

Ask YC: Should "Hacker News" be renamed? - jey

Should "Hacker News" be renamed to "Web 2.0 News" so that the "Hacker News" moniker can be freed up to be used by a site that provides news of interest to hackers and the intellectually curious in general?
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brk
No.

And your proposal baffles me. The term "Hacker News" is just a text
descriptor. It appears no where in the URL of the site or stories. Renaming it
would both be pointless and inaccurate, as the not every story is about
Web2.0.

Right now, Web 2.0 might tend to be the dominant underlying topic, because Web
2.0 is the dominant outlet for most hackers to practice their craft. Over
time, you should expect this to change to roughly reflect the state of current
hacker primary employment paths.

10 Years ago, your text might have read `Should "Hacker News" be renamed to
"Telecom and Networking News" so that the "Hacker News" moniker can be freed
up to be used by a site that provides news of interest to hackers and the
intellectually curious in general?'

The "Hacker News" moniker does not need to be freed up. If you have an idea
that seems to be more "Hacker News" than "Hacker News", go build it and draw
and audience and trounce this site. That's the beauty of Web 2.0 ;)

~~~
jey
" _If you have an idea that seems to be more "Hacker News" than "Hacker News",
go build it and draw and audience and trounce this site. That's the beauty of
Web 2.0 ;)_ "

I'm thinking about it. The problem is that I don't want to spend any time
thinking about nor running a news aggregator site.

And no, Web 2.0 is not "the dominant outlet for most hackers to practice their
craft" -- it is the dominant outlet within the self-selecting set of hackers
who follow Paul Graham. For the most part this means web developers in their
early 20's -- which is also Web 2.0's core audience.

I didn't intend the question seriously, it's more just to poke fun at the Web
2.0 centric stories that appear here. It depresses me that this site focuses
so _incredibly_ much on Web 2.0 and not on science/software in general. If the
site wasn't so damned Web 2.0 centric, neither of the Quotably stories would
have made it to the front page. I'd say 95% of Web 2.0 stuff is made just to
appeal to other Web 2.0 enthusiasts and not really to any large audience. I'm
not saying that there shouldn't be niche stuff to serve Web 2.0 enthusiasts --
just that it's disproportionately large.

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cperciva
No.

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davidw
Do you have examples of good articles that weren't noticed?

~~~
jey
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jey>

I think it's funny that the highest rated one in the top 10 is the one I just
submitted on a lark as an experiment.

~~~
davidw
You seem to get a fair amount of upvotes. I basically think that things that
'really take off' are pretty random. I'd much rather hear people discuss "how
to decide what to discard": <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144716> than
Carr and Arrington bickering about IP:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144105> (which was sort of interesting,
but worth somewhere less than 10 points, IMO), but... so it goes.

~~~
pchristensen
Putting a comment on the article makes more people notice it, click on it,
vote for it, and move it to the front page. Whenever I see a great science
article, I make sure to comment on it so it get off the "Newest" page and on
the front page. It takes surprisingly little, and then once it's on the front,
it usually gets a lot of love.

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manvsmachine
HN is effective because it's so narrowly focused. Yes, there are submissions
that deviate somewhat, but because of the initial focus, the outliers remain
(for the most part) intelligent and interesting. If you broaden the focus, you
also broaden the range of the outliers, and we'll start getting completely
unrelated posts.

~~~
jey
I fully agree, but I wish the "narrow focus" was on Hacker News instead of Web
2.0 News.

~~~
manvsmachine
So do I, but there are always going to be posts that don't "belong". I'm just
saying that at least the way things are, at least the outliers are Web 2.0
news. But we should under no circumstances change the mission of the site to
better match what's being posted. If we expanded the intended focus to include
those, HN will end up looking like valleywag.

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zin
Good question. But I don't have an answer.

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crashmoriarty
To be fair, Y Combinator is about startups and startups are, typically, Web
2.0 :)

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sant0sk1
then where would all the intellectually curious, web 2.0 hackers go for their
news?!?!

~~~
jey
Nothing stops you from visiting more than one site; I still go to reddit.com
my daily dose of conspiracy theories and funny pictures. :-)

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edw519
No. Hacking does not equal Web 2.0.

Many of us were hacking long before "Web 2.0". Many of us currently hack stuff
that is not "Web 2.0". And many of us will still be hacking long after "Web
2.0".

"Hacker News" is just right.

~~~
jey
Sure -- but this site focuses nearly exclusively on Web 2.0 news and gossip.
There's _nothing_ wrong with a site focusing on Web 2.0 gossip, obviously
_tons_ of people are interested in it. I just think it shouldn't pretend that
it's a hacker news site.

