Ask HN: No more than 3 articles on a topic on homepage | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: No more than 3 articles on a topic on homepage

4 pointsjusben13697 comments

Is it fair to ask moderators to keep it to say 3 or 4 articles at the most on the home page about a single topic? I feel like when a major event happens HN becomes overwhelmed on a single topic to the detriment of representing a broader array of current topics in technology.

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A plug in / extension / script to allow users to filter certain topics would be brilliant, I think.

Allowing mods to limit the number of topics would just cause a great deal of meta outrage. It's bad enough when people flag. It'd be awful if mods controlled the front page.

A lot of users seem to feel it's an important topic which still merits discussion.

Some sort of topic filter, or a tagging system might help (or use hnapp.com or whatever third party thing is available), but putting a hard limit on something that other people want to talk about is pointless censorship.

It's a discussion forum, and this seems to resonate with the community.

I do not support this. Yes, there are "surges" around particular events... but guess what? They eventually end and that topic settles in with everything else. Just give it a few days - and maybe take heart in that fact that so many HN users are so obviously passionate about certain topics.

This is a filtered noPRISM-version of HN: http://hnapp.com/filter/bb4abe7a00d09a35b95c6763f09c0cfb

I found it in a comment from a few days ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846416 ). It's a bit outdated, you should add "Snowden" to the filtered words.

(hint: To read the HN comments, click on the points/comments numbers.)

Quick question; do you remember when Aaron Swartz died? Pretty much every article on the homepage was about that. Would you have requested the same ruling then?

I think this is more to do with a persons engagement on the topic in question. Hacker News works by following the consensus of what the majority want to see. So I think it is working correctly.

Yes on the Aaron Swartz question.

I disagree, I think we can solve this problem without placing a hard limit on the number of articles on the home page. Consider:

1. That to place a limit on the number of articles on a particular topic on the homepage you must be able to group articles into topics.

2. If you can group articles into topics why not implement either: (a). a filter control which filters out topics based on user selection or (b). a second "diversity of topics" page HN which includes only the top articles on HN per topic (a log plot of HN).

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