

Ask HN: Why doesn't HN have categories? - sharemywin

Seems like it would be nice to have a couple categories. programming, start ups, makers, etc etc.
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stevewillows
The short answer is that HN is it's own category. You've no doubt seen the
several 'HN for x' sites that pop up -- HN itself is a catch-all that in
theory brings the best of everything in to one feed.

"On-Topic: 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."

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krapp
Although Hacker News is possibly becoming too large and too complex as a
community for a "one channel fits all" model to work. Whenever stories of a
certain type become popular (Aaron Swartz, the NSA, etc) they can appear to
overwhelm the entire site, when they _could_ overwhelm, say, a board or tag.

Of course then, i'm basically describing Reddit...

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stevewillows
Exactly. The major sprees between NSA, SOPA, Bitcoin, etc are a pain and tend
to take away from the value of the front page. One nice option would be to
have the titles autocategorized so we could omit certain keywords from our own
main feeds. But again, this takes away from the simplicity of HN.

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petervandijck
But it has categories.

Homepage (the best stuff), New (all the stuff), Ask (hn-only discussions),
Jobs (jobs).'

The ones you suggest are almost impossible to use as categories (Twilio goes
in programming? startups? makers?), but could be implemented as tags though.
But that has its own challenges.

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sharemywin
you could still cross post.

