
Hacker News and Information Overload - WarTheatre
I have been reading HN for almost a year now (always via Google Reader) and lately I'm finding HN increasingly difficult to use because of the high volume of posts. Each day HN has about 100 posts which makes HN quite time consuming to even scan. Actually reading the posts? Forget about it.<p>Increasingly more often I find myself skipping HN in Google Reader because it has become a time consuming chore to find content I'm interested in. This saddens me because quality wise HN is IMHO the single best aggregator for IT startups.<p>I'm not sure what to do about this information overload problem but I feel it's time to remove HN from Google Reader because in its current form HN is simply broke.<p>I'm open to all suggestions about making HN more managable.
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skolor
I can't imagine trying to read it via a feed reader. Like you said, that's a
lot. What I tend to do is just use the site, not even use a feed at all. When
I've got 15-20 minutes to spend reading articles, I'll come to the site. When
I don't, I don't bother. If its a particularly good article it will be on the
front page all day, so I'll get to read it then. If it isn't, well, it
probably wasn't worth reading anyway.

Feed readers are good for something you want to read ever single post for. HN
is not something you'll want to read everything on, you just (in theory) want
to read as much as possible.

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windsurfer
So your solution to his "It hurts when I do this" is "don't do that".

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tptacek
What's wrong with that?

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windsurfer
Well obviously he wants to do it, and he obviously knows it doesn't hurt him
when he doesn't, so by saying "don't do that" you're being patronizing. It's
pretty insulting.

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skolor
His situation is more of "When I bend my wrist backwards, it hurts". He's
using it in a way that is _not_ necessarily good. Yes, it is included. And
yes, it _may_ be helpful/beneficial. But if you're having problems with doing
things that way, stop.

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spitfire
It's worse than that.

Each time an interesting post (say a blog post on fractal dimensionality in
the stock market) gets posted ALL of that persons previous work gets posted as
well. So you have a head post, followed by 5 other follow up articles which
just kills Signal to Noise ratio.

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Tichy
That should just be growing pains, though. Once HN has processed all people
with something worthwhile to say, there will be no more previous articles to
post - they'll all have been posted before. Things should then normalize...

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unalone
That will never happen. (I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not.)

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mgcreed
Could just need more points before reaching the RSS feed?

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pg
You mean each day 100 posts make it onto the frontpage at some point?

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rw
I emailed something to you about this last year. Is there anything you find
useful in it?

<http://exponentialspace.com/hn-churn.txt>

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Perceval
Fascinating set of proposals, thanks for posting them here. They seem to fall
under the general category of 'automatic gain control':
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_gain_control>

As the 'noise' of submissions goes up, a system that automatically adapts to
the amount of activity in order to determine constitutes the 'signal' will
probably help HN readers cope.

I think OP's problem stems mostly from the format in which (s)he reads HN.
Checking the frontpage two or three times a day doesn't lead to the same kind
of overload as the RSS might. Whereas when checking the frontpage you'll see a
mostly stable set of articles (with most of the churn down at the bottom few),
on the RSS feed you'll see every single article that hit the frontpage
regardless of how short of period of time it spent there.

Perhaps, a quick fix for HN readers coming here from RSS feeds might simply be
to not send _every_ story out via RSS, but say, only those stories that stayed
on the frontpage for >1 hour.

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lleger
This really is a problem. At the end of the day when I'm reading the HN feed,
I usually have about 50 tabs open—this stuff is just too interesting. I
usually only read the ones that are quick reads though; i.e., a few paragraphs
or a list or two or maybe some sample code. Any bigger than that and I'll just
skim it, but I mean like hardcore skim so I just get the thesis of the article
and not the whole substance. If it's over a couple of pages? Instapapered. My
Instapaper grows at a much faster rate than it diminishes.

But this stuff is just too interesting to not at least open and skim. I mean,
jesus, a blog post of the fractal dimensionality of the stock market? Come on.

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DanielBMarkham
It's been mentioned before -- categories and adaptive thresholds (automatic
gain)

I think every other site has categories. They seem like a natural thing to
do.....

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jacquesm
Cue some johnny-b-goode to point you to the feature request link at the bottom
of the page ;)

But you're right. For starters just two categories would do, hacking and
everything else.

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DanielBMarkham
If I understand correctly, HN has always had two categories. They just haven't
been explicitly put into the UI: Hacking/startups and things that interest
hackers.

We've kicked this can around quite a bit, and so far PG doesn't seem to be
feeling enough pain to make a change.

Perhaps things will change.

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jamesbritt
The greasemonkey script for sorting items by age, points, and comments makes
it easier for me to find what are likely to be the more interesting
discussions.

A small addition is needed to have the script work when viewing older items
(you have to add the URL for the subsequent pages. Proof left as an exercise
for the reader).

This is very handy since some of the better threads are not on the front page.

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timdorr
There's a startup for that: <http://www.feedscrub.com>

I originally built it for Digg and Reddit, but HN is now one of my primary
uses. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

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jmonegro
try <http://news.ycombinator.com/classic>

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pkrumins
What are 'classic' posts?

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tokenadult
Classic posts are posts upvoted by people who have been registered at HN for
at least a year. I am not yet one of them.

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qeek
I have noticed the same thing and wholeheartedly agree with you.

Simple solution: categories with separate feeds.

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rw
That leads to the subreddit problem.

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DanielBMarkham
How about instead of having the submitter categorize the submission, everybody
can categorize it, just the same as everybody can upvote?

Not sure what "the subreddit problem" is. Just wondering if that would help.

