Hacker News Site Guidelines | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Site Guidelines

ycombinator.com

177 pointspg35 comments

Perhaps it could be added that submitters shouldn't submit "flamebait" - eg. titles/articles that will elicit very predictable, emotionally charged responses, or have borderline lying titles. In short, not tabloid material; which some other democratic news sites are buried in now.

This is provably the most popular content for the masses, so it's something to watch out for. The editors here do already kill it and that's great, but why not put this guideline in writing?

I like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119277

"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."

Stories about, say, the US elections are of equal importance to everyone, and fail that test.

"Stories about, say, the US elections are of equal importance to everyone, and fail that test."

--I think that is wrong. US elections are important to americans (and maybe some foreigners that are into foreign politics). You can be a hacker, and not an amercian, so you don't care much about US elections.

I'm using everyone very loosely as "a broader community", and not actually every person on the planet, if that wasn't apparent.

Another huge problem with Reddit. There was so much coverage on the US elections non-US citizens would get upset and everyone else would use the mentality "Well it got upmodded, this is what we want to see and you're just going to have to deal with it." Gladly we dont have that mentality here, it reflects too much of the .NET developers being tourists and look at everything with the "us" and "everything else" pattern.

Very destructive.

One of the problems with Reddit since Wired took over is the dominance of all kinds of political discussions on the front page, both US and world news. It really brought the site down, IMHO.

That's denying the impact the US economy/foreign policy has, for better or for worse, in the rest of the world.

I'm not "american", but considering the Internet Neutrality will be decided by the next administration I really care about the US elections right now.

But there's really no need to hear about it until it's decided if you can't do anything to change it (i.e. you are not a voter in the US, nor have influence with any large number of them). I'm Canadian and, though I will be affected by the future actions of the US, there's nothing I can really do to affect them back, so the news of the presidency will probably only reach me a few days after the election, when someone mentions it over coffee.

You have a point. I'd also prefer not to read that kind of news in this site, unless they are related to the tech world (like an interview at the Googleplex).

The tabloid and flamebait techniques can, unfortunately, be effectively employed while remaining entirely within the hacker's topics of interest. I'll spare the naming of specific blogs or yc submissions...

Certainly, but it eliminates an entire category of posting about things that are relevant "because hackers live on the same planet everyone else does", which, true as it may be, doesn't justify dumping the tight focus this site has had on hacker/startup oriented topics.

Two separate concerns, both valid.

This is THE reason I left Reddit. Sensationalist articles that made stories appear demonstrably worse than they really were. Articles turned out not worth reading, I would downmod them and eventually good articles were impossible to find. I approve this idea.

It's a pity there isn't a automated way to fix this -- a Netflix-like system that sorts articles by how highly they are rated by other users who rate articles like you do.

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. ... Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

These rules appear to be in direct opposition to each other. Could someone elaborate on which is the appropriate method?

The difference is in the value add of the blog posting. Reposts vs. commentary.

A link to these guidelines should be added to the http://news.ycombinator.com/submit page.

pg - You should take this out of the story table and just post it right at the top of the page.

There is a link to it at the bottom of every page.

There should be a link to it at the top of the page (something like #1 on the homepage and highlighted) for every user until the exceed a certain karma threshold (50?).

Except from comment pages...

Batten down the hatches, guys. Moderators, get your dead button finger ready.

Why can't we ask questions via Ask.YC? We want to hear from the YC readers, not necessarily PG or whom-ever read the info@ycomb

That bit is referring to questions about the YC program, not general questions of the Hacker News community.

The struggle for purity, in general, provides a depressing history.

The guidelines actually read like a bunch of common sense. The fact that people find it insightful means that it is easy to forget common senses like "being civil." That civility has to be spelled out as a guideline in a site for an educated audience is rather unfortunate.

I didn't even know until now that there are editors on this site. Who are these people and what magical powers do they hold?

Well, HN is written in Arc which has a REPL and so the editors can do whatever they want!

You think the editors interact with the system via the REPL? I would assume they just have the edit/delete functionality exposed for every post instead of just their own. Would be interested to know how this is actually implemented.

the source for HN is available in the Arc distro

I believe the source for a subset of HN is available in the Arc distro. I remember PG commenting about having to remove YC specific stuff from there.

YC's application form is integrated with HN. I assume that's the main thing they removed.

He was talking about things like the YC summer/winter application forms, not the moderation system.

Yes, and in fact you can see from that exactly what editors can do. (Look for calls to the function editor.) Editors can basically edit titles, kill stories and ban users.

shouldn't this list be on or linked on the submit page?

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