offers good initial conditions for achieving this: a great base of intelligent commenters who mostly seem able to have intelligent conversations with one another, even when they disagree. But maybe HN isn't the right place to be attempting this.

There are a few examples of online communities expanding so fast that original users no longer find them intellectually stimulating. Is there a single root cause? Are users so overconfident in their mutual abilities to discuss off-topic content safely, that they mistakingly end up allowing their own communities to kick themselves out; is it the fault of the design of the community software and system/processes; or, could it be that the community grew too quickly?

As somebody who enjoys this community a lot, I want to know that if 1,000 people start posting random URL's tomorrow, that not only would software filters stop junk from getting through, but that the community would step up and moderate itself because, albeit this is Hacker News, algorithms are never perfect: we are going to have to use our brains to make sure the site is still focused (or re-focused) regardless of how interesting an article might be.

On the other hand, there are good signs this may not necessarily happen to Hacker News. It's very possible that Digg, Reddit, and newcomer social news sites will be enough to satisfy the needs of most users. This site could be like a chess club in that it's open to everybody, but most people wouldn't care.

At the same time, one has to admit that if a social news site continues to address every topic on earth, it could get to the point where as the content becomes more similar to that of Digg or Reddit, there would be an exponential increase in new registrations daily of users looking for the next big thing. These users would then vote up new types of stories and change the site in a very short time. I think I read that one can't grow a team by more than 25% in number per year, or one will have a team that has lost qualities of the existing group--this is likely a major factor in retaining consistency and focus for this community, too.

"Indeed, Castro commentary is very likely to lead down the reddit road."

Hum... we don't want to digg too deep down the reddit hole?

I'm not connected to a TV, radio or other news sites. This is my primary news source and I don't mind if occasionally an article like this makes its way to the top. OTOH I understand this doesn't belong on HN. But I wouldn't start violently complaining about it.

Why can't I just have a button to dismiss a story of the front page? Not downvote it, just make it disappear from MY homepage?

Why can't I just have a button to dismiss a story of the front page? Not downvote it, just make it disappear from MY homepage?

It would be easy enough to do, but my gut tells me it would be a mistake, because it would make it easier for the site as a whole to deteriorate. As long as everyone has to see every story, there's a lot of pressure not to have bad stuff.

Paul Buchheit dislikes optional settings in software for similar reasons. He thinks they're usually just a way to punt on hard design decisions. Nearly everyone is going to use the defaults anyway, so you should just work hard to make those are right.

Well, with no ability to downvote I'm not sure how forcing everyone to see every story keeps the quality high. And there are certainly no incentives to prevent submission of low quality stories (as far as I'm aware). Just spam away and hope something will get upvoted.

But from a reading perspective once I read a story (and maybe some of the comments) from the front page I no longer care about it. Something I'll want to follow the comments (but to make that easy an option to see which stories have new comments instead of having to squint at the number of comments would work better anyway).

So usually over half the stories on the home page are links that I don't care about (either I upmoded them or want to ignore them and don't care to follow the comment thread).

Maybe this forces people to follow the new stream (of which an RSS feed would be extremely helpful).

I'm not sure how forcing everyone to see every story keeps the quality high

It means the watchdogs will bark when crap stories try to infiltrate the camp.

But the guy was talking about a hide button, not a "hide it before I even see that it is there" (if that's even possible) button. Am I misunderstanding this?

Butbutbut!!!

I'm positive at least 20% of the stories do not appeal to each person, but the stories in that 20% are different for each individual (see what I mean?)

Lack of interest towards a subject matter in an individual at a specific time doesn't necessarily denote lack of suitability for the subject for HN.

Personally I'm getting quite irritated at the need to eyeball-scan the news because I'm rather keeping up with the new articles so I visit often but I always have like 15 stories I already decided I wouldn't check out...

No one here is "complaining violently". Everyone has been quite civil so far. I like that about this site.

It's your choice not to follow other news sites. Something like cnn, bbc, etc... is a much better place to stay abreast of current events than yc.news.

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