Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

You will be very surprised to hear my suggestion: kill the off-topic articles mercilessly. No politics/economics and no fluff.

View on HN

Right now an article about veterans is the #3 post on the homepage and has an enormous number of points.

Good luck with that.

I liked raganwald's post, agreed with it, and think that he's generally a very bright and interesting guy, but I still flagged the article since I thought it wasn't really hacker news. pg can just up and kill stuff though, and doing more of that would set the tenor of the site.

So, that makes two flags, it's still there. Similar sentiment on the flag by the way, it's a good thing he did but I feel it does not belong here.

I've been wondering for a while now if this flagging is useful or not, it doesn't seem to have too much effect, if any.

If I recall correctly, pg made an addition that if a submission has over X points, it won't be auto-killed by flagging.

Correct, but that means that an editor will look at it (as happened, see above) and has to decide whether to give the article a pass or not.

I wasn't referring to the 'auto kills', but to the editor kills.

I wanted to flag it for the same reason, but there wasn't a 'flag' link anymore...

I flagged that article, but I guess I don't have enough karma for it to matter yet.

I properly also triggered the spam filter, because I just went to the thread and downvoted all the comments.

> I just went to the thread and downvoted all the comments.

Now why on earth would you do that ?

I figure it's ok to leave up the occasional commemorative post, when it's by an old and respected member of the community, so I didn't kill it. I think I'm going to have to though; the comments show HN users can't be trusted with this topic.

I think the problem is that there are very few 'hops' between "trusted, respected person writes something intelligent" and "flame wars" when the topic is emotionally loaded/political/economics/etc... Fluff articles aren't quite so bad, but I think they still beget more fluff.

That's a very slippery slope, 'old and respected' should not matter when posting off-topic stuff.

I've seen content that was much more on-topic killed off ruthlessly, it creates a sense of class-justice.

Whoever posted it and how long they have been a member should not be the deciding factor in killing stuff or letting it be.

Anyway, of course it is your call, but that's how I feel about it.

Not surprised, and agree. HN isn't covering a nice natural boundary of topics, it's trying to fit a group of people's ideas for interesting topics.

If and when it isn't doing that, said group of people should prune away the topics they don't want - otherwise it will grow into a general discussion site. Like pruning a shrub or guiding a vine. Yes, it's a bit dictatorial and a bit undemocratic, and that's fine because it's not a popularity contest trying to target the majority of people.

Often when googling for a problem and finding a result, there's a languishing forum post that goes

"problem" "irrelevant suggestion" "irrelevant suggestion" "unhelpful but well meaning comment" "me too" "answer"

and I wish someone had enough care to weed out the drivel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com