Ask HN: What are we doing here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are we doing here?

26 pointslbj15 comments

I'm not trying to give any answers or make any demands, but I'd really like to hear what you all think.

HACKER <-- News has changed a lot over the past few years. Todays top stories include a failing Pizza place, Alzheimers insights, a great story about psycadelics and an odd link to millionshort.com.

Its no secret that you can buy positions on hacker news, various websites sell upvotes for cheap, but Im confident this community could gain a lot by narrowing its focus and speaking openly about what that is.

Personally, I love it when I come on here and someone's written/shared a cool paper on a new algorithm (or a new take on an old one, like the 3d Ken Burns), some ground breaking developments (like Googles quantum leap), but especially when someones opensourced some massively helpful project.

I dislike all the company props, the lengthy articles written by non-technical people and especially the content thats already floating around in the mainstream, like anything Elon Musk does. I hate all the content thats strictly irrelevant as my function as a hacker/entrepreneur, like some lady dying from eating Wasabi in a 1000000000000000:1 freak accident.

What do you love to see here, and how do we get more of it?

I didn't see this earlier and need to respond:

> you can buy positions on hacker news

That's false, as far as we know, and we've put a lot of work into this. If anyone knows otherwise and cares about HN, please tell us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can counteract it. Anti-abuse measures are our priority.

If you don't have specific evidence, please don't say "its no secret that you can buy positions on HN". People repeating things doesn't make it true. In fact, when it comes to matters like this, people repeating things is mild evidence that it's not true.

> various websites sell upvotes for cheap

What websites exactly? I know of one, and we've been tracking their nefarious deeds and banning their customers for a long time now. Don't confuse buying votes with buying prominence. I can't say for sure it's not happening (that would be a Rumsfeldian known unknown), but can tell you for sure that what many accounts are actually getting in exchange for paying these spammers is an instant ban for themselves and their sites.

Someone posted here long ago, that HN is like a gym.

You walk in to a gym, there are people of all types. Lots of activity, the clank of weights and whirring of cardio machines. The heavy lifters are grunting out squat sets and chalking their hands. A yoga class is starting and the lycra and mats are flowing into that. It's not all workouts, though. Others are standing chatting to each other about energy drinks. Some are fiddling with their phones or watching the one of the mounted TVs.

My point is, HN has always been that gym: yes the overriding theme has been hacking in startups, but there's many adjacent and often even more things going on than just that. Is that bad or distracting? I don't know, but it makes this place interesting.

What do you love to see here, and how do we get more of it?

The collective answer is "whatever this community upvoted into the frontpage"

If you have evidence of people abusing the algorithm, please email the moderators.

One issue is that the hacker culture got contaminated by the cultural wars. And is hard because is a reflection of something that permeates society as a whole. Tech amplified it in many ways.

From the guidelines:

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.

If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

> "I dislike all the company props, the lengthy articles written by non-technical people and especially the content thats already floating around in the mainstream"

Well that's your personal opinion, and that's okay, you can upvote/downvote whatever submissions you like.

The democratic and objective perspective of Hacker News discussions is what I like... Not the content/topics specifically

I love to see exactly those articles you hate, and I hate all those articles that used to define very early HN, namely all this startup and investing in startups stuff.

I would be great if HN could have some content recommendation system.

What do you have in mind?

> anything Elon Musk does.

Might add zombie Steve Jobs stories.

I actually like to know what Elon is up to

The defining characteristic of HN compared to subreddits is age. Most people here are older than reddit, and while i love well-moderated communities on reddit (and HN could be one), talking to a much younger audience (and cynically deflating their hopes) feels kind of wrong to me. That said, the discussion on HN is still more or less OK , especially in the less crowded "ask hn" and show hn sections. But it's not really impressive or exciting and sometimes outright disappointing, at least compared to 10 years ago.

HN is now a legacy website. It's not about hackers (esp. of the illegal kind) neither about news (esp. (geo)politics). You 're not going to learn the hot new tech, but you 'll read what marketing dept. thinks of it a year later. You 'll also find articles about things that HNers don't really understand (e.g. neuroscience) yet keep getting upvotes.

It's still in my top 2 communities, but feels like going to bar that s now boring and its patrons are looking for new and exciting venues. I find fresh-er discussions in twitter lately.

>top 2 communities

What is the other community?

Honestly, I love good technical discussions the most. I've had good interactions learned a lot from very smart people discussing some of these. I'm fascinated by many articles that get posted that cover societal or cultural things, but the comment section usually ends up being garbage. In the end they just end up being filled with off topic flamerwars, downvotes and occasionally really negative content.

Not sure that theres much that can be done about it though.

I think the problem is that people are using HN as their only source of general news. People upvote anything that even remotely amuses them and hence the situation.

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