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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

I like cocktails. I like cocktail recipes. I don't know why this is on hacker news thought.

Maybe everyone just really, really needs a drink right now?

There ought to be an XKCD for this, but instead it's from the FAQ.

In short: somebody thought it was interesting enough to submit, and enough other people voted for it that it got to your attention.

That's it.

If it ends up with 2000 points and sits on the new page for 3 days, I'll be quite surprised, but strange subjects do that.

> I don't know why this is on hacker news thought. (sic)

Because someone posted it, and others upvoted it, and it got enough upvotes while it was new to get recognized by the algorithm and promoted to the front page. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

my thoughts exactly.

I feel the same, but it's an unavoidable cycle IMHO. Any subculture that becomes popular gets diluted by more average people, and the content becomes more basic and banal. You can flag and downvote, but eventually there are enough people who treat a platform like HN as a general discussion board, without regard for cultural alignment. It seems that stuff like politics and random recipes are on the rise, but it's not against the rules, so maybe it really is just a general discussion board that's evolving into the mainstream.

Well, it’s our fault. We had forums with categories and those had some random / chit chat category to have off topic discussions with the community while staying on topic anywhere else.

And a lot of the time, this random section was the more active of the whole forum but that was ok because it didn’t impact the other discussions.

But those were less engaging than social networks i guess (which hn is) so here we are.

...whats "on topic" for HN?

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Or, if you want to be less philosophical: anything that other people would upvote and not flag.

I feel like the cocktail recipes site posted falls closer to on-topic than off-topic then, having only Ingredients and Recipes pages, not even a blog...

Just because you might prefer coffee or soylent doesn't mean some other hackers don't like cocktails. Make yourself some https://entropia.de/Tschunk and relax!

You've missed the point. I enjoy cocktails, and I even think the linked page here is nice, both in cocktail selection and page design, but I don't think it particularly belongs on HN.

Here's an example recipe page that does feel appropriate to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48408854

I'm not trying to win any wars here, I only provided a possible explanation to someone's question. Culture evolves and that's fine, or maybe the ratio of technical vs non-technical content is actually stable on HN? I really don't know, but to me it feels like the the volume of random content and low-grade comments is increasing. Personally, I don't think that represents the spirit of HN, but my comment was downvoted so either I'm wrong, the culture has shifted, or the mainstream is already the majority here.

I'm a fan of the Caipirinha however, so thanks for the Tschunk recipe.

I see what you mean, and agree that that kind of submission taking a place on front page would indeed be better, but this submission is still original, done-by-hand work, while pancakes guy served out LLM slop...

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