
Ask HN: Too much soap opera news as of late? - vishaldpatel
So am I the only one that has noticed the rise of company-vs-company soap opera news. All these he-said-she-said stories and analysis.<p>Is it just me or is HN turning into more a CNN type outlet than hacker news (useful / fun shit we should care about)?<p>And who's upvoting it all to the frontpage anyway? Why?? :-/
======
pg
There are also too many meta-posts, which is why I almost killed this one.

Yes, there have been a lot of fluff posts about Facebook, Apple, and Google
lately. These posts are not so harmful in themselves. The problem is that they
are too easy to upvote.

But it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of
stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of
these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a
constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things
return to normal.

It may happen that one day things never return to normal, of course, but based
on experience so far I'm inclined to give these runs of bad stories time to
run their course before worrying about them.

I have been gradually adding protections against fluff posts. E.g. "Ask HN"
posts like this have for a long time had an automatic penalty applied when
being ranked on the frontpage. I'm always mulling over other things I could
do. But we're definitely not out of options.

~~~
philwelch
The problem is that we seem to go from one soap opera (App Store 3.3.1) to the
next soap opera (Faceboook privacy settings) with barely any break for sanity
in between.

~~~
branden
This might be a matter of recent circumstance. iPad release, Apple's new
developer guidelines, Gizmodo iPhone scoop, the Facebook privacy hubbub, and
Google IO happened one right after the other. We could just be experiencing an
uncommonly dense (and hopefully short) sequence of sensational tech news
events.

~~~
dejb
Or maybe pace of change is increasing.

------
tptacek
You're not wrong. There is a lot of drama on the front page.

Maybe what's happening is that nobody particularly wants "drama", but they do
(overtly or subconsciously) take sides in these things, and they vote up
stories that confirm their theories.

In any case, I'm not concerned about this (to provide one data point). What I
_am_ concerned about are the meta-stories about it. I feel like I can ignore
the Apple vs. Google stuff, but that the meta stories might produce HN policy,
and so I feel like I need to read them.

~~~
jacquesm
I think it is mostly because of a very limited number of sites that seem to
spin very large amounts of yarn out of a very limited amount of fibre.

There is hardly any substance to any of that stuff. Why X leaves facebook, why
famous IT personality (in their own minds) Y has ritually burned their iPhone
and will now use the one and true Android and so on.

Case in point, the current #5: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367616>

We could lose it easily, not to mention the 'Today is draw the prophet day',
because that so brought out the best of HN.

Maybe it's time for some stricter flagging.

~~~
RevRal
>Maybe it's time for some stricter flagging.

I've only been flagging spam, in faith that HN is self correcting. But I've
been getting annoyed more frequently, and am about to re-consider my position
on flagging. Maybe a "flag more" culture should be encouraged?

~~~
Locke1689
I think flagging HN-inappropriate posts is completely reasonable. I don't
hesitate to flag posts which I consider to be contrary guidelines. This kind
of empty sensationalism is technical but intellectually bankrupt in my eyes.

------
SlyShy
I would like to see more programming and hacking on Hacker News again. Lately
I've been seeing programming articles floundering in New and never making it
to the front page.

Bit of a shame, really. It used to be I only needed to go to HN to get my fill
of technical discussion. Now I'm not really sure where else to go. Perhaps
someone has suggestions?

~~~
branden
Someone mentioned <http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/> in a comment a day or two
ago. I've been enjoying it.

Edit - I found it in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094> which has a
bunch of other suggestions.

------
pavs
I think there are too many "HN is going down the tubes for x reasons" self
posts.

At any given time there are thirty (often unique) stories on the HN frontpage.
From time to time some of them will be off-topic, link-bait, sensationalist.
The current x vs y soap opera is not any worse than Apple vs Adobe opera or
Apple vs Windows opera or any other opera for that matter. These are
predictable patterns and happens ALL the time and anyone who has been hanging
around long enough should know that.

I don't think it is any worse than last year or the year before that.

------
RevRal
Frankly [my dear], I too have been finding the stories and the discussion here
pretty dull lately. On-the-plus, I've been hitting f5 less frequently :).

Perhaps old-timers with good karma should have a higher weight to their story
upvotes.

That, and we should start submitting more "appropriate" stuff that the old-
timers would like and upvote, and their upvotes being heavier, these stories
would propagate the frontpage.

------
philh
I somewhat agree. So I think in future, if I visit the front page and see a
lot of fluff, I'll check out /newest for things worth reading and upvote them.
(And try to find things to submit, though it's not easy when most of my news
is from HN or reddit in the first place.)

I'd encourage you (and others) to do the same, if you're not already.

------
jacquesm
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094>

------
rewind
I think it's just because there's a lot more current soap-opera-type news
lately. Google vs. Apple, Apple vs. Adobe, etc. Some of it is interesting. A
lot of it is boring and repetitive. But it will pass. No site can ever
completely escape a bit of TMZ, so there will always be some of it hitting the
front page.

------
Tichy
A lot of these were probably the result of the Google IO conference, which is
now over (I think)? When the iPad was announced there was also too much iPad
stuff for a while, but by now it seems to have settled a bit.

So just relax, things will be fine again.

------
Tycho
I think there's just too many stories about Apple. Apple always makes for
intesting topics but other sites will always cover Apple... I go to Hacker
News for the deeper, rarer stuff.

------
angrycoder
I've only been here a short time. But I agree. I come here to find interesting
tech articles, hacking, coding, whatever. I understand that the other items
could be of interest, but really, after the 3rd facebook privacy/apple is the
devil discussion, I think everyone has had enough.

It seems like we could meet everyone's needs with a simple tagging system.

------
jsz0
There are some extraordinary events playing out right now. I think it would be
unhealthy to ignore it. This is a huge sea change moment. It's going to impact
everyone involved in the tech industry probably for decades to come.

------
drivebyacct
Yeah. Enjoy the slow flow of users from reddit. From /r/technology to
/r/android to /r/iphone, the general level of technical knowledge is
pathetically low seen by the posts that were upvoted on android the last few
days that ranged from fake twitter accounts to lies about the froyo platform
and such

