
Hacker News Site Guidelines - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
======
tim2
Perhaps it could be added that submitters shouldn't submit "flamebait" - eg.
titles/articles that will elicit very predictable, emotionally charged
responses, or have borderline lying titles. In short, not tabloid material;
which some other democratic news sites are buried in now.

This is provably the most popular content for the masses, so it's something to
watch out for. The editors here do already kill it and that's great, but why
not put this guideline in writing?

~~~
davidw
I like this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119277>

"I personally tend to try to apply the standard of whether it's of importance
or interest to hackers in particular, rather than to human beings in general."

Stories about, say, the US elections are of equal importance to everyone, and
fail that test.

~~~
ardit33
"Stories about, say, the US elections are of equal importance to everyone, and
fail that test."

\--I think that is wrong. US elections are important to americans (and maybe
some foreigners that are into foreign politics). You can be a hacker, and not
an amercian, so you don't care much about US elections.

~~~
iamdave
Another huge problem with Reddit. There was so much coverage on the US
elections non-US citizens would get upset and everyone else would use the
mentality "Well it got upmodded, this is what we want to see and you're just
going to have to deal with it." Gladly we dont have that mentality here, it
reflects too much of the .NET developers being tourists and look at everything
with the "us" and "everything else" pattern.

Very destructive.

~~~
ilamont
One of the problems with Reddit since Wired took over is the dominance of all
kinds of political discussions on the front page, both US and world news. It
really brought the site down, IMHO.

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jedberg
"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they
found on another site, submit the latter. ... Don't abuse the text field in
the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting
discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want
to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit
that instead."

These rules appear to be in direct opposition to each other. Could someone
elaborate on which is the appropriate method?

~~~
aston
The difference is in the value add of the blog posting. Reposts vs.
commentary.

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bayareaguy
A link to these guidelines should be added to the
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submit> page.

------
run4yourlives
pg - You should take this out of the story table and just post it right at the
top of the page.

~~~
pg
There is a link to it at the bottom of every page.

~~~
cstejerean
There should be a link to it at the top of the page (something like #1 on the
homepage and highlighted) for every user until the exceed a certain karma
threshold (50?).

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aston
Batten down the hatches, guys. Moderators, get your dead button finger ready.

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redrory
Why can't we ask questions via Ask.YC? We want to hear from the YC readers,
not necessarily PG or whom-ever read the info@ycomb

~~~
robg
That bit is referring to questions about the YC program, not general questions
of the Hacker News community.

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mynameishere
The struggle for purity, in general, provides a depressing history.

~~~
whacked_new
The guidelines actually read like a bunch of common sense. The fact that
people find it insightful means that it is easy to forget common senses like
"being civil." That civility has to be spelled out as a guideline in a site
for an educated audience is rather unfortunate.

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cstejerean
I didn't even know until now that there are editors on this site. Who are
these people and what magical powers do they hold?

~~~
jgrahamc
Well, HN is written in Arc which has a REPL and so the editors can do whatever
they want!

~~~
drm237
You think the editors interact with the system via the REPL? I would assume
they just have the edit/delete functionality exposed for every post instead of
just their own. Would be interested to know how this is actually implemented.

~~~
tokipin
the source for HN is available in the Arc distro

~~~
cstejerean
I believe the source for a subset of HN is available in the Arc distro. I
remember PG commenting about having to remove YC specific stuff from there.

~~~
foonamefoo
He was talking about things like the YC summer/winter application forms, not
the moderation system.

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DarrenStuart
shouldn't this list be on or linked on the submit page?

