
Ask HN: Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. - RiderOfGiraffes
An observation in passing.<p>Discussions like the one about Barach Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize are valuable, especially when held between intelligent, thinking and rational parties such as are found on Hacker News.<p>However, I believe it does not belong here.  It does not seem to me that it follows the guidelines.<p>But there's a problem.  I strongly believe that the discussion does not belong here, and yet I can provide no alternative fora.  Other places more suited to this topic are overrun with the shrieking, thoughtless, knee-jerk reactionaries that I come here to avoid.<p>I propose a sister site to HN, one where to participate it is required that you have karma earned via the original HN.  In that way there is a barrier to entry so that only those with some standing in "the community" (whatever that may be) can join the discussion.<p>Suggestions, thoughts and ideas welcome.<p>As a side-note, such "off-topic" discussions often seem to have the number of comments seriously exceed the votes on the submission. Currently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870921 has 140 comments, but only 67 points.  People don't want to up-mod the submission, but they do want to have their say.<p>I wonder if this is a good predictor.  The irony would be if this suggestion garners significantly more comments than votes.  It probably will.<p>ADDED IN EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION:<p>I'm not proposing any more rules or policies, just that there's somewhere else to go with things like this that are clearly of interest, but not obviously on-topic.  There are things I'd like to discuss with HN participants, but don't do so because they're against the guidelines.<p>Better to have somewhere else to go than to have them summarily killed.
======
AndrewDucker
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 :->

~~~
tptacek
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?

------
gojomo
Once upon a time: [http://mattmaroon.com/2008/09/25/introducing-
nonhackernewsco...](http://mattmaroon.com/2008/09/25/introducing-
nonhackernewscom/)

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

~~~
davi
<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.

------
Ixiaus
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_.

------
roundsquare
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.

------
yan
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.

~~~
stingraycharles
_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.

~~~
unalone
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.

~~~
req2
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.

------
ashishk
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)

~~~
icey
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.

~~~
ashishk
That would work.

------
kgermino
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.

------
alttab
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.

------
davidw
> 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.

------
hernan7
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.)

------
heed
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."

------
antirez
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.

------
far33d
The most annoying off-topic discussion is the meta-discussion.

~~~
tyn
And still you initiate a meta-meta-discussion

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

~~~
tptacek
Because categories helped destroy Reddit?

~~~
biohacker42
It's not so bad if you subscribe to a small number of narrow focus sub-
reddits, like hard science, C++, Math, etc.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
biohacker42
"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?

------
drhowarddrfine
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.

~~~
TomOfTTB
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)

~~~
jacquesm
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.

