

Ask HN: No more than 3 articles on a topic on homepage - jusben1369

Is it fair to ask moderators to keep it to say 3 or 4 articles at the most on the home page about a single topic? I feel like when a major event happens HN becomes overwhelmed on a single topic to the detriment of representing a broader array of current topics in technology.
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DanBC
Visit new. Upvote interesting new submissions. Contribute to good articles.
Ignore submissions that are not interesting to you. Consider flagging articles
that you think do not belong on HN.

A plug in / extension / script to allow users to filter certain topics would
be brilliant, I think.

Allowing mods to limit the number of topics would just cause a great deal of
meta outrage. It's bad enough when people flag. It'd be awful if mods
controlled the front page.

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krapp
A lot of users seem to feel it's an important topic which still merits
discussion.

Some sort of topic filter, or a tagging system might help (or use hnapp.com or
whatever third party thing is available), but putting a hard limit on
something that other people want to talk about is pointless censorship.

It's a discussion forum, and this seems to resonate with the community.

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mindcrime
I do not support this. Yes, there are "surges" around particular events... but
guess what? They eventually end and that topic settles in with everything
else. Just give it a few days - and maybe take heart in that fact that so many
HN users are so obviously passionate about certain topics.

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gus_massa
This is a filtered noPRISM-version of HN:
[http://hnapp.com/filter/bb4abe7a00d09a35b95c6763f09c0cfb](http://hnapp.com/filter/bb4abe7a00d09a35b95c6763f09c0cfb)

I found it in a comment from a few days ago (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846416)
). It's a bit outdated, you should add "Snowden" to the filtered words.

(hint: To read the HN comments, click on the points/comments numbers.)

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devonbarrett
Quick question; do you remember when Aaron Swartz died? Pretty much every
article on the homepage was about that. Would you have requested the same
ruling then?

I think this is more to do with a persons engagement on the topic in question.
Hacker News works by following the consensus of what the majority want to see.
So I think it is working correctly.

~~~
jusben1369
Yes on the Aaron Swartz question.

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EthanHeilman
I disagree, I think we can solve this problem without placing a hard limit on
the number of articles on the home page. Consider:

1\. That to place a limit on the number of articles on a particular topic on
the homepage you must be able to group articles into topics.

2\. If you can group articles into topics why not implement either: (a). a
filter control which filters out topics based on user selection or (b). a
second "diversity of topics" page HN which includes only the top articles on
HN per topic (a log plot of HN).

