[1] http://codybrowntext.tumblr.com/post/1602181256/dc-is-gettin...
I can see the relevance of regionalised hacker news sites, but I dislike the idea of a regionalised Hacker News site. Note the capitalisation and plurality.
2) What makes you think the rest of us (non-Indian) folks wouldn't be interested in these topics?
note: I am not being a smart-ass here. I am genuinely curious. Personally, I think it would interesting to hear about how this stuff actually works over there. You know, a real perspective other than "they're stealing our jobs" or Outsourced.
personally, i can very clearly see why they'd want to do something like this.
What HN needs is enhanced search (and tagging) capabilities, precisely to allow user to select content from specfic regions (and in different languages).
For example, I think it'd be extremely useful to be able to bring up posts specifically about China, or Paris, or only in French or Russian.
I could imagine something that works, if you're willing to fragment even further and make language-specific sites, as this way you could post articles in languages other than English and you'd get discussions from those users who don't feel that comfortable in English. But that further restricts your user base. Might work for French and German, but beyond that? (Spanish, too, of course, but then you'll run into problems with the country/law specific stuff)
I have the largest interest in my community and I mean "community" in both the sense of the hacker community, but also my regional community: Texas, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Europe, Australia, and then "The Rest of the World" in that order. If "The Rest of the World" begins to dominate the stories or even if Australia, for example, starts dominating the stories then I will head to somewhere where more of my interests are shown.
And I think that's just basic human nature. We can only read so many headlines, articles, posts in a day and it makes sense that we self-filter to select the sites that show us things that are the most interesting to us.
Sry to go on at length, but I found your comment provocative and I wanted to paint a clear picture.
Not trying to be a jerk - it's a serious question. "I see you" and appreciate your making the comment but I personally wouldn't want tags.
Is that really a sensible position to be taking? If HN can only survive by people purposely not visiting better sites, HN doesn't deserve to survive.
This entire line of logic is silly when you actually translate it into concrete recommendations you are making to real people.
If the designers of Hacker News want a community that's segmented, let them do it. I don't think it's right to use the HN name to do it for them, though.
I explained it to you. If you want non-fragmentation, that is exactly equivalent to telling people that they should stay where they are. "Not fragmenting the community" can't happen in the abstract, it can only happen in the concrete choices of others. Therefore, when you advocate against the fragmentation of a community even as it naturally tends to it by the natural result of people doing what they desire, you are advocating that other people should not follow their desires to go somewhere else. They're not even two sides of the same coin, they're just the same thing. But it sure sounds a lot less friendly, which in my opinion is the more accurate way of looking at it.
There's a difference between fragmentation of a community because of site structure and people going elsewhere because they like it better. In building a community, the choices of the designer of the community's home influences the structure of the resulting community without needing to tell them explicitly to do one thing or another.
My original point was not to say I agreed or disagreed with the post's plea to stop fragmentation, though it seems that you took it that way. I was saying that your original point of adding more options being inconsequential because there are lots of sites out there was an oversimplified trivialization of the problem. Too many options on a site is frequently a real, important design problem, and you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Having HN1, HN2, HN3, etc is different from having HN, Digg, Reddit, etc.
I'm done. I didn't mean to get into an argument, I was just pointing out something you didn't seem to be considering when you made your comment. HN's existence as a single entity might be an intentional design decision, and it's not necessarily a bad one.
We need some means of generating stronger local communities.
#28 on PG's essay "Ideas We'd Like to Fund" is "Fixing Email Overload" http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html . For many of us, HN overload is as serious as HN overload. There is a front-page story daily for every new hack invented to manage it.
HNI fragments HN as does techstartu.ps