Hacker News Reader

Comment by c1sc0 | Hacker News Reader

that's fine, but does xkcd really belong here?

please not this again

Agreed. Although there has been a considerable amount of "unsuitable" material make it to the front page of HN, there has also been a lot of pointless citation of this unsuitable material - to the degree that it dominates constructive dialog taking place.

HN is changing, no doubt, but as has been pointed out time and time again on HN, if it is of interest to the community at large, it belongs. The community is changing (undeniable) but, maybe it is that sometimes posts other than an amazing O(N) bubble sort are also of interest...

I, for one, enjoy chuckling at XKCD - typically I just go there myself (without the aid of a social bookmark site!), but perhaps this one is just relevant enough to make it on HN... Or maybe I am wrong.

It seems to me though that posting something like XKCD is simply for getting Karma. It's not like the people who read it don't already check every monday,wednesday and friday morning... or is that just me?

Not just you, but I belong in the camp that never checks xkcd on my own. Not a fan, probably never will be, but if the community thinks its interesting, might as well. This one was indeed interesting.

Anything updated periodically probably works better with RSS (subscription model), while sites like Hacker News seem better at aggregating interesting scattered content (and hosting the resulting discussion). There's certainly room for overlap (e.g. "look at the interesting post on this blog, subscribe if you like it"), but people submitting every single update as they occur will probably detract from the signal here.

Except that nickb posted it, and doesn't he have like infinite karma by now anyway?

Either that or people have felt pain when installing Linux before.

Careful analysis of this post's score will answer your question for you.

The HN aim used to be set above "popular".

How so? The HN front page is designed to only show the most recent, most popular articles.

The fact that XKCD comics, when submitted, reach front page status almost every time indicates that they belong right where they are.

Unfortunately that's the attitude that got Digg and Reddit where they are today: lots of quick/simple/amusing links that are easy to digest and upvote, but not a whole lot of substance.

Thinking more about this, it might be even more true than I realized at first. A lot of times after reading a long interesting article I totally forget to return to news.yc to upvote the article. One solution could be to display the article in a frame with easy access to voting.

reddit has a toolbar, exactly as you describe. If you're logged in, you can see the option here: http://www.reddit.com/prefs (immediately below the languages)

Actually, xkcd has been off the front page (or at least not high up it) for a while.

Which is why I said "when submitted". Unless I am missing a bunch of XKCD submissions which aren't getting front paged...

I've seen a few on the "New" page with 2 or 3 votes and no comments.

Besides, if they're only occasionally submitted, then isn't that a good quality filter?

Yes it is, which is why the ones that are submitted and front paged have been filtered for quality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com