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Comment by vadfa | Hacker News Reader

>readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...] stories that were placed there randomly

>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page

If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station, that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to listen to random songs.

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HN is not a “greatest 80s hits” radio, though. Users submit links and users vote on them. There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases. Sure, there is some tweaking, but in the end it’s all stories posted and upvoted by us, collectively. So it is entirely pointless to whine about the content: it is what the community wants to see.

There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases.

HN is more actively moderated than this, you can find piles of moderator comments about it.

YC companies can put in an submission; it goes to the front page but sinks fairly rapidly and can't be commented on. I think that these are usually employment ads.

I also think that's the only direct placement, but I can't be certain.

There's more than that. Actually, this story mentions it:

> Moderators and a small number of reviewer users comb the depths of /newest looking for stories that got overlooked but which the community might find interesting. Those go into a second-chance pool from which stories are randomly selected and lobbed onto the bottom part of the front page. This guarantees them a few minutes of attention. If they don’t interest the community they soon fall off, but if they do, they get upvoted and stay on the front page.

There is the second chance, but stories that don’t resonate disappear quickly even after that. I included this in the tweaking the mods can do. I guess I went a bit far about editorialising, but it’s still a minor effect.

I don't think it's a minor effect and without quite a bit of active fiddling, the front page would be full of meta, dupes and pitchfork-fetching-exhortations. This even comes up in a mod comment in this very thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29028421

Interesting perspective, thank you. Though it's more about removing things from the front page than putting there things that people don't want.

You can't scroll past a song on the radio

Radio is a one way medium though. HN missed an opportunity to sell users on it but adding it as an opt-in/invite feature instead.

So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.

Playing 00's music on an 80's radio station isn't challenging someone's fondness of 80's music, it's just annoying.

I was disagreeing with the premise that Hacker News is, or should be, very narrow in scope. Though I'll grant you that there are certainly degrees to this. There are regularly posts that make me wonder why they were posted to HN when I first see them here - and yet, these often manage to enrich my day.

There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.

There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.

And no risks in being too open about who gets to be a member of your club?

Of course there are, but it can be hard to keep in mind what one is trying to achieve. It is easy to think you are doing one thing while really living by a different set of principles.

For instance I've worked for companies (at least two) where, the set of goals for the hiring process, and what was actually practiced, were pointing in somewhat different directions. In the end it really came down to "how like us is the candidate". All while sailing under a "diversity is good" flag, being convinced that we lived our values, and (in one case) increasingly experiencing the problems stemming from a hardening monoculture. What happens when you try to resolve that situation is, to put it carefully, "interesting".

What I was talking about in the quoted bits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024069 didn't have to do with topic scope. It had to do with article quality, which is orthogonal to that. I agree with you completely that HN should be broad rather than narrow in scope—that's highly desirable and we spend a lot of time trying to nudge and nurture things in that direction.

Just for clarity, when I was talking about how users are emotional about the front page and react intensely when they see something they don't think belongs there, it was in the context of an experiment we'd run to randomly place stories from /newest on the front page. Users reacted disastrously, not so much because of scope but because the median article's quality is just really low. That's true about in-scope topics like programming as well as other topics. I hope that makes sense.

As for 'who gets to be a member' - we don't restrict that nor want to restrict that. Everyone with intellectual curiosity, i.e. everyone, is welcome. The only requirement is actually using the site in that spirit. This is not so easy, of course, especially when the more activating topics show up.

The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project.

You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic. But don't submit something like "God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good" since is obvious off topic , though I am curious about such illogical believes if I want to learn more there is a better forum for that.

Entirely agree about political stories and rust projects du jour (I’d go as far as associating out-of-topic posts on $random_software about how it’s be much better in rust).

Just ignore/downvote/flag and move on, though. Nobody is forcing anyone else to read anything, and it’s normal that some people here are interested in things in which I’m not. None of us is the arbiter of what should or should not be on HN. Not us mere posters, anyway.

I am not clear about flagging, I don't want to get myself tagged because I flag-ed someone 3rd submission of his weekend Rust project, or those COVID conspiracies/magic cures, I could offend some free-speech extremist if I have the opinion that the HN is not the correct place for that.

Yeah flagging is the most extreme, for things that really don’t have anything to do here. It’s rare that a flag-able story ends up on the front page, to be fair, but a COVID magical cure or a propaganda piece for the usual quacks would fit all the criteria to be flagged to oblivion.

I don’t flag random projects, just ignore them (I know some people here like them, it’s not my thing but it is harmless). I downvote obnoxious comments about how something needs to be rewritten in rust in unrelated threads, though.

there are times when a very good post contains discussion that quickly goes "lord of the flies" with controversy polarity and off topicality.

this is a case where i would flag the post rather than spend hours flagging comments, that would result in jail time if said IRL.

> You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO …

It’s handy for jumping to the bottom of a control loop if the language lacks a CONTINUE statement - the sin being outweighed by cleaner and easier to maintain code.

Sure, but even if you have continue some languages give you the GOTO so you can exit out from nested loops, useful when you need to work say with pixel colors in a big image, you need all the performance you can get.

I don't think it is hard to pick clear examples. It is harder to pick clear policies for examples that end up in some gray area.

Sure, but the parent was implying that if we reject some content is because we don't want our mind changed. A forum should have a scope/topic and it should reject off-topic posts.

I love subreddits with clear rules, then you don't see articles or comments that go in tangents, memes or american or international politics. The moderators can decide the gray area after user report. So trying to post some COVID or politics stuff in one of the good moderated subreddits will be removed and it is not because we don't want to open our mind.

The parent actually didn't refer to off-topic posts. It referred to posts that "challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices".

>God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good

Anyone else wondering what a "hearth pill" is?

Probably a "horse dewormer pill", which is what all the Trump supporters are popping these days instead of getting vaccinated and wearing masks, because they don't trust doctors or medical science or vaccines.

Possibly, the word “health” was mis-typed on a phone and then wrongly auto-corrected to be “hearth”.

>Anyone else wondering what a "hearth pill" is?

typo/bad spell, I meant heart

I am not attacking Trump or americans here, is a story from my country where in a very religious family the daughter failed to convince her mother to get the vaccine, the reason was soem Jesus /God does not allow it but for some reason God allows the mother to take pills/medicine for her heart ... makes no sense , if God gifted you a bad heart then WTF do you take unnatural pills, why did you vaccinated your children but for COVID you somehow found in the Bible that this vaccine is too much.

> So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.

You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.

I'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because it is healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of bias and denial of same.

The reply you are quoting is currently at -3. Voting is more about about affecting visibility than whether one agrees or not. Or ideally should be. Does this tell us something? Doesn't it kind of prove my point for me?

> I'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because it is healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of bias and denial of same.

I'm sorry but you're just doubling down on your baseless assertion. Just because you argue everyone might have their personal bias that does not mean that everyone around you is desperately trying to not challenge their beliefs. That's a very specific and very personal interpretation that you're trying to pin on everyone around you without any basis.

Meanwhile, there are simpler and reasonable explanations that you somehow decided to ignore.

I downvoted it because it's just a boring snipe and has no real substance. This comment, while ever so slightly more substantial, is still little more just some vague claims and accusations.

As far as I'm concerned that it's downvoted only "proves" that people tend to prefer more substantial conversation than this. If you had posted something of value I wouldn't have downvoted it, even though I probably would have disagreed with it.

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