Ask HN: Do you think Hacker News should begin with “subreddits”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think Hacker News should begin with “subreddits”?

16 pointsacadapter48 comments

As the quality of Reddit declines, Hacker News becomes more and more interesting as a consistent user-friendly and respectful forum for technology and science.

However, a notable difference from Reddit is the absence of the "subreddit" concept.

Do you think it would be good for Hacker News to slowly try to fill that niche? It doesn't have to be a free-for-all creation of subforums, personally I believe that manually curated categories would be useful.

Has this ever existed on HN?

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The current format promotes intellectual diversity both in content and comments, instead of creating segments with lower diversity. It also seems to help promote a forcing towards higher quality content as there is less available space to compete in. Attention-wise, it's nice to only have to check one page - and consistency-wise, simplicity seems to promote longevity.

Yep, one of the nice things about HN is finding a topic that is kinda random and that I wouldn't have gone searching for. But I click on it because it piques my interest, and I end up learning something that might be useful or gives me a better picture of the world. We would lose that with specific categories.

r/all has that randomness but it's mostly garbage, like mental fast-food.

I think the biggest problem that needs to be solved here is the tendency of people here not to accept that Hacker News' purview is "anything that satisfies intellectual curiosity" - not exclusively technology and startup oriented content. People can't just ignore the presence of content they're not personally interested in, rather they'll flag and downvote otherwise perfectly legitimate content or else start tangential threads about whether or not it belongs on the site.

To that end, I think personal filters would be more useful than either tags or subreddits (even though HN already has ersatz subreddits in /ask, /show and /jobs.) The hide option is already a step in that direction, but it requires being reactive, whereas filters would be proactive. Give users a field in which they can list words or domains to either include or exclude (similar to the format of USENET killfiles) and have the feed sort based on that.

Then everyone gets what they want, and hopefully fewer people pollute the threads with complaints about Hacker News "turning into Reddit" because other people find things interesting and intellectually gratifying that they don't.

Indeed, it’s hard to read about naughty Orcas and Postgres internals on a single feed, despite both being inherently interesting to me. It’s a refreshing change from the Reddit homepage, with topics I have to piece together myself.

Fact is, I can’t fully predict what I will find interesting so HN regularly offers me a good few dark horses that Reddit simply cannot.

Not long ago, there was a series on the history of bread. I’m sure there’s some kind of subreddit for this but I’d never have sought it out.

No. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491978 for reasons.

Mostly positivity in the comments there. Care to elaborate?

It failed.

A lot of things fail, that's not to say whether or not they're good ideas.

External implementations have a problem - they can't get the needed boost from "the power of Default".

No, if HN had 'subreddits', it would be an entirely different thing than it is right now. And there's nothing about the technology or design or management or clientele of the site that would assist it in being a general-purpose forum hosting site like Reddit is.

Might as well ask "should Apple stop selling electronics and become a company that drills for and refines oil?" Because there's about as much relevance between the two.

I wouldn't go that far. Maybe more like, now that Apple has the M2 chip, should they stop making devices and focus on music and entertainment? Subreddits would fundamentally change how HN is used and lower the diversity of discourse. Obvious trolls aside, I appreciate when someone offers a perspective I hadn't considered.

This is also a site filled with people way more knowledgeable about certain topics than I could ever hope to be yet still allows me to chime in from time to time because of the variety of topics that make the front page.

Is the quality of reddit declining? If so, why make HN more "reddit-like"?

I dont think HN has enough sprawl to meaningfully support subreddit-like fragmentation, personally.

dang wrote something about this a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

Thanks. The main term I use to describe this is 'non-siloed' (kind of weird but I don't know a better name for this) and there are lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all....

I'm worried that if you added subreddits to HN, HN may decline as well.

Do you have a theory as to why Reddit is declining?

I think it's the hostile user interface and the lack of clear goals with moderation.

Yeah, the interface is slow and trash, even the legacy mode is frustrating to use.

I rarely do more than 3 page views. Most of my Reddit sessions span 1 page.

Some thoughts.

I think users happen in generations. The first users set a tone, and then later users make formal and memetic rules to enforce tone (like the monkeys with the bananas up the ladder). Without change, this sticks and places become stagnant. On the other hand, there's clearly been a huge influx in users on Reddit and they haven't managed the volume well so you have popular threads which commenting in is just pissing in an ocean of piss. When that becomes normalized, users are forced to resort to unusual behavior to get noticed, meaning being spammy, dramatic or offensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

To me, the reason is simple - it got big.

When a site/group is small there's little motivation for bad actors, advertising spam, fake accounts, etc. Why bother making spam bots on site X when site Y has 10x the userbase? Why try to make people angry with poor headlines when it won't reach a large audience? Why try to do propaganda when you could go elsewhere?

Smaller communities are generally also tighter knit. In a small group there's more notable reputation that sticks. People can't get away with being jerks.

As well, there's the corporate side. Reddit has to think and act very differently than HN does. They need to think about their profitability. What do advertisers think of their site? What kind of opinion does the public have of them? They can't afford to let things be loose and wild, they need to carefully control the content or the hammer could come down on them hard. That means a lot of accusations of violating "free speech".

If HN suddenly got as popular as Reddit did, the exact same things would happen to HN as Reddit. 0 doubt.

So no, it's not directly the format of reddit that is the problem. It's just the size.

Reddit was never good, people who think it was just suffer from nostalgia.

I'm not sure Hacker News has the audience for subreddits. It's a big site sure, but it's not Reddit level popular, and splitting content across different sections of the site will hurt its activity even more. I guess tags or categories that merely let you search by the type of ccontent rather than splitting them up entirely could work though, since the general feed would contain everything by default.

But that's not really how subreddits work.

I don't know. Maybe forums are over now; no longer cool and relevant as a website architecture. I used to help run one, and having topics works, but it also silos. Finding a good balance between granularity to help manage content without shutting potential contributors is always the challenge.

Tags would work nice, you can easily filter in and out. Select multiple tags to see the intersection. Like in https://lobste.rs/

The tags would need to be handled carefully though. Let any user create them on a whim, and you have a complete mess of nearly-duplicate meaningless tags.

Only have a rigid set of tags, and you'll find some things just aren't covered well by the existing tags.

It takes a continuing system of moderation to gradually revise the tagging system over time to get anything good out of it.

Yeah, but tags are more work and just add to the cognitive load. I can filter well enough by just reading the headlines.

incorrect tags are worse than no tags at all

I agree with this. I have left forums because the number of subforums made it too tiring to find what you wanted. One forum I read daily is likely to drop off my list since they seem to be going in the same direction.

HN's flat format is a feature: I can glance at the front page and decide what looks interesting and ignore the rest.

I once read something somewhere about the architecture of either Bell Labs or IBM or somewhere like that back in its heyday. Apparently it was set up so that people had their own individual rooms to work in which were situated down long corridors that fed into a large atrium which was where people ate lunch and was also the only way in and out of the building (probably a firefighters nightmare). The author credited this as causing a lot of the innovation and success of the company; people had spaces where they could get deep work done uninterrupted but then the nature of the building contributed to people bumping into each other and being exposed to lots of different ideas from different parts of the company. Hacker News reminds me of this atrium.

I kind of feel like subreddits would somehow end up leading to me discovering less interesting content. I feel like I come to Hacker News to discover random stuff from a very broad church that is mainly rooted in STEM but also has things that are often related such as philosophy, psychology, productivity and the like. I think something would be lost if it went down the specialist sub areas route.

I do however get the appeal. I myself have searched for “hacker news for finance” when wanting to know more about the topic and found someone else had already asked the same question on HN. Lobste.rs is very similar to hacker news but has gone down the tag route suggested in the other comments mentioned here. https://lobste.rs/about

Why the hell information should be divided, for letting more shit to be published? Hell no.

I'd rather avoid the hierarchical approach, and just let users add tags to a submission (similar to stack overflow), and then one could easily filter by those tags.

Absolutely not. Siloes very quickly become vacuums.

Why does HN need to change because another site is 'declining'? If HN is becoming more interesting, why does it need to change?

I don't think it would be good.

I think if there's reason for a niche, starting a clone is a better idea. In fact, that's already been done, like with https://lobste.rs/

I think that all forums degrade when there's more users. When people with a passing interest in a topic start bleeding in and leaving uninformed comments, that's kind of the beginning of the end for quality.

Also, we're always talking about the "small web," and this is a great example of how to keep it smaller.

We’re probably good but maybe offer a way to avoid certain articles on your front page?

Also make the front page longer.

2000 entries would work well but it would make bragging about being on the front page less of a thing.

It's a thing now??

https://google.com/search?q=on+the+front+page+of+hacker+news

If anything, it would be good, so I could ignore all the political and economic garbage again.

"hide" is an option on every submitted article. Very handy when certain topics come up that I don't care about, especially when a day starts developing a "theme" that I'm uninterested in. Of course, on those days it's also a good chance to break free from HN for a bit too.

I mean, if i wanted to read reddit i would reddit.

Could be really good. But maybe a supported platform for open communication with the team behind the site would be more helpful to get in place first. Kind of like [1]. Externalized but internal, offering better organization and structure for growth, just as subreddit-alikes would.

It'd also show that 1) the input of the community is valued 2) the community is less a drag/energy drain for the admin team and more of an input and 3) more expansive changes of this nature could be made and are not just a waste of submitter brainpower...

1. https://metatalk.metafilter.com/

Oh please god no

That’s a big no.

No please no

no.

No thanks. I'd rather see tags implemented than a separate space.

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