Ask HN: Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items.

I don't feel that Hacker News is swamped with off-topic discussions. I'm not having to wade through political or social commentary to find articles about Haskell, video adapters or Javascript. In fact, a quick look at the front page indicates that less than 5% of it isn't technical in some way - and more than 80% is entirely technical.

I say we avoid putting things in place to avoid problems we don't have yet :->

I agree. This is what the "flag" button is here for. It should work fine as long as nobody gets offended when their stories get flagged --- and why should they?

Once upon a time: http://mattmaroon.com/2008/09/25/introducing-nonhackernewsco...

What happened to that - it won't load for me ...

http://nonhackernews.com/ looks like it expired & got scooped up by a squatter.

See also this post on Matt Maroon's blog about what it was like to run it: http://mattmaroon.com/2008/10/10/nhn/

I wonder if it ended because it was too much trouble to moderate well, and he killed it, or if it withered on the vine and died on its own?

Either way, it suggests that starting a good social news/discussion site is hard work and not just a matter of setting karma threshold high enough.

That said, if you start something, I would definitely enjoy coming to check it out.

I also have felt like I wanted a HN-like forum, in my case, for neuroscience. My network of neuroscience friends & colleagues is probably large enough that I could try such a thing, but I haven't summoned the activation energy, in part out of worries that it would take more work than I want to put in to maintain.

I like this suggestion. I'm not against HN having off-topic posts and discussions but I think such an implementation would help focus the discussions and keep it's participants lined up (I like the Karma points from HN to vet new users idea).

I, personally, would love to see a sister site dedicated to the broader topic of intellectual discourse.

Hey All

Seems like there are a few objections to this. I figured I'd put up a post about them all.

1) Just flag them and let them die.

That doesn't really solve the problem. There is a subset of people here that want to talk about "off topic" articles (myself included). The idea here is create a community where these discussions can take place without them being flagged.

2) The number of off topic posts isn't that high.

Again, the idea is that we want a place where there will be a lot of "off topic" posts. I'm sure that for a lot of off topic articles either a) people don't post them for that reason or b) they don't get up voted a lot and are primarily ignored.

3) Such a site probably won't work/will die, etc...

This is possible, but as far as I can tell, the worst outcome is we ditch the idea and we're back where we started. In any event, I don't see another solution off the top of my head, but if anyone has anything that takes into account the above two constraints, please share.

4) There are other places to get this.

Are there? If anyone has such a place, please post it.

From experience, any features requested to facilitate or hamper existing behaviors usually fail and get reverted or go unimplemented. Some examples from the past are marking high-karma users and removing visible karma.

I'd say, just let HN run its course and it'll figure itself out. The more policy and rules you try to add the more soul you take away from it.

I'd say, just let HN run its course and it'll figure itself out. The more policy and rules you try to add the more soul you take away from it.

The problem is, when you let social network sites "figure itself out", the end result is, in my not so humble opinion, usually an emotional, harsh and perhaps childish community. Maybe HN has the advantage of being connected to YCombinator, and thus has a reduced risk of this happening, but the risk is still there. Besides, there are elements of HN that do manipulate the community to make it what it is: for example, not being able to downvote posts until a certain karma level has been reached (thus focusing on the positive rather than the negative).

Personally, and I think I speak for more people in this community, the existence of HN is a huge relief considering the state of today's online communities. It would be a waste if the nature of HN would be lost due to a lack of foresight in controlling this very nature.

I support this initiative to split sites. It seems overcomplex, but we need to try something to evolve the site and ease its growing pains.

Maybe HN has the advantage of being connected to YCombinator, and thus has a reduced risk of this happening, but the risk is still there.

It's already happened. Even in tech discussions, we've got a whole shitload of snark even when it comes to mild topics. Topics with even a little drama, like the 37signals discussion over accepting VC, lead to people acting like high schoolers. I'm 19, and I read some of the comments people're leaving here, and I want to tell them to grow up. That's a really, really, really bad sign for a community, when adults are acting like n00bs.

When it comes to off-topic stuff, I realize each and every time that the majority of people here don't know what the hell they're saying. When people start talking about relationships, or drug use, or politics, whatever, most comments are inane and wrong. Look at the Nobel conversation right now. People are going nuts and dissing the committee at every chance they can get, calling it a disgrace, etc., because apparently they've never looked at the Nobel prize before. They're also assuming that the gut reactions of people hours after an announcement determine how a political game is going to be played. It's frighteningly immature, assuming these people are all allowed to vote based on their shallow opinions.

Every week I grow more and more disgusted with this community. I stick around because the few dozen voices that are smart are really worth having discussions with, and I love still being able to discuss certain topics and learn from people who know more than I do, but I'm starting to agree with the general rest-of-the-Internet consensus that people here have their heads stuck deep up their asses. Every time I defend this place somewhere I realize I don't believe what I'm saying. I'd like to fix that, because there are precious few places left to jump from here.

Relationships and politics aren't the best examples - even the "experts" on all of these topics fail to demonstrate that they actually know what they're saying.

Even in topics like psychological research or evolutionary biology, people are willing to spout forth uninformed crap because they prefer their own "years of experience completing projects in the trenches against her psych lab any day." Dunning-Kruger is in full effect on HN, and it's a great argument for a liberal education.

The depth of the ignorance and resistance to modern science here is somewhat shocking.

I agree. If you build it, I will use it.

(I'm guessing there's no API to authenticate HN credentials. Might be worth reaching out to pg)

This doesn't immediately require pg's input - generate a sufficiently unusual string per user and authenticate only the users that have that hash in their HN 'about' page.

Here's a hacky way to do it:

Provide your profile URL on signup, which would allow your karma to be seen. Then the site would give you a generated code for you to put on your profile.

Once you put the code on your profile, you go to the new site and click "verify" and the site checks your profile for the code.

It ain't pretty, but it'd get the job done.

That would work.

I agree that its very hard to determine whether the problem is the content of the sites (Politics ect.) or the visitors to them. As much as I'm against complicating HN with sister sites and categories I think that if nothing else it would be an interesting experiment. If it were developed I would certainly check it out and I think that if it was set up similarly to HN it might work. I feel that the best thing to do is set a sister forum up as a beta limited to HN users with a certain karma level (Although I recognize that this would probably exclude me) and see what happens. The only way to know what would happen is to try it. If it doesn't work and the site degenerates into a reddit than most users from HN will stop visiting it and it falls apart; if it works than it can it be opened to a wider array of users. I say try it.

The problem with creating off topic forums is that it is similar to subreddits. If people come to HN because they followed a political link thats in an "off topic" forum, we've attracted the type of discourse we are trying to avoid.

Consider HN an experiment in "socialism," where it can really only work with one visionary leader (PG?) and a small, controllable community.

Empires based on sound foundations (Roman,Ottoman,British, and soon America) eventually spiral out of control due to their unfocused momentum.

This could cause a lot of people to be unhappy with HN - but then they are complaining about something that HN was never designed to solve.

Manage expectations. The internet is a big place, I love HN but I can't imagine its the only place for logical discourse.

> Other places more suited to this topic are overrun with the shrieking, thoughtless, knee-jerk reactionaries that I come here to avoid.

Correlation and causation and all that, but that correlation makes me quite wary of those topics.

Most of the time I confess that I don't upvote the topics I comment on. I just forget to do it, mea maxima culpa.

Maybe the ranking algorithm could be changed so commenting on a topic is counted as an up-vote. That would have the bonus benefit of riding us of the "this doesn't belong in HN" complaint comments.

(Disclosure: I didn't see the Obama discussion, wouldn't have opened it had I seen it.)

Maybe we need to define "On-topic" submissions more clearly. It's fairly vague as stands:

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

there is little/no offtopic here, so isn't it a bit of overreacting to claim this is a problem? Also it is truly interesting from time to time to check the HN users feeling about political/.../... issues.

The most annoying off-topic discussion is the meta-discussion.

And still you initiate a meta-meta-discussion

Why bother with another whole website? Why not just have a few categories?

Because categories helped destroy Reddit?

It's not so bad if you subscribe to a small number of narrow focus sub-reddits, like hard science, C++, Math, etc.

Which creates hard science and C++ reddit communities at the expense of a general reddit community ("reddit" is an epithet here), when the general HN vibe is the reason many of us are here.

"At the expense of" is an interesting way of putting it, aren't we all here specifically because HN is more exclusive with a more select group of users? Aren't exclusivity and selectivity the very goals we seek? And isn't HN becoming truly popular and thus generic and shallow exactly what we seek to prevent?

/r/lisp is the only section I read and it's devoid of stupid jokes and multipage puns.

/r/programming would be cool if it wasn't full of naive pre-undergraduates. (why do those people find everything "interesting"?)

/r/programming has this sort of questions: "Kripke Semantics of Computational Tree Logic is hard, can someone teach me" .. Of course, they don't tell the guy to go fuck himself and get a library membership at the local uni, so they all take turns explaining in 140 characters entire fields, all while doing ASCII-math with the Reddit equivalent of BBCode. Amidst all this crowd-teaching, someone will come in and crack a Bush joke, get upvoted a few thousands points, and all the replies will be puns about temporal logic, atheism, weed and George Bush.

Sad.

Off topic discussions are just that. We didn't come to this site to discuss politics so it doesn't belong here. There are many other places available to do that.

Any suggestions to create an off-topic board is not a solution. These are mostly populated by those who would come to the site based on politics and nothing to do with what Hacker News is about.

Whats being stated here is that there is no forum which combines two things:

1) Things that are off topic for HN.

2) Commentary from people who meat some sort of HN criteria (i.e. able to make reasonable statements and arguments).

Also, it turns out that a good number of people are interested in politics articles and a good number of people here get annoyed with politics articles.

The proposed solution seems to cover both problems. I'm not sure if it will work, but certainly the issue it is trying to address is real.

I think your opinion reflects a view of HN that I don't share. You seem to see it at as just another place on the web.

But I, and obviously others like me, see it as a community of people who I enjoy interacting with. As such there are going to come rare times when I want to seek that community's opinion on a certain topic because I value the opinions here so much.

So for me, it's not sufficient to say "go somewhere else" because it's the community here that I want to interact with. And I don't see anything wrong with that as long as its done in moderation.

Based on that conclusion I personally don't think this is a discussion worth having. PG has shown he's willing to kill topics if he feels the "off topic" level is too high. So as long as people who get their items killed don't take offense I think we have the perfect ecosystem to keep off topic items at just the right level.

(Though I personally wouldn't object if an "Off Topic" section of HN was added either)

Don't kill them, simply drop them off the front and the new page. That way the discussion can continue if it is deemed off topic.