
Ask HN: Is it just me or has the quality of links on HN improved significantly? - sidcool
.. Especially the front page! I can&#x27;t get enough reading the insightful articles and viewing the videos.  If the content had indeed improved, what changed? What measures contributed to it?<p>EDIT: I mean the quality of tech&#x2F;startups content.  I usually ignore political posts.
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thecupisblue
I'd say it has definitely decreased significantly.

There's way more marketing posts and "tech news" which are nothing but barely
informative opinion pieces around something. Quite a lack of quality content
compared to years before.

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muzani
I agree. I haven't checked the front page much. Feel free to flag if it
doesn't meet the requirements, as per guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic. "

Unfortunately, barely informative opinion pieces isn't in that list.

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el_programmador
Yes, I've also found that it has. The most likely reason is that either
someone (mods) is vetting them to ensure that the high quality posts stay up,
or maybe the community itself is doing the good thing by upvoting the good
quality posts and downvoting the bad ones. Or maybe, its a combination of
both!

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pwg
Posts can't be downvoted. They can only be upvoted, ignored, or flagged.

And everything on the front page gets there by being upvoted by readers.

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owlninja
I think you can downvote after getting 500 karma.

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codegeek
Not posts. Only comments can be downvoted. Posts can only be flagged.

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Dowwie
No, I haven't noticed improvement, but my model of improvement may not
necessarily be one that we share. I see a more thought-diverse community as an
improvement. We learn from those who don't share the same views as us. Hacker
News hasn't offered the opportunity for that to happen. I see valuable
dissenting opinions buried at the bottom of the comments section all the time.
This is for a variety of reasons, not just the opinions of the community. Two
categorical reasons include architecture and design. Hacker News is designed
to facilitate group-think. The timing of comment submissions and lack of
nuance in the voting mechanism make it especially problematic for promoting
thought diversity.

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gtirloni
I think you're arguing that the platform should help with finding thought-
diverse comments, but how should it decide for you?

If you want those comments, you scroll down. It seems the problem is that
those comments aren't being prominently featured at the top. Should they?

Also, I see plenty of comments that I disagree with being voted to the top.
The key aspect is that they are well-thought comments, very polite and bring
interesting information. I usually upvote those comments myself.

In summary, I don't think the platform can fix its users.

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octosphere
I think the more meta and wide ranging the subject matter, the better, because
there's something for every user of HN to comment on, and oh do users love to
snipe on specific sections of an article. Meta content is like crack for
users. Narrowly constrained articles seem to be ignored.

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Whut
Given that I'm a data engineer I have a bias towards this, but I love how many
SQL articles have been posted lately.

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rpiguy
The site still feels more inclined toward political discussion than it used to
be. There were the occasional explosions like when Chelsea Manning was
arrested and when Schwartz committed suicide, but the site used to feel more
technical... at least to me. I have no hard data.

I would love to see demographic data on users and how they have changed over
time as well.

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mattrp
More political for sure. And more nytimes, Bloomberg links that I am likely to
have already read either directly or through other channels.

And seriously, do we really need another link talking about how awesome Rust
is?

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Dowwie
The Rust phenomenon isn't unique. It happened with every other major
breakthrough technology ever since Hacker News has achieved critical mass. We
are going to be bombarded with whatever is leading change. New endeavors that
aren't leading change fizzle out of existence from the front page.

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mattrp
You’re right - I wrote that in jest. I was first to complain but I truly do
like the content that makes it to hacker news and the way in which it is
ranked. I would say 9 times of 10, I’m surprised to see what’s on the front
page because it’s definitely not the mix of information I normally consume.
It’s cool to see what people are doing and think about new frameworks like
rust and clojure and even erlang.

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cylinder
No, I disagree.

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copperfitting
True that!

