Why I don't find HN useful anymore | Hacker News Reader

Why I don't find HN useful anymore

imgur.com

117 pointsdag57 comments

This is pure whining. If you don't like the articles on HN

1. upvote articles you like

2. Submit more articles you like

You have submitted just 3 stories to HN (excluding this) http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dag and frankly the story about warren buffet is not HN material and the fashion article is also not hard core HN material.So you want others to find articles you like and upvote them and not do the work yourself.

I would have given a point by point rebuttal of how many stories you have marked as insignificant was in fact interesting but it seems like you have already made up your mind. So good luck. Try joining/making another community

I doubt he'd have much luck elsewhere. By his own graphic he had no objection to 50% of the articles and honestly that's a pretty good return rate all-in-all. No community is ever going to exactly reflect any one person's likes and dislikes. Especially a community as large as HN.

Any site that can produce 15+ interesting articles a day in exchange for the roughly minute and a half it takes to skim the HN headlines is doing great in my book.

It's not that I like 50% and don't like 50%, rather I think that one or two years ago 50% of these would never have been submitted to HN.

1. upvote articles you like

2. Submit more articles you like

I am surprised people keep offering this as a solution. Isn't it obvious that if MORE people upvote and submit other stories like politics, then politics we will have?

Isn't it obvious that majority rules?

hmm ? "majority rules". How can that be not obvious? It is called a community. The advice is to do something about it rather than just complain. More often than not the people who complain (like dag) have not contributed much articles. If i remember a pg comments only 10% of the users visit the new page. And something like 4 votes are often enough to put an article on frontpage.

I wonder how much upvoting of new articles happens by the people who complain. The only publicly available metric for contribution to articles is submissions and dag certainly hasn't contributed enough. So yeah, the advice still stands.

Why I don't find HN useful anymore

http://imgur.com/8yx0Z.png

I never ceases to fascinate me how taboo meta discussions of HN are. We tolerate all kinds of topics, but this one almost everyone viscerally hates. It is as if everyone takes it as a personal insult on their tastes. Odd.

I disagree.

I don't read it as people being insulted but more so that they see meta discussions as distracting from the more valuable function of HN.

Also, this topic reminded me of this post:

"Meta is a social problem, period. It's applicable to everything you do in life."

(Source: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001282.html)

IMHO Metafilter shows the way here (as usual)-- putting meta-discussion in its own little silo keeps it from annoying the people who don't care.

i don't mind meta discussion when it's constructive, such as voting, dealing with spam, backend code updates, etc.

but the OP chose to complain about links he didn't like on his page by adding his own link that many others now have on their pages that they don't like.

So is this a meta meta discussion?

Note that most of the links you clicked on were not ones that I marked.

Ignoring your opinion per se for a minute, I feel you could have chosen a less snide way of expressing it.

you just added to the noise

pot, kettle

∞

Entirely agree. I flag such submissions.

Not exactly the most eloquent criticism, but I do see what the OP is getting at. For me, HN has gone from a daily read (too much noise, hit-or-miss quality), to a weekly scan of http://news.ycombinator.com/best - which is generally pretty good. Techmeme is my daily scan for news, which I can go through in less than a minute with Instapaper as my procrastination shield.

You know, I've been here for over 2 years now and have certainly seen this link but never made the mental connection to use it for just a weekly checkup.

Excellent idea! This will keep me from getting caught up in time-wasting comment wars and cut down my daily habit of scanning through everything.

There's no real need for no-procrast with this link... Simply logout and set it as your new HN bookmark.

Another trick I use is to check the submitter of really interesting stories and see what else they are submitting. I find many users' submission more interesting then the HN front page and even best. Like pg himself for example.

He does have a point - today was especially full of politics. The Schmidt stories are not politics but certainly the blue state blues and german story are.

Are you saying 50% of the links on the front page (btw, a sample set of 1) are very interesting to you?

That's a damn good batting average.

But it's a horrible free throw percentage. So I guess it all depends on your sports analogy.

So does this count as wishful thinking, or public outrage?

Public outrage.

Had I written a long article about the good times at early Reddit, young Startup News, or even the newly rebranded HN and written about how we should strive to return to those days, that would be wishful thinking.

Eric Schmidt resigns from Apple's BOD is Politics how?

Take your smug sense of superiority, turn that sumbitch sideways, and stick it up your candy ass.

Well said. This is exactly what I was thinking.

Also, why is the pie chart thing "wishful thinking"? Next time I need to create a chart, this will be in my mind, and I will probably not make it a pie chart. It may not change the rest of the world, but it helps me.

Your comment is extremely disrespectful, and I believe erroneous.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics , "There is no academic consensus on the exact definition of "Politics" and what counts as political and what does not. Max Weber defined politics as the struggle for power." I found that definition applicable.

Yeah, it's the politics of a technology company's board of directors... and here it is on a site for people interested in starting technology companies.

What, exactly, is your point? This article is a lot more interesting and relevant to entrepreneurs than the one about hacking the firmware of keyboards that you did not highlight.

As the awesome skunk anansie song goes:

Yes it's f*cking political! Everything's POLITICAL!!!!!!

I see what you're saying. I for one would like more science stories.

Why I don't find your post useful. http://www.notoriousbrk.com/blah.jpg

Funny, but I've made suggestions in the past.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

For those who are curious this is the "suggestions" made

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90944

Inclusion of every new post or exclusion of every post from a particular website at user's discretion. Regexp based? Just to prevent the site from effectively becoming an RSS reader.

Also suggested was a killfile, which I think is the better suggestion.

This seems to be inevitable as the number of users grows. See: daypop, del.icio.us/popular, reddit. All of these were wonderful when they were small, and then converged onto a mix of top 10 lists / funny photos / outrage of the day links as they got big. I predict if HN keeps growing, it will experience the same fate.

These articles that you think are useless put the technology we love to read about into a social context. I personally think this site has a great balance of low-level programming topics and high-level context articles. If the site ONLY had the articles you deem as "useful" then it wouldn't be so damn addictive and wouldn't be nearly as popular. I'm sure you'd love a small community so that you can feel special that you know about something no one else does - but I think Y Combinator is probably trying to build a popular site that they can potentially make money on some day. To that end they're doing a hell of a job so far.

One way to solve this is "subreddits," but that has a lot of its own problems (e.g. its almost impossible to start a new subreddit, even for an important distinction).

I always thought a Netflix-prize like mechanism, e.g. "people who voted similarly to you also liked," would be much more fine grained & much more useful than subreddits.

Give PG's influence on using Bayesian classifiers (a form of machine learning) for detecting spam email, using machine learning on HN would seem to have a sympathetic ear.

That's what happen when community shape in to a normal distribution :)

PS: I noticed sin curve of _goodness_ I see in HN content. Should be something related psychological patterns.

No TechCrunch links and nothing about Twitter. That's an exceptionally good front page for HN.

As the community increases the quality decreases to have a higher level of comprehension. If anyone is a webmaster they know that a -well- written article about how to hack X vs. a dumbed down version will lose out to the dumbed down version. Quality will simply continue to decline here. I have noticed this as well. Let's start a quality hacker site, this one is slowly turning into another Digg.

When people start doing something with a website of mine that I don't want them to, I just give them some other place to do it. So with a blog on a particular topic, if people get more social and off-topic, I'll create an "off-topic forum," and direct everyone there.

There is definitely an influx of politics into HN, and it will probably continue. Why not create a HN: Politics site?

Different strokes for different folks. You apparently don't like news about copyright law or big tech employers that hire tons of hackers. I do. On the other hand, I don't care about resetting my sleep cycle, exploding ipods, or rails and apparently that isn't too offensive to you. This is a social media site that serves up news to tons of people, not just you.

Sometimes, I find the "new" stories more interesting than the frontpage. If I upvote a new story, it shoots right up on the frontpage...

...thus restoring the balance (for my likes, anyway).

You seem to think the only value in HN is providing you links to click on. What about giving you a chance to discuss the issues of the day with fellow entrepreneurs?

shouldn't you have posted this to the reddit images section?

The irony of the screencap commentary format was intentional.

I'm sure that's exactly what everyone else on Digg/Reddit would say. Now, why don't you actually take the time to formulate your thoughts on why HN fails to meet your expectations and what could be done about it. Until then, please stop contributing to the problem.

Not that I want politics to take over the front page, but those "politics" links are often technical/business opportunities for hackers.

From OP's profile:

  user: dag 
  created: 593 days ago 
  karma: 305 
  about:

Then drilling down the "submissions" link:

  1.  Why I don't find HN useful anymore (imgur.com)  
   76 points by dag 1 hour ago | 37 comments 
  2.  Hack Your Own CNC Machine (buildyourcnc.com)  
   27 points by dag 77 days ago | 3 comments 
  3.  Fashion for Geeks: Why bother? (urbanmonarch.com)  
   27 points by dag 508 days ago | 26 comments 
  4.  The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville (classic Warren Buffett article) (scribd.com)  
 3 points by dag 550 days ago | 2 comments

So you've been here for 593 days and have only made 4 submissions. Yet you complain about the submissions of others. Want a more useful hn? Stop complaining and start contributing.

an ironic complaint when you inspect the submitter's own submissions, which is only 25% HN-topical.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dag

Flagged. Whining about not liking Hacker News is not Hacker News. Your post adds to the problem you're complaining about.

Don't you get it? He's saving us all with his superior sense of what's right and wrong!

Sites based on user-submitted content will tend to be dominated by a maffia.

There must be editors who enforce and maintain the spirit of the community or it will become a propaganda outlet for the rulers.

We've seen it happen with Apple many times, one post about the GV fiasco is enough, not ten posts a day for a week trumpeting your own horn.

Or ten posts a day about dropping the iPhone.

Or ten posts a day about how much the AppStore sucks.

If you think we don't distinguish propaganda from real news, you'll be greatly disappointed.

HN is going down, whether we like it or not, and only PG can save it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Propaganda, payperpost and FUD are killing HN.

I disagree, but had to mod you up from the zero you got before I came here: I think your opinion is legitimate and does not deserve a down vote. I think what is -- not killing, but corrupting -- HN is down votes on opinions one disagrees with. This is a crack for groupthink to seep in, which is dangerous.

A jpeg? ("I can tell from the pixels...")

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