Ask HN: why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: why do we have less science related posts now that in the past?

32 pointshhm52 comments

This is something that I don't really understand well. Why do we have less science (or music, arts, whatever not directly programming & startups related) content here? If I remember it well, we used to have about 50% programming & startups, and 50% content that was interesting to hackers even if it was outside of those subjects. I even think the name change to Hacker News was to avoid focusing too much in startup & programming content (the previous name was Startup News)... why did the community almost entirely drop it?

I think the problem isn't that we don't like it when it appears, but that for some reason people isn't posting it so often. I haven't had problems posting maths, science, etc content into the first page, so maybe if everyone is interested in this we could try to post such content more often?

What do you think?

(Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker.)

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I think people are a bit afraid to post things outside of the main themes. The quality and relevance of such posts is a lot more subjective, so you always will see people complaining that it is not hacker news.

Very true. I think some of the "Topic Nazis" have migrated here from Slashdot.

Well, I guess we can discuss whether science is one of the main themes or not here... In my own pov, science is not only inherently related to technology, but also it's a common interest of everyone I know that works on high tech. Not so sure about general tech and web startups though.

Science and technical stuff require a high level of intelligence to understand. It's even harder to comment usefully in a discussion.

I've been posting quite a few of them in the past (science, neuroscience, cogsci etc) but they never got more than few points. People just don't seem to care.

Another thing is that many business related links never propagate upward either. I've started my own mini news site that will be all about business/finance/management. I haven't give the link to anyone yet. Anyone interested?

I'm interested. These are topics I wish to know more about.

I guess people will be interested in NickB's News.

yea I am interested

What's the url?

I haven't advertised it yet but you can find it here: www.newmogul.com

It's still missing some pages: about etc. but everything's functional.

I assume you're using a tool to see when people make comments on your posts. Got a link for it? I had considered writing one just last night.

Thanks for the link btw. This looks neat.

Yes, I use an RSS feed for comments. ycfeeds.com

I have to agree with you. While I find tech news interesting, I am also a big fan of science news. I'm not a hacker, but I hang around HN because the community seems to filter out very well all of the garbage found on Digg.

I came to the HN because of YCombinator and my ambitions, but I am no longer studying computer science (I have changed my major to mathematics and physics, pursuing what I dropped my first go-around at an undergraduate degree). I stay because this group shares many of the same interests in news. If science posts were to show up, then all the better. If not, then it may be that this group is more inclined towards tech news.

The reason there aren't more science submissions is probably just that there isn't very much good science writing on the web. Most of the science articles being written today are basically just poorly summarized press releases covering cleantech, medicine, space, and the physical sciences. Most of the announcements are bullshit to begin with, and the fact that the writers don't know what they're talking about makes it even worse. If there were people who went out and read interesting journal articles and wrote up the results in a readable way then I'd be all for that, but the number of people doing that is basically zero. Aaron Schwartz et al. were trying to do that for a while on their blog Science That Matters, but they don't seem to even exist anymore.

Help me understand: Are you suggesting that there is a lot more good programming writing than good science writing? Or a lot more good valley gossip writing than good science writing? Sturgeon's revelation suggests that there is a lot of crap writing about everything, but the question here is why HN seems to now prefer crap on other subjects to anything about science, good or bad.

There are some interesting blogs to follow though... Terry Tao's, and Scott Aaronson's are two examples: they can be very technical, but when they are more focused in the general public, they are great.

John Baez's stuff, and Overcoming Bias is also good.

I'm dying for non-technical science writing. I want to know what those guys are thinking, not read a popular write up.

They're usually good, even when it's outside their field.

Yes, I follow these too. Others are: The Unapologetic Mathematician, The Reference Frame (if you can filter the hating), Symmetry Breaking, Gowers's Weblog, Plus Magazine (sometimes), Not Even Wrong, Cosmic Variance, Backreaction... also some Arxiv rss's.

You literally just made my week.

And you make great submissions to HN too.

Cool, you're welcome! Uncertain Principles is cool too; from all these, go through the links and you'll probably find a few more.

Your submissions are high quality and technical, the way I like them. I would ask you to continue to submit from your sources, especially since the stories about what googlers eat for breakfast are getting old....

Thank you! Sure, I'll keep submitting whatever I find interesting in the little time I have.

I like the Kurzweil AI daily digest for science news, there are usually at least 2 articles worth reading every day.

I posted an article on my blog about how, at digg, science ended up being the best quality category (largest promotion/submission ratio - http://owenbyrne.com/2008/06/05/yet-another-random-digg-list...). My impression at the time was that there was no money in science - So people post crap constantly in other categories, because that's where the dollars are. There's a lot less money in the promotion of science, hence less sock-puppets, gaming, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift

Maybe in a small population social news site, the 'norm' for content can drift in a similar fashion to allele frequency in a small gene pool.

"... why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? ..."

I don't know but every time I post an article detailing the hard science behind say a wired, the economist, newsweek, salon or FT post it will be ignored. The reason behind this might be the fact the real science doesn't make for entertaining reading or more likely journalists explain difficult things in an more entertaining way.

I think there are two questions here we need tease out:

1. Are enough science stories being submitted? If not, why not?

2. What happens to the science stories when they are submitted?

I can't answer the first question (anyone got data?) but from experience submitting a few science stories is that they get a couple of votes and die. This, I think, is an interesting observation.

The hint of an answer also comes from my experience: I get my science news fix elswhere. HN, to me, is about things that make me think harder/better or see the world in a new way. Granted that's not always the case, but the gems here outclass any gem elsewhere I've seen.

So what think is happening is that we don't care for mainstream science news. I think for a science story to survive here, it needs to be a slightly off the beaten path subject with a very clever title - hackers are humans after all and headlines can affect them emotionally to get them to up vote.

I think the bar for a non-programming, non-startup article to count as "interesting to hackers" is a lot higher. Really interesting science articles just aren't written as often as somebody blogs something useless about how great closures are.

Your English is fine, by the way. I wouldn't have known you weren't a native speaker if you hadn't said so.

About the bar, I think that while it's certainly higher for science than for programming articles, it has dropped a lot for programming & startups so I don't understand why people is so incredibly picky with science (even for good articles) but an order of magnitude more tolerant with other subjects.

Oh, and thank you for your comment about my English :)

Deleted comment

Well, that's exactly why I mentioned not being a native speaker... I do that kind of mistake (and less subtle ones too), and I don't want you to think that I'm just ignorant or something.

Believe it or not, mistakenly substituting the word "less" when the correct word would be "fewer" is a mistake that a lot of native English speakers make.

Good to know... and now I'll try to be careful with that too.

The average upvoter has become less sophisticated.

A top story for almost two days was a screenshot of a hapless fellow complaining about mistakenly ordering the 'I Am Rich' iPhone app. (It got 59 story upvotes, and this was in addition to other news coverage of the app.) The thread had multiple highly-rated comments that were no more insightful than "ha, don't click 'buy' if you don't want to buy". (Two of those had over 20 net upvotes.)

The idiot hordes have arrived and are breeding like rabbits through mutual upvotes. Death of News.YC predicted; news at 11.

This is an utterly predictable problem.

News.YC has been mentioned in enough places -- like Reddit, where I migrated from -- that it's been gathering some influence from those places. PG has been curiously adamant about not doing anything algorithmically to address this, instead insisting that somehow this forum will just never accumulate the kind of cruft that every other web-based forum accumulates.

I think that web-based forums have to follow one of the basic rules of capitalism, in that it has one of three states: either it's dying, or it's growing slowly, or it's growing quickly.

Interesting conversations and submissions happen as a way for people to signal information to other people that they think might not be aware of it, and might find it interesting. Assuming it were possible for a forum to never either lose nor gain participants, eventually the participants would share most of the information that they weren't mutually familiar with, and those that were interested in external sources of information that they weren't initially aware of would begin to follow them, and there'd be nothing left to share. The forum gradually gets quieter, and dies.

Or, the forum can grow. It may grow quickly, as with Reddit or Digg or Fark or what-have-you, in which case it has a natural tendency towards more mainstream topics. Or, it can grow slowly, like News.YC, but it still gathers a little bit of new blood, and inevitably, that new blood brings a certain fraction of mainstream interest along with it.

The funny thing is, a forum in a slow state of growth will tend to accelerate into a faster state of growth, as the gradual increase in mainstream topics draws the interest of a larger cross-section of people.

So, the trick is to enforce a slower state of growth without killing it altogether, and I haven't seen any willingness here to do that.

Captcha, but not for bots, for humans.

The way I found reddit was from a link in pg's essays. And boy was reddit good when pg first linked to it. So we need a place where the only people are the kind who would voluntarily read something like pg or steve yegge.

Perhaps a simple logic puzzle wrapped inside a question about programming? That would require both factual knowledge of programming and at least a modicum of thinking ability.

That's your captcha for posts and voting permissions.

The problem I see is how to generate the captcha question/reply pairs. Perhaps something wiki style?

For each problem in Project Euler there is a forum that is open only after you solve it. One of the hard ones has "First!" comment in there.

Glad someone else has noted the karma inflation. It used to be that to cross the 20 point threshold for a comment it had to be insightful. Now the first snide reply to a rhetorical question an article poses gets 30+ easily.

I kinda agree. Especially if there is a thread about macs, and you dare say macs are too expensive, you will get downvoted to death. It's like fanboys have arrived, and herd mentality is being prevalent. Unless the post is offensive, there is no point to downvote more than a -2, just b/c you don't agree with.

That thread was full of idiots on both sides, man. I wouldn't read too much into it. People, especially hackers, get stupid when it comes to religious things like editor wars, OS choices, and anything else.

Cry as we might, this HN is still better than Reddit or Digg.

Don't forget that hacker news has collected lots of media attention all those numerous time that Y Combinator is mentioned. Paul Graham even pointed out to the community here that the demographic would be changing, and perhaps it has again a few times over.

The recent http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html is worth mentioning because if the VC types appear in droves here to observe us, they indirectly create a salting effect where we stop posting or otherwise behaving as ourselves. i.e, we go elsewhere, possibly back to a chat room, or just keep to ourselves until another collaborative opportunity presents itself.

We don't consciously post things here trying to comply with the vision. Historically, communities evolve independently of the vision their founders had when seeding them.

So, you can't complain why there are less science related posts. It is just the way because the community does not find science interesting. (By the way, I personally love science). You can try seeding the community with science related posts and see how we respond.

That's my point with posting this here. I don't want to complain, but I want to make the correct people aware of this (if they weren't already). What I think is: 1) interesting enough science articles go to the front page when they are posted on the news queue, 2) there are people interested in science here, maybe they'll care to start posting science related links again? I don't know, it's just an idea.

I post my own articles when I have time too.

Not directly pertinent to your original question, but since you're interested in science articles, I'd recommend tracking the Ars Technica "Nobel Intent" science news feed: http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/

Thanks a lot for the link.

It's a totally different site than it was a year ago.

It used to be five or six votes could keep you on the front page for a while. Now you submit the same kind of article and it dies with only a vote or two, and other people coming in with the same link count as some of those votes.

Sadly, I'm left to conclude that it is not the quality of the article, but the personal relationships between the posters that lead to upvoting or downvoting. That is, the same article submitted by two different people would get highly different scores based on the track record of the people involved, not the community's feeling about the content of the article.

Speculation only, but it explains the answer to your question. We ARE seeing just as many science stories -- probably more. It's just the wrong people are submitting them. (on average)

I don't find myself paying any attention to who the poster is though. Do you? If the story is interesting or the question important, I upvote it, otherwise not.

I don't either, but then again, I don't vote up and down a lot.

Just guessing, but I think there are probably three levels of visitors: random browsers, occasional voters, and people who play the board like a video game.

I'm more occasional. For instance, I usually don't view things that only make page 2

I still have hope. As long as people aren't posting game screenshots and cheat codes, there is hope.

Do you have numbers from a comparative analysis over time? (It may be true; I'm not sure and it would be good to quantify beyond anyone's vague impression.)

No, I didn't do such analysis, but I think the difference is quite evident (even if it wasn't 50/50, sure there was a drop).

SCIENCE has failed the world!!!!

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