I've decided to stop upvoting articles that have nothing to do with startups | Hacker News Reader

I've decided to stop upvoting articles that have nothing to do with startups

21 pointsDennisP16 comments

Basically, reddit already exists, and an appropriate selection of subreddits can produce a nice selection of articles and decent discussion. HN is arguably higher quality, for now, but I don't have another good source for startup-related items. (Suggestions welcome.)

Just my personal preference, others may disagree and vote differently. It's just that lately it seems I'm sifting through an awful lot of general-interest articles, many of which I've already seen on reddit.

The more HN becomes a source for non-startup news, the more users we'll get who don't care about startups. Since HN doesn't have "subreddits," we'll end up with just another general news aggregator, gradually decreasing in quality like they all do.

I know that I've contributed to this, and I've decided to stop.

View on HN

I've noticed two distinct groups on HN:

People like you, who come to HN for startup news

People like me, who come to HN for HN's take on news

The rift is causing more headaches for both sides as time goes on (and it's not going to go away on its own), so it's reasonable to split HN into two subsites: Hacker News and Startup News.

Us old-timers know Hacker News was originally called Startup News but got changed to Hacker News back in 07: http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

pg explains his reasoning pretty clearly there.

Oddly, I agree with almost all of your comment, except the headline part about "startups". =]

I am also wary of all the general news creeping in (not least because I seem to find myself reading/participating in the discussions despite intentions). But the "good" content I come here for is from my perspective the technical articles, while I don't have a lot of interest in the startup-related stuff, except insofar as it sometimes also includes solid technical content.

I mean, in a sense I therefore am interested in startups, since a lot of technical innovation comes from there. But more Woz and less Jobs would be my reading preference.

That's actually what I mean. Technical content that I might possibly use in a startup definitely qualifies. I just had a hard time with the 80-character headline limit.

Depending on how broad you use the term "startup", I might agree. The discussion about programming (and other technical) topics here is usually on a pretty high level, apart from the usual crowd jumping on every hyped bandwagon. Generally on a much, much higher level than "pure" startup news – which most of the time are (bad) economics 101 or sheer self-help book territory.

Right, what I mean is basically anything useful for people doing software-based startups. If it allows me to preserve the illusion that I'm being productive, I count it.

Here's an idea, buy the domain and steal it!

Filter It (http://fltr.it)

Install the fltr.it browser extension and you will begin to see the site's you visit most frequently in a different, more relevant way through the fltr.it overlay heatmap. The content fltr.it thinks is most relevant to your interests is highlighted. Not only does fltr.it learn your interests as you browse the web, it learns the interests of other visitors to the same sites and if enough users on a particular site use fltr.it our algorithms will begin "clumping" like-minded users' filters to the site and you can hop from one site-specific filter to another on-the-fly. See Hacker News through the "startup" fltr, the "science" fltr or the "random" fltr or even combine fltrs.

fltr.it preserves the underlying social and cultural dynamics of each site's userbase while augmenting the site's ability to present the most relevant content to each user-type.

It makes sense if the primary value one sees in HN is the articles, i.e. HN as high quality news aggregator.

If the primary value one sees is in the insight provided by the comments, it perhaps makes less sense, i.e. HN as a high quality discussion forum.

The lower quality the news that is aggregated, the lower quality the discussion that it attracts.

So should I not upvote this submission, because it's not about startups?

More seriously, I've taken to voting mostly for those things that are specific to the hacker/entrepreneur audience, and which I think contain valuable material. There are a few exceptions, but I apply the test: Should this be interesting to non-hackers/founders? If so, don't upvote, and consider flagging.

But it's too late. If only more people would take the pledge, but they won't. It's nearly time to move on - it's been an interesting two-and-a-bit years.

That's a good test.

I think the content on HN has continued to follow the general guidelines set out here: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html which makes me think we're doing ok.

"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Amen to that. I've long since concluded that there must be some sort of spambot just flooding the site with posts from various blogs and news sources, even if they arent even tangentially related to HN

Would segmenting HN like reddit work?

I think it would. It works nicely on reddit. A new subreddit is basically a new community, starting the cycle over again.

Amen.

Lately, I feel like the old curmudgeon yelling at kids to get off my lawn with moderations, edits, etc. Trying not to complain about it publicly just makes it even worse. I considered starting a thread to ask people to downvote more, which is something I never used to do.

The catch, I think, is that even if you could clearly demarcate exactly where the line is for what HN actually stands for, how do you figure out who is on which side of that line? What I think HN is isn't the same as probably anybody else, completely;

I also don't want this to become Reddit, or even general interest. While I'm loathe to reference a 'glory days' era, lest I insult those for whom the glory day was before I arrived, when I got to HN, it was decidedly more startup-focused. What wasn't startup-focused generally required significant thought.

Something else I haven't seen much of lately is a good-old fashioned Erlang-bomb.

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