Ask HN: Why is HN not categorizing submitted items?
It would be extremely helpful to have some basic categories: tech, economy, world news etc. on the homepage that you can filter by.
HN has a minimal tagging system based on the title:
- Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/ask
- Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/show
- etc (some people create their own, like "Tell HN", "Thank HN")
As others have mentioned, there are alternative HN frontends that attempt to do this. I personally would not trust submitter-categorized submissions, especially as more Redditors flee to HN.
When you submit URL: NH offers few general categories in a mandatory field. OP chooses most suitable. Homepage provides filters: ALL / CAT1 / CAT2 / CAT3.
Nothing drastically changes, but helps with content consumptions significantly. For example, I might be interested only in hardware stories, so I'll click on the HARDWARE cat/tag whatever.
Amazing what a couple handfuls of regexs can do. I do need to update that list[1].
I have been thinking about making a classification model for "things that might be posted to Hacker News" and was thinking about training it on