Ask HN: Is anyone else tired of reading the same articles? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone else tired of reading the same articles?

44 pointsemilepetrone29 comments

I have spent the last hour reading articles from HN I've saved over the last few weeks. They are all the same. Lean startup this, A/B test that, Design is important, I failed, Build a community then revenues, etc.

After years of reading the same articles, I have learned very little. Everyone is repeating the same stories/advice, and, as a community, I don't see any progress.

Are we doomed to continuously repeat the same sad stories over and over again? Can we finally kick this habit? I don't know- but I am tired of reading the same articles written with slightly different adjectives.

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I've been a user longer than you have, and I still learn things.

I think the solution, as with any news site, is not to assume that everything on it will be stuff you don't already know. Which seems pretty obvious, really...

I think the problem isn't about learning new things - it is repeating information which may not even be as good as the original article.

I'm going to work on building a site that will be the Best of HN. Somewhere people can go to see the best article on AB testing or Design. If a better article comes along, it will receive more votes and become the new #1.

"If a better article comes along, it will receive more votes and become the new #1."

More votes than what? A previous article's votes on HN?

As time goes on, there are more people reading HN, so even shitty articles posted today may get more votes than stellar articles posted two years ago.

I think you're suffering from confirmation bias. Certainly there's a lot of repeating content, but there's tons of new stuff on HN constantly.

An unfortunate habit I once noticed in myself was skipping over articles whose titles I didn't understand, even though if I want to learn about new things that's almost certainly the wrong way to go about it. You'll notice (and remember) what you're familiar with much more than what you're not.

If you really want to increase the diversity of content on HN, spend more time on the new page. There are ~25 links submitted in the past couple of hours (on a Sunday). Probably 80% of submitted links receive fewer than 5 upvotes, but there's tons of great stuff in there that simply doesn't get upvoted quickly enough to get a front-page vote-boost.

I like the new page better than the front page- sure there's some crap but there is tons of great stuff there.

You could try the "new" link up at the top, and up-vote things you find interesting. There are a LOT of worthy submissions that never make it to the front page.

Completely agree, often I find the best articles on /new and not on the front page.

I think a great experiment for pg would be to set /new as the front page for HN and see what happens.

I like your experiment of making /new the homepage for a trial run and see what happens

If you don't like it- write something new and post it!

You make a valid point. But, those answers have to do with the questions that startups ask all the time:

1. how do you launch? answer: "lean startup this" 2. how do you make convert more users? answer: "A/B test that" 3. is design important? answer: "design is important" 4. what happens if you fail? answer: "that's okay, I failed" 5. what do you do first, community or revenue: "build a community, then revenue"

We're limited by the subject matter, which is what makes this community so valuable. Moreover, our answers are similar because we've all developed a very similar startup ethos over time.

Are there other questions we need to be asking as startups, which produce different answers?

Is basically the problem of threads-based forums repeated in the blogo/HN-sphere...

It would be cool if the best blog-posts could be somehow preserved, and shown when somebody is interested in them as if they were new, + personalizing the news/reading experience (Thoof comes to mind here).

In the past years I built this (http://www.logilogi.org), as a hobby/passion-project, but naturally it has not taken off either, as threads and/or "expiring the attention" that is given to posts, have the advantage that they focus readers on a limited number of posts, increasing the likelyhood of attaining critical mass in discussing/replying to them.

So there is a dilemma here...

This site isn't set up to preserve knowledge. A newcomer hasn't really got anywhere to go to see all the accumulated knowledge, and they can't tell which old stories they should read to get that knowledge quickly.

As such, things will continue to be reposted over and over.

So yeah, the site is doomed to that scenario.

Instead of reading every story, read the first few comments. They'll tell you if anything new or interesting has been posted.

What would you like to read about ?

It isn't a question of 'What' but 'What's next?'

Articles regurgitating AB testing homepages, green buttons, and, my favorite, 'Follow me on Twitter here' aren't progressing the community.

What's next? What can we do with this information that advances the discussion?

I don't have the answer. I'm raising the question.

Because of the emphasis on a particular business model by YC and by extension HN, ritualized repetition of the conventional wisdom isn't surprising. On the other hand, suppose someone had a radically different and successful business strategy. Would blogging about it at length be likely to raise or lower returns?

There is a lot of articles on the same themes... which is reasonable, people aren't so unique that there won't be tons of overlap. You can choose to not keep reading A/B articules et al. Spend the time you have wasted reading the same things over and over again learning a new skill...

I think you are hitting at exactly what I'm so frustrated with - the goal of these articles is to help people learn a new skill/ learn from their mistake. However every few weeks, the same meme reappears. The Startup version of Groundhog Day.

Yes, but isn't the Startup world rather "Groundhog Day" by its very nature?

A founder might make some egregious mistakes the first time around. The next time, s/he can bring some of the experience forward to make things smoother. The 4th or 5th time around, a newcomer might marvel at their prescience.

Merlin Mann got very frustrated with this same problem as it pertains to the GTD/Lifehack community. (where he felt that he was part of the problem.) He wrote this essay about it: http://www.merlinmann.com/better

Maybe a simple keyword filter would help? Could be done as fancy 'realtime' search which would actually be cool/useful giving instant feedback. It would make it easy to screenout posts that are uninteresting to the user.

Maybe there just aren't enough awesome articles out there for you?

Otherwise, if you see something you'd like to read on HN, submit it! If that isn't successful, then you can really start complaining.

Why is this post falling? 7 pts in 28 minutes should be front page, and now its on the second page? I thought it was a valid argument to raise...

Since you ask, personal opinion only ...

Articles without links have a penalty applied. This site is about finding cool stuff, not about musing over the site itself. If it isn't a link to somewhere else then it's less likely (although not certain) to fall strictly in line with the site's original intent.

Yes, it's a valid point to raise, but a better way to raise it would be to write a proper article, discussing the issue, proposing possible solutions, weighing their merits, then making specific suggestions, and finally, submitting a link to the item to wrote. This is much to be preferred over just complaining.

Thanks- I am doing that right now +1

There's plenty of new stuff on here all the time. Get an rss reader and scan through titles. Makes it easier to filter the repeats.

I just skip over the repeats. I'm still new here so I probably haven't read all of them. And, after all some things bear repeating.

Even this post is a duplicate sentiment.

One issue you run into is that, in any field, the tried and true gets repeated a lot (for newcomers and for other reasons). Anything 'really new' tends to not be embraced because it's untested and no one knows for sure it will work...etc. Those are valid concerns. Even for areas where people are doing cutting edge stuff, you pretty quickly develop a few respected "experts" and anything which doesn't readily agree with their view will be dismissed, actively attacked, etc -- even in cases where it is a non-competing alternative which addresses, in effect, a different issue/niche. Also, those folks who already know all the tried and true stuff will tend to be fairly small in number. Trying to get a good conversation going among that small group will tend to be tough and not well-suited to a very public discussion.

If you can think of a way around some of those issues, more power to you. But it is an issue that tends to crop up to some degree on every forum I have ever belonged to, regardless of the topic in question.

its impossible to find your perfect news feed unless you are running it... I would just start skimming over a few other feeds routinely and you will be able to pick up a bigger variety of stories.

treehugger, techmeme, betanews, techcrunch, and even ted will be good places for a wider inventory of stories.

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