Hacker News and Information Overload | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News and Information Overload

24 pointsWarTheatre38 comments

I have been reading HN for almost a year now (always via Google Reader) and lately I'm finding HN increasingly difficult to use because of the high volume of posts. Each day HN has about 100 posts which makes HN quite time consuming to even scan. Actually reading the posts? Forget about it.

Increasingly more often I find myself skipping HN in Google Reader because it has become a time consuming chore to find content I'm interested in. This saddens me because quality wise HN is IMHO the single best aggregator for IT startups.

I'm not sure what to do about this information overload problem but I feel it's time to remove HN from Google Reader because in its current form HN is simply broke.

I'm open to all suggestions about making HN more managable.

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I can't imagine trying to read it via a feed reader. Like you said, that's a lot. What I tend to do is just use the site, not even use a feed at all. When I've got 15-20 minutes to spend reading articles, I'll come to the site. When I don't, I don't bother. If its a particularly good article it will be on the front page all day, so I'll get to read it then. If it isn't, well, it probably wasn't worth reading anyway.

Feed readers are good for something you want to read ever single post for. HN is not something you'll want to read everything on, you just (in theory) want to read as much as possible.

So your solution to his "It hurts when I do this" is "don't do that".

What's wrong with that?

Well obviously he wants to do it, and he obviously knows it doesn't hurt him when he doesn't, so by saying "don't do that" you're being patronizing. It's pretty insulting.

His situation is more of "When I bend my wrist backwards, it hurts". He's using it in a way that is not necessarily good. Yes, it is included. And yes, it may be helpful/beneficial. But if you're having problems with doing things that way, stop.

In this case, yes.

This isn't a broken leg, its a cut. You keep it clean (ie, don't refresh the front page every five minutes), and you don't poke it. If it was a broken leg (ie, the front page gave you only the chronological order), then there would need a fix.

You're right. This site isn't really designed to be read as a chronological feed. That defeats the purpose of the front page, which puts more popular articles in higher positions an d keeps them visible for longer.

It's worse than that.

Each time an interesting post (say a blog post on fractal dimensionality in the stock market) gets posted ALL of that persons previous work gets posted as well. So you have a head post, followed by 5 other follow up articles which just kills Signal to Noise ratio.

Damn, that's a good post. I missed it. COuld you find the link to that fractal post?

that one ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417463

It's quite a bit older than your account so I doubt you 'missed' it.

Actually, the article being older than his account would virtually guarantee that he missed it.

He was probably disingenuous when he said that it was a good post, though.

I was being disingenuous as well when I decided to find a relevant link being sure that such a combination of elements must exist if the original poster referred to it...

Do not attribute to misunderstanding what can be attributed to malice ;)

I was serious. I have a deep interest in the stock market and fractals both, so an article that brings them together ... well, it's gravy!

hehe, funny :)

So, there you go then.

There is a link at the bottom to http://www.webmynd.com/html/hackernews.html

In case you ever want to find a particular HN posting again.

That should just be growing pains, though. Once HN has processed all people with something worthwhile to say, there will be no more previous articles to post - they'll all have been posted before. Things should then normalize...

That will never happen. (I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not.)

Could just need more points before reaching the RSS feed?

You mean each day 100 posts make it onto the frontpage at some point?

I emailed something to you about this last year. Is there anything you find useful in it?

http://exponentialspace.com/hn-churn.txt

Fascinating set of proposals, thanks for posting them here. They seem to fall under the general category of 'automatic gain control': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_gain_control

As the 'noise' of submissions goes up, a system that automatically adapts to the amount of activity in order to determine constitutes the 'signal' will probably help HN readers cope.

I think OP's problem stems mostly from the format in which (s)he reads HN. Checking the frontpage two or three times a day doesn't lead to the same kind of overload as the RSS might. Whereas when checking the frontpage you'll see a mostly stable set of articles (with most of the churn down at the bottom few), on the RSS feed you'll see every single article that hit the frontpage regardless of how short of period of time it spent there.

Perhaps, a quick fix for HN readers coming here from RSS feeds might simply be to not send every story out via RSS, but say, only those stories that stayed on the frontpage for >1 hour.

I really liked your option to hide already already viewed stories, although I would want to explicitly hide them, because there are interesting posts that I want to come back to.

With a hide button I could go down the page and quickly hide all the "social" stories about get a date, pick a grad school, the latest twitter app, Arrington bashing, and go straight to the good stuff like Erlang. ;-)

This really is a problem. At the end of the day when I'm reading the HN feed, I usually have about 50 tabs open—this stuff is just too interesting. I usually only read the ones that are quick reads though; i.e., a few paragraphs or a list or two or maybe some sample code. Any bigger than that and I'll just skim it, but I mean like hardcore skim so I just get the thesis of the article and not the whole substance. If it's over a couple of pages? Instapapered. My Instapaper grows at a much faster rate than it diminishes.

But this stuff is just too interesting to not at least open and skim. I mean, jesus, a blog post of the fractal dimensionality of the stock market? Come on.

It's been mentioned before -- categories and adaptive thresholds (automatic gain)

I think every other site has categories. They seem like a natural thing to do.....

Cue some johnny-b-goode to point you to the feature request link at the bottom of the page ;)

But you're right. For starters just two categories would do, hacking and everything else.

If I understand correctly, HN has always had two categories. They just haven't been explicitly put into the UI: Hacking/startups and things that interest hackers.

We've kicked this can around quite a bit, and so far PG doesn't seem to be feeling enough pain to make a change.

Perhaps things will change.

I left reddit as soon as they fractured it into subreddits. The cool thing about HN is that it simultaneously has a diversity of subjects and a community.

The greasemonkey script for sorting items by age, points, and comments makes it easier for me to find what are likely to be the more interesting discussions.

A small addition is needed to have the script work when viewing older items (you have to add the URL for the subsequent pages. Proof left as an exercise for the reader).

This is very handy since some of the better threads are not on the front page.

There's a startup for that: http://www.feedscrub.com

I originally built it for Digg and Reddit, but HN is now one of my primary uses. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

try http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

What are 'classic' posts?

Posts upvoted by users who've been around longer.

Classic posts are posts upvoted by people who have been registered at HN for at least a year. I am not yet one of them.

I don't find the classic version to be significantly different from the "new" version.

I just tried to add "http://news.ycombinator.com/classic in Google Reader, hoping it would find an RSS feed on the page. There is no RSS feed on this page actually. Yet Reader added the following feed:

http://friendfeed.com/ketan?format=atom

I thought maybe this feed is referenced in the classic page somewhere, but it is not. Google Reader bug?

I have noticed the same thing and wholeheartedly agree with you.

Simple solution: categories with separate feeds.

That leads to the subreddit problem.

Solutions to problems lead to more problems.

How about instead of having the submitter categorize the submission, everybody can categorize it, just the same as everybody can upvote?

Not sure what "the subreddit problem" is. Just wondering if that would help.

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