Hacker News Reader

Comment by ripb | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be an effort by some here to turn HN into Reddit 2.0.

How is this content HN appropriate?

My kind of rule of thumb is whether it's interesting and thought provoking, not whether it's related to technology and startups. This article, or rather, the content of the episode, is interesting and thought provoking to me, and presumably other people.

The guidelines here say "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Although of course, that's subjective.

I must say that I don't get it. The subject is TV and TV dating (not to be confused with real-world dating). It's water cooler conversation material, and not even the programmers' water cooler, but the one all the salesdroids hang out around and talk about TV shows and football.

I usually find these kind of comments inappropriate, since it must be interesting to have been submitted and upvoted.

However, in this case I agree... it's a stretch to call this relevant, even though I'm sure a lot of us respect Louis CK.

Can anyone offer some insight into how this fits into Hacker News?

Louis CK is a hacker of culture and comedy. It's totally appropriate.

Louis C.K's comings-and-goings have been on HN's frontpage before, most notably how he's decoupled himself and his work from the demands/constraints of TV comedy conventions, even to the point of him learning to shoot video and edit it on his own laptop, nevermind writing it (he even wrote all the lines for Dane Cook in the episode in which Cook rips on him for a real-life incident in which CK fans accused Cook of stealing CK's work)

Given such freedom in creating and producing content, it's interesting to see what content he actually chooses to produce.

That would have been an infinitely more interesting and appropriate article to read on HN. He seems to have initially achieved escape velocity from typical performer constraints by self-funding shows using his Reddit fanbase, is that right? If he's shooting and editing his own TV shows even at a preparatory stage, I want to read about that shit. I already noticed his show has some unconventional shots in it, and wondered why. That honestly was the most interesting part to me, how it didn't feel like the same old shit on TV in so many ways.

With regard to the topic at hand, talk about this particular TV show has been hitting my RSS reader. And so far all I'm seeing is the replacement of regressive, fact-free bullshit about heterosexual relationships with progressive, fact-free bullshit about heterosexual relationships. Another interesting article would be some sort of empirical approach to understanding these issues.

Here's an idea: new HNers can upvote, but no downvote. If HN's popularity goes up, you'll have a large influx of upvotes for trivial news, and a limited set of users to stop it, which is the typical problem for growing communities. I've been here for almost a year, and I still don't have enough karma to downvote, so I'd guess the number of high karma HNers must not be that big.
Also, according to the guidelines[1], you should use the report button (assuming you have enough karma) instead of commenting.
Edit: it took me longer to write this comment that it took for the article to go down. Nice.

Using Reddit's terms because I'm not sure if there are HN specific ones

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com