What happened to Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

What happened to Hacker News

blog.imranghory.org

57 pointsig128 comments

It switched from "Startup News" to "Hacker News" and the guideline is stated as "Anything good hackers will find interesting, which isn't limited to just hacking."

Then the site became popular, and so everyone thinks "I'm on Hacker News, and I can contribute anything I think is interesting." With the enormously wide range of interests covered by the entire population now on HN, there is no focus. Everyone clamours to be the first to submit the latest piece of gossip about any company or person remotely connected with technology. Or companies. Or anything, really.

In particular, though, the "welcome" message asks for things that are "deeply interesting". One thing is for sure - we don't get that.

My interests are in math, science, education in math and science, theoretical computing, elegant hacks, and running a business. To find anything about those I have to hunt deep in the stack, because they rarely make the front page. HN is no longer a sensible filter for stuff I want.

In fact, I don't think it really serves anyone well any more.

I'll bet this item now gets flagged into oblivion. Any discussion of the current state of HN is regarded as "meta" by the majority and seen as criticism of them. The democratic nature of HN's voting system implies that the majority rules, pretty much everyone can flag, and as I know to my cost, flags will effectively kill an item.

Added in edit: this is now less than two hours old and has 26 points - it should be on the top page, and it's actually down at 156. Flagged to death, despite the fact that it should be interesting to everyone here.

My wish is that the moderators would more ruthlessly prune the politics/economics stories. They draw in anyone and everyone (who doesn't have opinions on those things?), rather than people interested in startups and tech. And the debates are old, old, old. I'm reading an interesting book now, Grand Pursuit ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0043RSK4Y/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=de...; ) about the history of economics and some famous economists. And a lot of the very same more state, less state, right vs left stuff was being argued about 100 years ago... it just goes around and around and around, it seems.

And hacker-psuedo-elitism aside, most of the people commenting on politics and economics aren't any more informed on the subjects than people right off the street.

The content is dictated by the community. There is still a significant amount of start-up info and stories but you are right on one point, the site has evolved from being almost exclusively start-up orientated to one that contains content of interest to Developers, Hackers and entrepreneurs.

Essentially, popularity happened and the site evolved to reflect the increased deomgraphic now reading HN.

Exactly. I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. In fact, the quality of discussions hasn't boiled down to BS in spite of the popularity.

PG explicitly switched the site from just Startup News to Hacker News.

Sorry you missed it.

Yeah, I have sort of the opposite complaint: too much startup-scene drama news (e.g. anything having to do with Techcrunch), not enough hacker news (in which I'm willing to include "anything remotely technical").

Start up drama doesn't not really help "founders meet and talk", so I would say it is just as off topic.

for me (as a new member) I really like HN for one reason, and one reason alone - the quality of the discussions. The people here seem smart, civil and informed about their posts (and the one's who aren't get voted down). That, to me, is far more useful than startup news, all the time (not that I have any problems with startup news I actually like it).

I agree. Although you can find these discussion elsewhere on the 'net, I appreciate the level of discourse here and like to read the tech take on politics or economics of whatever. That kind of stuff is meaningful in a lot of people's lives and can even affect their businesses. I just gray out the rest of the noise in my head.

Personally, I don't know the first thing about hacking, and I don't have any particular affinity toward startups. The reason I visit HN on a daily basis is because it's a great cross-section of news that delves into design, development, tech law, tech businesses large and small, and yes, even a little bit of politics and economics. And often, the comments can be incredibly insightful. I find articles, software and businesses here that I otherwise wouldn't find.

Ok, so here is my 5 minute solution: I just flagged every piece of content that I think does not belong on the homepage, now I'll scan the first 3 pages of the 'new' section and upvote all those articles that I think should be there.

If everybody else does the same thing then this should correct itself.

I'm betting that it won't make a bit of a difference. Want to try?

Some of us already do that, either from the 'new' page or from the RSS feeds. It doesn't seem to be helping much, as you predicted. The people submitting those kinds of stories have an agenda, and they're using every tool they have to promote it.

What exactly is this meant to be the solution to? That some random blogger missed the transition from Startup News to Hacker News?

What do you think flagging does?

Why are you so special that the current voting system should be changed to fit your preferences?

Flags will push content down on the homepage, early flags on the new page stop content from getting on the homepage at all.

In other words, flags are a crude mechanism that you can use to modify the rankings, effectively they are downvotes.

It won't take many flags to clear the homepage of the political and mainstream content. My guess is that it won't matter because that same strategy can be used against content that is on topic. And I've seen that happen, plenty of times.

Please don't, I'm sure moderators have enough to do already without people trying to game the site to fit with their world view.

To be honest r/startups doesn't look very appealing to me:

  'Hey r/startups, I'd love your feedback - I'm running a deal site for small businesses. What deals do you want to see? '

  'Had what I thought was a great idea, turns out it there is already a startup with MASSIVE funding working on basically the exact idea.'

  'I'm joining a start-up, getting paid with "equity" - Is it worth anything?'

  'Another what to do/how to tread after finding a first to market competitor question...'

  '[In SF] Can anyone tell me where to find local start-up events and hackathons?'

Whoopie. Loads of self posts by clueless people. The Ask HN posts that appear on the front page here are much better and nearly always worth reading.

Ask HN posts are so shortlived on the homepage that they might as well not be there. The penalty on an 'Ask HN' reinforces that.

They do have their own section but it is far less popular than the homepage.

This effect is so strong that it prompted someone to ask if the 'Ask HN' mechanism is broken somehow:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3018343

Did you figure this all out in the 24 days you've been registered? Maybe they have been broken recently, but the actually interesting ones still get through.

> Did you figure this all out in the 24 days you've been registered?

No, I did that over the last couple of years.

Which is sad. My favorite items here are Ask HN and Show HN.

There are only so many "Five reasons why we do a lean startup" self-promoting blog posts to go around, and even those get tiring after a while…

I'd say that there's still a lot of startup content, probably not less than at the beginning. The percentage might be a bit down, because nowadays a lot of people use this as their primary news site and don't want to switch between HN for startup content, and e.g. reddit/r/programming for tech stuff. News for startup guys doesn't have to center around startups all the time.

And as some others have said: Hacker News.

I always wondered why it was 'hacker news' but clearly run by a company that promotes startups, and not hackers in general.

As happy as I am that it turned into 'hacker news', I see it turning into 'general news' and it makes me sad. This is the best hacker news site out there right now, and finding a replacement will be tough.

One tiny (?) change would make my day: Purge (dead) links from the 'new' section as soon as it's flagged to death.

Quite often I follow that section and see most interesting subjects to 'make it' in minutes or to drop off the page due to (dead) spam links.

Isn't it that way by default? In any case it's a preference; make sure "showdead" is set to no in your prefs.

You're right, of course, and I'm an idiot. I somehow expected showdead to affect nothing but comments.

Just set "showdead" to "no" in your profile.

What I'm interested in is why there isn't the 50 bitcoin stories a day submitted anymore. Actually, I'm glad the bitcoin stuff stopped getting submitted so frequently. Might as well submitted links about Amway or Metabolife.

What happened to Hacker News? It evolved.

It's not like some evil troll is upvoting Google and MS stories.

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