I have been a RSS subscriber for a long. I love HN but I have to admit that I get a little frustrated by the increasing percentage of noise. Especially by off-topic links.
I spend now too much time sorting useless stuff (for my needs) for reading a few really good links.
Do you also think there is too much noise?
If many agree, maybe it will be a signal that it is now time to add some categories/filters. :)
Thanks.
Also, I'm not quite clear on what you're having problems with. Why can't you "go the the new page and up-vote more interesting stories"?
As for your down voting me, whatever. Enjoy. I don't even know what use karma can be on this website. Though at least now I know there is some.
I've always wondered how someone who has been on the site for less than a year can have a Karma > 1000 points. I always thought they were posting a lot - but a dozen 50 Point submissions will get you halfway there pretty quickly...
I'm sure you also "don't see race".
If there were only code articles or technology articles, it'd get boring and I'd probably come back less often. I probably spend way too much time here really, but I probably click on 75% or more of the articles on the front page. I click on them because they are interesting, not necessarily because they are about programming or technology -- they expand my mind.
I think mind expansion is good for hackers.
http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories
once in a while and flag those that are plainly spam or very badly off-topic. Sufficiently many flags kill a submission.
edit: How often does Google reply with the answer when you comment that you can't find something using their site? Now that's service right there...
Maybe YC could sponsor a little "Netflix Challenge" for Hacker News, where the 1st-place prize is an automatic bid to the upcoming YC round.
Also, if you just want programming links, read http://hackerhackernews.com/. The topic here is much broader than only technical things.
That's actually the reason why I haven't bothered checking this website for months, but got curious and decided to come back today to see if things have changed.
The thing that I find most noisy are the "ASK HN" posts. I wish there was a way to filter these out, so I only get news.
C'est la vie
In the interests of full disclosure, I was the one who submitted the "How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night" article. Yes, it's not topical. However, I'm not ashamed! I thought it was interesting, and clearly so did the 44 other people who upvoted it.
I'm quite pleased with the community that's developed here, who are discriminating enough to pick out many articles I find interesting.
However, HN could definitely be improved, so that people who are only interested in certain topics (such as only computer/hacking related articles) or not interested in other topics (such as off-topic, or political, or venture capitalist articles) could more easily filter through what's becoming a firehydrant of links.
I think the best way to do this is by implementing tags.
And you can say that Hacker News will stay pure or whatever but this is exactly how things began with other sites and then slowly but surely things became less and less relevant. I do think that it will take quite some time before Hacker News gets that way but I'd rather be strict now and nip it in the bud before regretting it later.
With the analogy of tags I would say that if you had the two most basic tags: "hacker-related" (programming, science, tech and related fields) or "non-hacker-related" (ie. sleep habits) Then I would only have hacker-related tagged material here.
Now I realize that in the case of Digg they did purposely branch out to expand their community. And I doubt pg would do the same. Thus the speed at which Hacker News would descend in quality would be much slower, but in my mind it's not a sense of speed it's a sense of direction. And right now Hacker News is descending from the direction and the kind quality we had.
If I could be so bold as to take a guess at what you mean, it seems you're suggesting that the HN community submit only topical links.
I think that suggestion will generally simply be ignored by those people who want to (for whatever reason) submit non-topical links because only a small fraction of HN submitters will even read your suggestion, and most of those that read it aren't going to care (or they wouldn't have submitted off-topic links in the first place).
In order to reach all submitters, we could have some sort of global notice reminding everyone to only submit topical links. Maybe a stern and clearly worded warning on the submission page itself.
But say we do that and people continue to submit and upvote off-topic links. In my opinion, this is precisely what's going to happen. So then what?
I think there is no solution to keeping HN pure short of having the site be moderated by people dedicated to keeping it pure. But clearly that's not the model HN wants to pursue.
As long as HN is self-moderating it will not stay pure, and the more popular it gets, the further away from purity it will drift (witness what happened to Slashdot and Kuro5hin).
So, given that HN is not and probably will not stay pure, how can we improve the situation? I think the solution is clear: tags. Tags will let each reader more easily focus on what they find interesting, no matter how "impure" the site gets. It's an easy solution and one that should scale pretty well.
We can calculate a score based on user oldness and his score, so he can submit or not and the time between his submissions.
but imho tags/categories are awful. there has to be a better solution to this.
i don't think filtering domains will do much good either.
editors like slashdot aren't exactly great (and require an editor staff).
voting schemes reflect the taste of the community (more specifically the percentage of people that vote - not taking into account bots/cheaters). there's always slashdot's semi-random karma system, but it's not really that great either.
so really, what's the solution? no effing clue..
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on the other hand, i'd really like to know the stats on the number of people who click on an article and the number of people who voted on the same article.. also, average points stories get and so on..
edit: oh yeah, nevermind that, forgot that only after some X karma you can downvote/flag
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oh well, information overload.. it's a joy
I don't know how that would be tackled exactly. I suppose just introducing new people politely to the culture here, and for current members to refrain from upvoting comments that are ok but have the pseudo-clever semi-snarky internet vibe to them.
(And for the record: "1. Collect Underpants, 2. ????, 3. Profit" seems to be a more mature business model than some that are featured here on hn.)
I for one welcome our new television meme overlords.
But I agree that the RSS feed can get cluttered. Maybe a yahoo pipes thing could create a delayed feed that only passed items with certain characteristics.
(Serious question -- I don't listen to rock bands, indie or otherwise, so I don't know how the time- and popularity-dependence of their volume.)
Unfortunately I tend to find both right as they stop being cool. (I joined on erlang day)
But yeah, you're right, my experience blinded me. And cheer up, your comment seems out of place.
I don't see how not having tags helps anything or anyone. It just keeps the article space flat instead of organized by topic.
Of course, the articles still have different topics. They're just not easily distinguishable from one another by automated means.
Tags are bad because keeping the article space flat keeps out people with only marginally similar interests.
The article space is flat right now, but that hasn't been enough to keep the site pure either.
I think the battle for purity has already been lost. Now it's just a question of whether the site is going to be rendered useless because the number of submissions is going to be too great to slog through with a flat article space, or if it's going to be made manageable with tags.