HN: 33K visitors = 32,500 random tire kickers. But it also = 500 new hackers

"Sure, most will say "Erlang, WTF!" But a few will say "Erlang, What the... Wow!!!""

I think that argues even more for flooding the front page with ultra-geeky stories. Several people (including me) discovered that we found a page full of Erlang stories more interesting than a lot of the more general common interest stories often found on the front page. We should try to create more "Erlang...Wow!!!" moments by promoting more articles with deeper content.

I tried to start a thread about promoting lots of deeper articles on a specific technical topic as a "theme of the day" kind of thing. The thread was killed, not sure if it was because it was thought to be an attempt at humor or if it just runs counter to the spirit of Hacker News. But I still think more articles with deeper content on the front page makes for a better Hacker News.

I agree 100%. I enthusiastically support measures designed to encourage "Wow!!!" moments :-D

Except that particular measure was designed to discourage casual visitors from being interested in HN, for the sake of reducing the load on the server. And it was a joke at that.

I know it was a joke, my point is that encouraging "Wow!" is good, discouraging "What's this?" is... well... unfortunate.

To me, "Wow!" is an extreme form of "Interesting!" And by "interesting," I don't mean the same thing as "Capturing attention." The HN front page is full of stuff that captures attention, however "FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee Vivek Kundra" isn't interesting in the same sense that Boltzmann’s Universe (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/01/14/...) is interesting. The salient difference is that although the former is entertaining, it doesn't change me in any way. It isn't actionable.

Whereas the latter leaves me wondering, and I will still be thinking about its implications tomorrow.

So overall I would say that de-emphasizing attention-capturing stories is great, provided they are replaced by interesting stories. And when the traffic subsides, by stories that are interesting and attention-capturing.

lots of deeper articles on a specific technical topic as a "theme of the day"

Permit me to disagree. The Erlang flood was not a favor to Erlang, from my perspective. Because if there is one thing I do not have it is the time to read an entire page full of in-depth links on a topic that I barely know the first thing about. Especially when at least half of those links aren't necessarily good: They were chosen mainly because their titles contained the word "Erlang". Yesterday was not about quality. It was about quantity.

All that yesterday accomplished for me was to create a subconscious association between Erlang and concepts like boring and spam and slushpile, an association which I must now work to overcome. Any good links in that pile were lost in the shuffle. And this is terrible, because the design of HN is such that a link cannot be submitted twice unless you find a way to hack its URL. (It's a perverse form of reverse SEO. I'm pretty sure that standard SEO advice is to give each piece of content a single, canonical link -- but text which is accessible by multiple URLs can be submitted multiple times to HN.)

If you want to promote excellent, deeper articles on a specific technical topic the correct plan is to release them gradually. Declare Wednesday to be Erlang Day and submit one Erlang link to HN each week. Or, if you want, declare Erlang Week and do one article per day. But don't waste our time. Don't overwhelm us with noise.

I like the idea of the topic day. And what about sub-HNs, that would discuss very specific subjects ?

When reddit launched sub-reddits, it was a sign to me that reddit was no longer sustainable as a community. It got really boring, really fast. I never read reddit anymore; I'd go to Slashdot first, because at least there, every once in awhile, somebody directly involved in a news story is actually commenting.

Subreddits do some things really well. AskReddit became a great community. I was involved in Suicide Watch for a while. and it really was doing some great things.

The problem with Reddit was that it let users make their own reddits. That led to dilution. If PG were to divide Hacker News by his own pattern, we might maintain order.

That said, I'm against it. There's no need yet: the community's fairly intact.

While we'd gain very narrow topics in the "sub-HNs", regular HN would become diluted.

remember kids, every friday is a fortran day

Hey, it's Friday now! Where are all the Fortran articles? :)

> The Erlang flood was not a favor to Erlang, from my perspective.

Actually it was the massive barrage of Erlang articles yesterday that convinced me to start learning Erlang.

Without knowing more about you, it's still hazy... ;)

I think the whole erlang meme was amusing for a day, but it'd be very tedious if it repeated itself regularly.

I for one would be just as annoyed to see HN become purely programming/deep-tech oriented as I would be to find it turning into reddit/r/politics.

HN has a unique mix of contents that balances a lot of different interests. Please don't try to shove it one way or another.

Here, here.

I'm not an extremely avid programmer. I code, but my interests lie more in design. As such, I find that when we get into deeper, more technical moments - absolutely yesterday, with Erlang - I find that I've got nothing to contribute. On the other hand, when the conversation stays more social - not meaning off-topic, but rather focused on interesting unrelated subjects, with discussions about design and site launching and site events - I'm able to contribute more.

On the other side of the coin are people who are more interested in programming and less interested in that stuff, and the best part of the community is that both types of people have a place to talk to one another.

I actually really miss the deep geek articles. The ratio of geek:webby current events articles used to be higher.

I've actually customized my reddit with sub-reddits, and I get more of my deep geeky stuff over there and more of my business-y stuff here.

I helped that flood, and you know what? I actually read some of those articles and got to know Erlang and FP a little better, not to mention the Erlang Distribution.

It may have been a bit juvenile on my part, but I actually learned something from the experience. Not that I'm recommending repeating it daily or anything. :-)

Can't putting a facade on HN to discourage people have a negative result, in that it will ENcourage some set of people who like that facade?

And if so, won't that dilute the real identity of HN, actually making it more like that facade?

Thanks for this to make me feel welcome. I came in through CH and have immediately fell in love with the format and content here. I was a bit confused by the rush of Erlang posts right after I arrived (did I do that?), but now I'm settled in and trying to absorb as quickly as possible ...

like a shamwow

Happy to have you.

given my name is Shamiq, i've contemplated using shamwow as a username.

already have shamazing used by my now-defunct blog.

I learned a few things from this Erlang WTF:

1. HN is not a news filter website, it is a community. I am glad to be in this community.

2. HN as a web app is really a kind of a forum. It was shocking for me to realize this, because I hated forums from the days when they killed participation in mailinglists and irc in some of the communities I loved to be part of. I considered myself to be a person who "doesn't get" forums.

3. I am very interested to see how HN community will solve all those issues with filtering out trolls, foolish memes, menacing eternal september, boredom with the same type of news we will start to expect from each other and so on...

I hope to learn so much more :-)

The day i realised i had started to read the comments before the actual articles was the day I realised this. Sometimes the comments are of greater value.

I did enjoy seeing the articles on Erlang. If I want to see more stories like that, then I just need to take the time to either find similar articles or upvote the ones which I am interested in. The top list of stories is a reflection of the members of the community who are actively posting/upvoting articles. If there are certain types of articles you want, then it is up to you to support them.

How do we know that the "right" contributors even care about Erlang? Or who the "right" contributors are? There's always going to be a subset of people here that will be naturally interested in things like Erlang or the design of the Lua VM. But there are also hundreds of people who are worth engaging with who couldn't possibly care less.

How about we just move on?

I have no objection to the moderators killing this discussion if it improves HN. Or of them leaving it up while it seems to be constructive.

How about an online test to obtain membership?

I have a good test. It's very exclusive. You have to beat the crafty chess engine at a 60sec game of wild 5 "reversed". With black. Good luck.

I was thinking about an IQ test, something like at Google. Maybe a coding problem, and then a special Hacking intelligence, Macgyver type test.

I can write a long blog post explaining why I think this is a bad idea, but in all honestly the simple truth is that I'm afraid I would fail such a test and that would be embarrassing. So I make up some mumbo-jumbo about why the test doesn't correlate to good HN citizenship or some-such.

Your saying that made me realize that was my reason for disliking the idea, as well.

the better reason than being afraid of such a test is that in the long term everybody has their moments when they contribute a stellar bit of insight, even those who woule fail such a test. By testing for a certain 'level' you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Surely the best test is whether you can be insightful enough to really add value to the site through good links and comments? And that's what karma is designed to measure.

It'd be too easy to put rules into this board that would penalize or reward people based on their karmic performance.

I have been a lurker for somewhere over 6 months, originally referred by a PG essay, I think.

I would hate to see too much forced change/active management to filter the user base, as I have learned an astounding amount from the links, the comments, and my observed behavior (compulsion/obsession?) with the site.

This is my first post, and so far, I have not had any content links to offer. I, for one, would be disappointed if I did not make the metric to continue to read/learn.

(Edited for correct grammar - sorry.)

What turns a lurker into a contributor? The fear of not being able to lurk. Oh well, back to lurking.

4 points minimum is a start.

How about making the user wave a chicken over their post before clicking submit?

It'd be hard to verify that. It's a good one though -- one day.

I'd agree with some sort of account signup requirements. Maybe invites from current members etc... but doing the Erlang homepage is just weak sauce. I would think that even the "1337 hackers" on this site don't need 5,000 more erlang links they could find using google or delicious. Sites like this are only interesting when they are broad enough to introduce us to new things, not barrage us with details about someones fav language.