Ask PG: do you want HN to be a general news site or not? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: do you want HN to be a general news site or not?

52 pointsnailer40 comments

Hi Paul,

I know you wrote the HN guidelines specifying 'whatever hackers find interesting' is appropriate. However people take this two ways, either:

A. Whatever gets upvotes is OK, even if a large chunk of the articles on HN are about suicide bombers, the TSA, political leaks, etc and duplicate existing sites like Reddit.

B. Things that specifically Hackers find interesting - as opposed to the general population - belong on the front page.

IIRC you appealed for people to submit Scheme stories a while ago after an influx of new users came to visit, so I'm hoping for 2) to be your answer. If so, is there anything we as a community can do, asides from flagging articles (which we're already doing), to stop HN further becoming a general purpose news site?

View on HN

I think about HN like an editor would about a magazine. Stories about bees or Wikileaks or the TSA are sometimes appropriate. Maybe once a week or month. They are not and nor should they be automatically disqualified, I just don’t want to see too many of them.

Leave it the way it is! If hackers find it interesting it'll get upvoted. For example, I upvoted the bee story the other day. It was a really interesting article and I don't think my wife, for example, would give any shits about it.

I suspect that the bigger issue is that the wider range of topics, the fewer hackers will be as a percentage of all users, and that will precipitate a further slide into general news.

Is there a reason you don't use Reddit for these stories? They have heaps of articles about bees, the TSA, and wikileaks.

What's the HN reader's perception of the Reddit vs HN community when it comes to articles about bees / TSA / wikileaks?

Do we think we have more interesting commentary? (e.g. is that why we post those articles here?)

The commentary here has always been a lot better than reddit for the large majority of stories. Reedit has its place because you can custom tailor it to what you want to see and the best comments sorting helps with seeing a few good comments. That community is a lot more hostile and likely to digress into a pun comment chain though.

To me, reddit is like a really cool charter school with lots of AP and college level classes with a few brilliant geniuses, but at the end of the day it is still a high school. HN is more like a fine graduate program at a respected university. That's my take.

You know, I actually don't visit Reddit too often since I prefer Hacker News because of the entrepreneur/hacker content I can rely on. But at the same time the best entrepreneurs are well rounded and cultured, so articles about other topics isn't tainting Hacker News. I just wouldn't want every article on the front page to be about bees, TSA and Wikileaks.

My guess would be 'no' but when a subject is popular you'll see a cluster of articles around it. You can't please everybody all the time in a community this size so your best weapons to counter any negative effects that you perceive are in order the 'submit' link and the voting arrow on those articles that you think are great, and as a final resort for things that you think are off-topic or spam the 'flag' link.

They've worked pretty good so far and it is neat to see how effective some minor tweaks have been in sending the 'front' page in the right direction.

The most important page on HN is not the homepage however, it's page #2 of the new submission list, that's where you might still be able to rescue an article that you think does not get the attention that it deserves.

You may want to really consider submitting more interesting stories, 50 or submissions over 4 years is not a whole lot. If everybody that feels like you do would post interesting articles instead of 'Ask PG' stuff about the perceived quality of the site that quality would go up quickly.

flag articles as appropriate and upvote things you like.

edit: though, i admit i'd like to see downvotes on submissions, too, just to see how that would work out here. perhaps two front page lists for an experiment. one that shows the results with downvotes counted, one without.

Sure, but alas there's now enough new users on HN who upvote general purpose news to the front page that flagging doesn't work anymore.

Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2043841

this was also the case in the election cycle. tons of political stuff that got popular and highly voted didn't go anywhere until (i think) a mod made an executive decision

Flags are already downvotes on submissions so even if you don't get enough flags in time to 'kill' the article it will definitely go down in the rankings when it gets more flags.

i know, but to get to something to flag it, you have to perform more clicks. you have to really disagree with something to want to go flag it. a downvote button on the list would make it much more convenient and more likely to get used to tag something mostly off topic but not blatantly bad.

> you have to perform more clicks. you have to really disagree with something to want to go flag it.

I think that's actually good except for the case where you're flagging spam (it's annoying to have to click twice to flag an obvious spam article when it could have been one click). To have the barrier a bit higher for a thing that will have a large effect is good imo.

which i think is true for flagging, which is more than just a downvote. make it more inconvenient for the thing that can kill a story or report spam.

but for just a downvote, which has the same but opposite effect as an upvote, placing it right below that upvote would be a good location.

Well, I think the most important thing to do is for people to upvote the stories that they see as being "Hacker News". I've got the HN frontpage feed as a "Live Bookmark" in Firefox, which links right to the story URLs (not the discussions), so sometimes I'll go a few days just reading the stories, not upvoting/discussing anything, all the while thinking, "Jeez, there hasn't been anything good on HN lately."

Now, I try to log in at least once a day or every other day and post an "HN-worthy" article if I come across one, or at least try to contribute to the discussion of an article.

My "Fix HN" suggestion: apply a different "decay" rate to the "Ask/Show/Tell HN" posts so that they stay on the front page longer. They're usually more focused on HN-oriented material, and posted by people who post on HN semi-regularly (at least). I'd also lower the flagging threshold to something like 3 or 5 so that people don't abuse this for general news articles.

Actually the decay rate is set the other way, right? The Ask/Show/Tell stories get whacked sooner. Can't remember exactly why though.

It occurs to me that any story that takes a long time to consume -- say a long TED talk -- has a built-in disadvantage to a story that can be quickly consumed. That's because of the way the decay rate works.

Ideal HN-bait story? A long-ish story with several technical-looking drawings, charts, and graphs, all around some flame-bait brand/fanboy thing like Apple or Google, loaded with personal drama that involves some famous tech person. If it has some technical googledegook or obscure jargon, all the better.

I don't mean that as a criticism of HN, just trying to flesh out what commonalities I'm noticing. Seems like that would be a first step to critiquing site. For all I know, this is exactly the kind of story pg wants to see. Beats me.

EDIT: This idea of trying to come up with the silliest hn article title in order to demonstrate community trends was so interesting to me that I followed up with a HN Contest http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048844

Yep, HN is currently set up so that the Ask/Show/Tell stories decay faster, which just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like there used to be so many more of those posts, but it's really that there are more now and they just rarely show up on the frontpage (which is probably the only thing that most people look at).

I think you're right about the HN-bait stories -- in fact, I have a feeling that a number of people tend to upvote sensational stories (actually, just the titles) without even reading them, which makes the problem even worse.

I've noticed in myself a trend: I'll read the first few graphs and then, once I figure out whether I agree with the author or not, either ditch the whole story or just go upvote it.

I assume other people do the same. It's not a good thing to do.

I think the site would be much more useful if it were just Ask/Tell/Show HN stories with some kind of meta filtering on top. How do I find a cofounder? What's the best way to measure traction? How do all these startups get so much media attention? Is there some way to navigate from those questions to all the discussions about it that we've had on HN? If so, and if you could do that with a 100 startup-related issues, it'd be a hell of a more useful site than all the gossip and drama that we end up with.

I'm definitely hoping for that the community (not just Paul Graham - why should he, regardless of how much I/we respect him, dictate direction) drifts towards A (as it has recently). Lets put it this way: you're never going to be skilled at anything if you stick only to things that hackers (our definition of it) find interesting, and not the general population? If you imagine a Venn diagram of,

  (news for us) V (news for the general population)

You'd still stick to just the very left? You'd be leaving out fair amounts of science, mathematics, arts, communication. That means that you'd be biased but more importantly, limited. Why should you ever want that?

Is HN the only place you get news and information? It is one of the few places (specifically community sites) I can get news relevant to programming and startup culture. That's not to say there is no place for some of the stuff further to the right, but maybe not stuff we might find by going to cnn.com. The lack of "Sub-HNs" means that if we want to keep HN's utility in terms of sifting info and news on the internet, we have to keep a tight focus.

Let me clarify (I'm being down-voted for stating my honest opinion which is in itself quite sad. I did not troll, nor was I disrespectful): I never said we should talk about the whole scope.

I certainly do not want to read news that would be to the far right of that diagram. But there are a number of soft skills you do acquire from sometimes leaning on the intersection between "hacker news" and just "news". I don't believe we should limit HN just to the very left because we'd miss those. That being said, this is HN and I don't ever want to come here for CNN content - that's why CNN.com exists.

I think you are being down-voted because your statement seems to imply that a person could not get the other news from anywhere else. I would like to see HN as just or predominately the far left of your diagram. I see news about everything everywhere, but I highly value the niche I see here and cannot find anything like it anywhere else. I'd like to see it not diluted.

FYI -- I did not down-vote your comment. I rarely ever down-vote anything on HN.

Why? Because I don't want to talk about arts, communication, general science, or politics with a bunch of pseudonymous, arbitrarily-selected laymen online. Putting that here covers up technical news and discussions that I am interested in reading (discussions frequently conducted by actual experts in technical fields, and which, unlike general news, I can't find at a dozen other websites.)

There's a point, here.

The are only two differences between political discussions on HN and political discussions in any random moderated forum.

1) The posts are shorter.

2) Most of those involved in such discussions think that the (almost-always) bog-standard partisan/ideological arguments they advance are somehow more insightful because they're smart programmers, entrepreneurs, or just geeks in general.

Because there are other sites that already serve as sources of general news. I come here looking specifically for "hacker news".

what is "hacker news"?

via the Hacker News Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

So hacker news is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Which can be quite general news.

Don't forget that && though. Off-Topic: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

So yes, things that gratify one's intellectual curiosity. But typically if it suggests a new trend.

By way of example (of what I think not what the rules are) YOU may find articles on high frequency trading to be intellectually satisfying. The majority of HN may not. A few articles as the trend emerges will be generally interesting to the whole crowd here as an emerging trend. But after that it is probably a very specific area of interest that is much less of what we all want our front page filled with.

What differentiates hackers from the general population? Is it perhaps above average intelligence, a higher level of curiosity, maybe tinkers, and/or possibly individuals who are interested in all sorts of interesting stuff?

If that is roughly the definition, then I suppose there would be general news but of a novel, or intellectually interesting nature.

If, on the other hand, by hacker you mean programmer, and by non general news you mean only news related to programming, wouldn't that be slightly too narrow?

I think technology news are dominant here, but the variety now and then I think is a good thing.

You are making a false dichotomy. A) and B) are NOT mutually exclusive.

On the contrary. Assuming the vast majority of HN are indeed "hackers", and that we do not just blindly upvote, then a post will get upvoted iff hackers find it interesting.

'A) and B) are NOT mutually exclusive.'

That's correct. B is a subset of A. The TSA, bees, and wikileaks are undoubtably interesting to many people, not specifically hackers.

I don't understand the wording of A and B. Stories that are getting upvoted by the hackers here (A) are by definition stories that hackers find interesting (B).

Read B) again.

'B. Things that specifically Hackers find interesting - as opposed to the general population - belong on the front page.'

Note the word 'specifically' and the phrase 'opposed to the general public'. I'm a hacker and I like pizza, however pizza is not a thing specifically Hackers find interesting.

Exactly.

An article about the economics or business of pizza, or someone obsessed with making great pizza (like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz91GfoZ-Zs ) might be considered interesting enough to merit going on HN.

I think the problem with that assumption is that non-hackers can visit this site and vote for articles that are only interesting to the general public and otherwise off-topic for this site. It doesn't take many votes to get on the front page, you only need a handful of users who are willing to upvote any sensational headline.

How many examples are there of non-hackers hanging out here and vote stuff up?

so I'm hoping for 2) to be your answer

Even more confusing - he refers to 2 as being his preference.

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