Hacker News Reader

Comment by pveierland | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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