Ask YC: Should "Hacker News" be renamed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Should "Hacker News" be renamed?

4 pointsjey16 comments

Should "Hacker News" be renamed to "Web 2.0 News" so that the "Hacker News" moniker can be freed up to be used by a site that provides news of interest to hackers and the intellectually curious in general?

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No.

And your proposal baffles me. The term "Hacker News" is just a text descriptor. It appears no where in the URL of the site or stories. Renaming it would both be pointless and inaccurate, as the not every story is about Web2.0.

Right now, Web 2.0 might tend to be the dominant underlying topic, because Web 2.0 is the dominant outlet for most hackers to practice their craft. Over time, you should expect this to change to roughly reflect the state of current hacker primary employment paths.

10 Years ago, your text might have read `Should "Hacker News" be renamed to "Telecom and Networking News" so that the "Hacker News" moniker can be freed up to be used by a site that provides news of interest to hackers and the intellectually curious in general?'

The "Hacker News" moniker does not need to be freed up. If you have an idea that seems to be more "Hacker News" than "Hacker News", go build it and draw and audience and trounce this site. That's the beauty of Web 2.0 ;)

"If you have an idea that seems to be more "Hacker News" than "Hacker News", go build it and draw and audience and trounce this site. That's the beauty of Web 2.0 ;)"

I'm thinking about it. The problem is that I don't want to spend any time thinking about nor running a news aggregator site.

And no, Web 2.0 is not "the dominant outlet for most hackers to practice their craft" -- it is the dominant outlet within the self-selecting set of hackers who follow Paul Graham. For the most part this means web developers in their early 20's -- which is also Web 2.0's core audience.

I didn't intend the question seriously, it's more just to poke fun at the Web 2.0 centric stories that appear here. It depresses me that this site focuses so incredibly much on Web 2.0 and not on science/software in general. If the site wasn't so damned Web 2.0 centric, neither of the Quotably stories would have made it to the front page. I'd say 95% of Web 2.0 stuff is made just to appeal to other Web 2.0 enthusiasts and not really to any large audience. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be niche stuff to serve Web 2.0 enthusiasts -- just that it's disproportionately large.

No.

Do you have examples of good articles that weren't noticed?

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jey

I think it's funny that the highest rated one in the top 10 is the one I just submitted on a lark as an experiment.

You seem to get a fair amount of upvotes. I basically think that things that 'really take off' are pretty random. I'd much rather hear people discuss "how to decide what to discard": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144716 than Carr and Arrington bickering about IP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144105 (which was sort of interesting, but worth somewhere less than 10 points, IMO), but... so it goes.

Putting a comment on the article makes more people notice it, click on it, vote for it, and move it to the front page. Whenever I see a great science article, I make sure to comment on it so it get off the "Newest" page and on the front page. It takes surprisingly little, and then once it's on the front, it usually gets a lot of love.

HN is effective because it's so narrowly focused. Yes, there are submissions that deviate somewhat, but because of the initial focus, the outliers remain (for the most part) intelligent and interesting. If you broaden the focus, you also broaden the range of the outliers, and we'll start getting completely unrelated posts.

I fully agree, but I wish the "narrow focus" was on Hacker News instead of Web 2.0 News.

So do I, but there are always going to be posts that don't "belong". I'm just saying that at least the way things are, at least the outliers are Web 2.0 news. But we should under no circumstances change the mission of the site to better match what's being posted. If we expanded the intended focus to include those, HN will end up looking like valleywag.

Good question. But I don't have an answer.

To be fair, Y Combinator is about startups and startups are, typically, Web 2.0 :)

then where would all the intellectually curious, web 2.0 hackers go for their news?!?!

Nothing stops you from visiting more than one site; I still go to reddit.com my daily dose of conspiracy theories and funny pictures. :-)

No. Hacking does not equal Web 2.0.

Many of us were hacking long before "Web 2.0". Many of us currently hack stuff that is not "Web 2.0". And many of us will still be hacking long after "Web 2.0".

"Hacker News" is just right.

Sure -- but this site focuses nearly exclusively on Web 2.0 news and gossip. There's nothing wrong with a site focusing on Web 2.0 gossip, obviously tons of people are interested in it. I just think it shouldn't pretend that it's a hacker news site.

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