

Ask PG: do you want HN to be a general news site or not? - nailer

Hi Paul,<p>I know you wrote the HN guidelines specifying 'whatever hackers find interesting' is appropriate. However people take this two ways, either:<p>A. Whatever gets upvotes is OK, even if a large chunk of the articles on HN are about suicide bombers, the TSA, political leaks, etc and duplicate existing sites like Reddit.<p>B. Things that specifically Hackers find interesting - as opposed to the general population - belong on the front page.<p>IIRC you appealed for people to submit Scheme stories a while ago after an influx of new users came to visit, so I'm hoping for 2) to be your answer. If so, is there anything we as a community can do, asides from flagging articles (which we're already doing), to stop HN further becoming a general purpose news site?
======
ugh
I think about HN like an editor would about a magazine. Stories about bees or
Wikileaks or the TSA are sometimes appropriate. Maybe once a week or month.
They are not and nor should they be automatically disqualified, I just don’t
want to see too many of them.

------
dawsdesign
Leave it the way it is! If hackers find it interesting it'll get upvoted. For
example, I upvoted the bee story the other day. It was a really interesting
article and I don't think my wife, for example, would give any shits about it.

~~~
nailer
Is there a reason you don't use Reddit for these stories? They have heaps of
articles about bees, the TSA, and wikileaks.

~~~
jaekwon
What's the HN reader's perception of the Reddit vs HN community when it comes
to articles about bees / TSA / wikileaks?

Do we think we have more interesting commentary? (e.g. is that why we post
those articles here?)

~~~
weaksauce
The commentary here has always been a lot better than reddit for the large
majority of stories. Reedit has its place because you can custom tailor it to
what you want to see and the best comments sorting helps with seeing a few
good comments. That community is a lot more hostile and likely to digress into
a pun comment chain though.

------
jacquesm
My guess would be 'no' but when a subject is popular you'll see a cluster of
articles around it. You can't please everybody _all_ the time in a community
this size so your best weapons to counter any negative effects that you
perceive are in order the 'submit' link and the voting arrow on those articles
that you think are great, and as a final resort for things that you think are
off-topic or spam the 'flag' link.

They've worked pretty good so far and it is neat to see how effective some
minor tweaks have been in sending the 'front' page in the right direction.

The most important page on HN is not the homepage however, it's page #2 of the
new submission list, that's where you might still be able to rescue an article
that you think does not get the attention that it deserves.

You may want to really consider submitting more interesting stories, 50 or
submissions over 4 years is not a whole lot. If _everybody_ that feels like
you do would post interesting articles instead of 'Ask PG' stuff about the
perceived quality of the site that quality would go up quickly.

------
noodle
flag articles as appropriate and upvote things you like.

edit: though, i admit i'd like to see downvotes on submissions, too, just to
see how that would work out here. perhaps two front page lists for an
experiment. one that shows the results with downvotes counted, one without.

~~~
nailer
Sure, but alas there's now enough new users on HN who upvote general purpose
news to the front page that flagging doesn't work anymore.

Example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2043841>

~~~
noodle
this was also the case in the election cycle. tons of political stuff that got
popular and highly voted didn't go anywhere until (i think) a mod made an
executive decision

------
profquail
Well, I think the most important thing to do is for people to upvote the
stories that they see as being "Hacker News". I've got the HN frontpage feed
as a "Live Bookmark" in Firefox, which links right to the story URLs (not the
discussions), so sometimes I'll go a few days just reading the stories, not
upvoting/discussing anything, all the while thinking, "Jeez, there hasn't been
anything _good_ on HN lately."

Now, I try to log in at least once a day or every other day and post an "HN-
worthy" article if I come across one, or at least try to contribute to the
discussion of an article.

My "Fix HN" suggestion: apply a different "decay" rate to the "Ask/Show/Tell
HN" posts so that they stay on the front page longer. They're usually more
focused on HN-oriented material, and posted by people who post on HN semi-
regularly (at least). I'd also lower the flagging threshold to something like
3 or 5 so that people don't abuse this for general news articles.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Actually the decay rate is set the other way, right? The Ask/Show/Tell stories
get whacked sooner. Can't remember exactly why though.

It occurs to me that any story that takes a long time to consume -- say a long
TED talk -- has a built-in disadvantage to a story that can be quickly
consumed. That's because of the way the decay rate works.

Ideal HN-bait story? A long-ish story with several technical-looking drawings,
charts, and graphs, all around some flame-bait brand/fanboy thing like Apple
or Google, loaded with personal drama that involves some famous tech person.
If it has some technical googledegook or obscure jargon, all the better.

I don't mean that as a criticism of HN, just trying to flesh out what
commonalities I'm noticing. Seems like that would be a first step to
critiquing site. For all I know, this is exactly the kind of story pg wants to
see. Beats me.

EDIT: This idea of trying to come up with the silliest hn article title in
order to demonstrate community trends was so interesting to me that I followed
up with a HN Contest <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048844>

~~~
profquail
Yep, HN is currently set up so that the Ask/Show/Tell stories decay faster,
which just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like there used to be so many
more of those posts, but it's really that there are more _now_ and they just
rarely show up on the frontpage (which is probably the only thing that most
people look at).

I think you're right about the HN-bait stories -- in fact, I have a feeling
that a number of people tend to upvote sensational stories (actually, just the
titles) without even reading them, which makes the problem even worse.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I've noticed in myself a trend: I'll read the first few graphs and then, once
I figure out whether I agree with the author or not, either ditch the whole
story or just go upvote it.

I assume other people do the same. It's not a good thing to do.

I think the site would be much more useful if it were just Ask/Tell/Show HN
stories with some kind of meta filtering on top. How do I find a cofounder?
What's the best way to measure traction? How do all these startups get so much
media attention? Is there some way to navigate from those questions to all the
discussions about it that we've had on HN? If so, and if you could do that
with a 100 startup-related issues, it'd be a hell of a more useful site than
all the gossip and drama that we end up with.

------
fredoliveira
I'm definitely hoping for that the community (not just Paul Graham - why
should he, regardless of how much I/we respect him, dictate direction) drifts
towards A (as it has recently). Lets put it this way: you're never going to be
skilled at anything if you stick only to things that hackers (our definition
of it) find interesting, and not the general population? If you imagine a Venn
diagram of,

    
    
      (news for us) V (news for the general population)
    

You'd still stick to just the very left? You'd be leaving out fair amounts of
science, mathematics, arts, communication. That means that you'd be biased but
more importantly, _limited_. Why should you ever want that?

~~~
benwr
Is HN the only place you get news and information? It is one of the few places
(specifically community sites) I can get news relevant to programming and
startup culture. That's not to say there is no place for some of the stuff
further to the right, but maybe not stuff we might find by going to cnn.com.
The lack of "Sub-HNs" means that if we want to keep HN's utility in terms of
sifting info and news on the internet, we have to keep a tight focus.

~~~
fredoliveira
Let me clarify (I'm being down-voted for stating my honest opinion which is in
itself quite sad. I did not troll, nor was I disrespectful): I never said we
should talk about the whole scope.

I certainly do not want to read news that would be to the far right of that
diagram. But there are a number of soft skills you do acquire from sometimes
leaning on the intersection between "hacker news" and just "news". I don't
believe we should limit HN just to the very left because we'd miss those. That
being said, this is HN and I don't ever want to come here for CNN content -
that's why CNN.com exists.

~~~
middlegeek
I think you are being down-voted because your statement seems to imply that a
person could not get the other news from anywhere else. I would like to see HN
as just or predominately the far left of your diagram. I see news about
everything everywhere, but I highly value the niche I see here and cannot find
anything like it anywhere else. I'd like to see it not diluted.

FYI -- I did not down-vote your comment. I rarely ever down-vote anything on
HN.

------
Andrew_Quentin
What differentiates hackers from the general population? Is it perhaps above
average intelligence, a higher level of curiosity, maybe tinkers, and/or
possibly individuals who are interested in all sorts of interesting stuff?

If that is roughly the definition, then I suppose there would be general news
but of a novel, or intellectually interesting nature.

If, on the other hand, by hacker you mean programmer, and by non general news
you mean only news related to programming, wouldn't that be slightly too
narrow?

I think technology news are dominant here, but the variety now and then I
think is a good thing.

------
yuvadam
You are making a false dichotomy. A) and B) are NOT mutually exclusive.

On the contrary. Assuming the vast majority of HN are indeed "hackers", and
that we do not just blindly upvote, then a post will get upvoted iff hackers
find it interesting.

~~~
nailer
'A) and B) are NOT mutually exclusive.'

That's correct. B is a subset of A. The TSA, bees, and wikileaks are
undoubtably interesting to many people, not specifically hackers.

------
jdp23
I don't understand the wording of A and B. Stories that are getting upvoted by
the hackers here (A) are by definition stories that hackers find interesting
(B).

~~~
nailer
Read B) again.

'B. Things that specifically Hackers find interesting - as opposed to the
general population - belong on the front page.'

Note the word 'specifically' and the phrase 'opposed to the general public'.
I'm a hacker and I like pizza, however pizza is not a thing specifically
Hackers find interesting.

~~~
zdw
Exactly.

An article about the economics or business of pizza, or someone obsessed with
making great pizza (like this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz91GfoZ-Zs> )
might be considered interesting enough to merit going on HN.

