
Ask PG: Sub-HNs as a solution to cluttering of HN front-page? - blizkreeg
The quality of posts on the HN front page hasn't been the same off late (past 6+ mos?).<p>Why not have a sub-HN for the three main categories most posts seem to fall under?<p>- HN:news (all the FB, Apple, TC, Inc articles, soap opera stuff, and so forth) - news.ycombinator<p>- HN:discussion (Ask HNs, Review-my-site, advice, other general, somewhat casual talk) - talk.ycombinator<p>- HN:learn (probably the objective that HN started with - core, solid hacker stuff, tech learning, how to scale etc) - learn.ycombinator<p>I realize this takes away some of the simplicity of HN and goes down the Reddit route but perhaps a pivot (as beaten up as this word is) is in order? Also, at least from what I can see all posts on HN fall in one of these three categories.<p>There are more non-old-timer HNers now with up-voting capabilities and that seems to have had an effect on what makes it to the front page. At least with this model, if you're not interested in pointless Facebook hype articles, you don't have to see them pop up with alarming regularity on the front page.
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pg
The reason I resist doing something like this is that it's sort of like
dealing with getting fat by buying bigger pants. I'd be willing to introduce
categories to make HN a better site, but I wouldn't want to do it as a way of
solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap. I'd rather
attack that problem directly.

Also, it seems to me the problems with crap posts on the frontpage are not as
old as 6 months. In fact they're so recent that I'm by no means sure that it's
not just random variation. The frontpage was ok today.

~~~
metamemetics
> _a way of solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap_

add downvoting to submissions and the community will take care of it

~~~
mooism2
When I used Reddit, some people said they downvoted submissions on niche
topics they weren't personally interested in, e.g. a Rubyist downvoting
Haskell articles.

There are enough Haskell enthusiasts here that I don't think Haskell
submissions would suffer, but who knows what niche topics would?

~~~
edd
I used to be on Reddit in the Lisp days (before it had many users). The day
that they introduced the `my.reddit` was when the quality of posts massively
fell. The recommended behaviour at that point was to try and train your
recommendation engine by voting for things you liked and down vote things you
didn't. The `my.reddit` then showed your own personal homepage. From that
point votes no longer became a quality control as people would vote without
thinking based on a headline.

I am all for some way of adding meta-data to links so a user can filter based
on them. But you have to be really careful to not turn votes in to a
meaningless action and keep them as a way of voting on quality rather than
opinion.

(ps. I stopped using Reddit shortly after that change and as such haven't
seen/used it recently and don't know how the sub-reddits are doing to manage
that situation. Also it was one of many changes that negatively effected
signal-noise but one I always feel was the turning point)

~~~
jokermatt999
Nowadays your best bet is to find a smaller subreddit with a tight focus,
essentially starting a new community. The main community has major issues with
quality control, but the splintered subgroups are generally much better
overall. Really, it does seem like small size is the best quality control,
unfortunately.

------
derefr
Those don't seem like categories to me. It looks more like you're talking
about two continuous dimensions upon which all posts fall: _ephemerality_ (or,
conversely, timelessness), and _community-orientation_ (or, conversely,
xenophilia.)

A "learn" post is just a post that will still be good a while from now. A
"discussion" post is just a post closely related to the goings-on around here,
to the point where all the information related to it can be included and it
doesn't need a link.

Couldn't these be separate voting axes? Voting on ephemerality would affect a
post's time-factor in its calculated ranking (ephemeral posts would drop off
the front page quickly, while timeless ones would last a while); and
community-orientation would be a setting each user could have in their profile
(a slider for "I like more/less community in my HN.")

------
GavinB
The problem isn't the organization, it's the depth. This site is based around
news items and self-submissions that act like news items. 25-48 hours after
submission, no one will bother commenting on an item.

There's no room for depth of discussion in the current format, and so it gets
repetitive in both news items and comments. This leads to the perception HN
quality is degrading.

I think there's room to innovate in the management and threading of
discussions, but it's more complicated than splitting into categories.

~~~
rbanffy
I usually start my visits to HN with my threads page. I frequently answer
comments well after articles leave the first page but only on threads I got
involved. There are times I go back to the root discussion to read more, if I
see some reason to assume much has changed after my last visit.

Only when I see nothing new there is that I move to the home, and then to the
"new" page, where I frequently do some flagging.

If something has led me to perceive the quality as degrading, it has been a
surge in articles that are much more "news" than "hacker".

------
danieldon
The most obvious problem is that the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"
clause in the guidelines is too broad and, therefore, impossible for certain
people to internalize. That's why there are even long-time users who somehow
believe that pictures of girls in t-shirts are appropriate
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367047>). That misconception creates a
broken windows environment where people start racing downwards.

I don't have a precise solution. In my experience, zero tolerance for off-
topic subjects like political discussions is the best way to keep online
communities healthy. As the saying goes, give an inch and they'll take a mile.
Somehow making the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" clause stricter
would go a long way to improving quality overall.

------
jrockway
I like the idea, but the reality is that I'd just read all three out of
bordeom or inability to not click stuff. So it would end up being the same.

If you want to make a new site with categories, you are welcome to, of course.
If people like it, they will find it. (Remember when there was only Slashdot?
And then Reddit? I don't read either of those anymore...)

~~~
techiferous
Making a new site is the solution. There are too many people who like things
the way they are here, for better or for worse. HN is frozen; it doesn't
adapt.

------
HSO
I myself may be guilty of "diluting" the site as I'm not from computer science
or engineering by background, I'm just interested as a hobby, and I joined
around a year ago. Having said that, may I ask whether the point hurdle to
upvoting is static? If so, an easy way to keep the quality constant may be to
mark it up every year in order to account for point cumulation over time or to
introduce a scheme similar to the rating of articles (i.e. points divided by
time). The "natives" will have been around for a long time and/or will have a
higher point/time ratio while interested bystanders/observers like myself will
not. Why am I harming myself in this way? Because a few interested bystanders,
not synchronized, will do no harm but add more and possibly synchronization
and they may even harm themselves unintentionally (not to mention the
"natives").

------
armandososa
What if randomly the front page changed to
<http://news.ycombinator.com/newest>? PG may know better from statistics, but
my guess is that most people never go to that page to upvote newest stories
and the few people who does, are those who shape the front-page.

Maybe it's a dumb idea, but that's what I was thinking.

~~~
robryan
Or make it a split screen on option, that you can show hide new on the right
side. Would fit nicely on a wide screen. Then you could see if anything
catches your eye in new, without have to consciously know you were doing it
and it would introduce it to people who haven't used it before.

------
Kilimanjaro
I say an editor is enough to ban posts about facebook selling our mothers or
apple killing its employees in vietnam.

Hackers don't like gossip and HN is not a yellow tabloid.

No need to diversify.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Better yet, give moderator powers to the top ten users (or those who
volunteer) and watch them closely just in case they abuse their powers. If
three out of ten consider some articles yellowish they can ban them even if
they are in the front page already.

------
blogimus
I disagree. I really don't see what is broken with Hacker News (and I've been
here for a while too).

~~~
blizkreeg
I'm not saying it's broken. Just saying some of the cracks could be fixed in
time.

~~~
blogimus
To me, the thing that makes Hacker News, well, Hacker News is that the site is
really simple, from a technology contraption point of view. It is controlled
and shaped and molded (and whatever other verb you want to use) by us users
(counting PG as, well, prime user?) and not shaped so much by arbitrary
software constraints such as binning topics (putting in buckets). The touch to
tuning this site has been light, with such adjustments as flagging and tuning
the rise and fall of topics based on a variety of heuristics. Some tuning has
been undone, such as color coding "most valued posters"

If anything, I would say if we were to change the site, the next experiment
would be to put a greater collective downweight on titles or source sites if
there is a strong local temporal grouping (glut within a timeframe) of those
tags/keywords posted. Example: lots of facebook posts at one time then
facebook posts drop off the front page a little faster than if there was only
a small number of facebook posts. But even that, I'm not sold on this.

------
d0m
But I have to agree that if you are not interested in facebook and apple, half
the post are useless. Plus, if you already know 5% of linux, 1/4 of the post
are useless since it's usually a blog post explaining how cat works. The rest
is interesting to me (of course, not the How to start a startup repeating what
as already been said 10 millions of time, and why block are cool in ruby)

------
ryanelkins
The interesting thing is that this site should be a reflection of those
participating in it. That means that either the audience is growing in a
direction that is not consistent with the original participants or that there
is some other force at play trying to alter the content of the site.

The first thing to do would be to figure out which of those two scenarios is
at play and address that. If the tastes of the users has changed (or an influx
of new users that have different tastes has emerged) then I'm not really sure
what the answer is.

------
endtime
Unlike some other people, I agree with what you're saying about how HN has
changed. I guess the fundamental question is whether to adapt HN to the
userbase changes or to try to keep HN from changing at all (probably with
stronger moderation). My preference is for the latter (of course, I'm not a
mod, so that's easy for me to say), and I do think that's kind of how it's
been handled so far...but I think the former isn't a terrible option if the
mods become overwhelmed.

------
helwr
I hate categories, hn is perfectly fine as a "surprise me" portal

where else I can post an article on Caligula's giant ships
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370063>

or piping cats <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116085>

~~~
techiferous
Reddit.

~~~
helwr
thanks, i'll give it a try

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pook
I think it's a social phenomenon, not a technical one. Clay Shirky wrote the
standard work on what happens when you try to fix social problems with
technical ones: <http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

A better solution may be a new form of Erlang flood. Perhaps with some added
technical incentive, say, a new list of users most hospitable to "classic"
content.

That's a shit idea, but I'd much rather see PG work to better the community,
than try throwing tech at it and watching the social forces mitigate his
efforts.

------
quizbiz
What about folder-like threads instead of sub-reddits that would group threads
with identical keywords like Google, Apple, iPad, etc.

------
davidmurphy
if this were done, I'd suggest separate "learn" sub-HNs for geek stuff and
business stuff. (github vs marketing)

------
FreeRadical
Anything start-up related should be in the main HN, all other items in a sub-
HN.

