

Please Discourage The Region Wise Fragmentation of Hackernews - dkd903

We saw an Indian version of Hackernews earlier today. And then there was a post about DC getting it's own Hackernews. If this fragmentation goes on we will end up killing this awesome Hackernews community and it's awesome visitors.
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user24
Well hang on now - be clear that Hackernews and ycombinator are two different
things. If this[1] is the DC post you're talking about, then that's a DC
version of _ycombinator_ , and I fully support that kind of 'fragmentation'. A
UK YC would be much welcomed (I'm sure there are startup incubators on the UK
already, but more is better).

[1] [http://codybrowntext.tumblr.com/post/1602181256/dc-is-
gettin...](http://codybrowntext.tumblr.com/post/1602181256/dc-is-getting-its-
own-version-of-y-combinator)

I can see the relevance of regionalised hacker news sites, but I dislike the
idea of a regionalised Hacker News site. Note the capitalisation and
plurality.

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judofyr
The point of Hacker News India is to discuss India-related news which doesn't
get much attention over here. HNI doesn't compete with HN, it completes it.

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angrycoder
1) What is so different about startups and programming in India?

2) What makes you think the rest of us (non-Indian) folks wouldn't be
interested in these topics?

note: I am not being a smart-ass here. I am genuinely curious. Personally, I
think it would interesting to hear about how this stuff actually works over
there. You know, a real perspective other than "they're stealing our jobs" or
Outsourced.

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allenbrunson
news.yc is now really, really crowded. an avalanche of submissions means that
only a few get to make it to the front page. as simply a numbers game, not
very many of them are going to be indian-specific.

personally, i can very clearly see why they'd want to do something like this.

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MrMan
But if the Indian audience upvotes them they will rise to the top.

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variety
But as the community is growing, this is kind of inevitable. And desirable.

What HN needs is enhanced search (and tagging) capabilities, precisely to
allow user to select content from specfic regions (and in different
languages).

For example, I think it'd be extremely useful to be able to bring up posts
specifically about China, or Paris, or only in French or Russian.

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rednum
I think it is desirable too. European version of Hacker News would be
extremely useful for me - sure, there's lots of region-agnostic valuable
content, but also many topics considering startups are irrelevant to people in
my area (Central Europe) - for example 'whos hiring?' threads consist mostly
of offers in US (and of course offers from Europe would be much more useful
for european hackers)

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pdelgallego
I also think that it would be very interesting an European Version of HN. But,
I'm not that sure that it will reach the critical mass of users that make a
community vibrant.

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mhd
Yes, you probably have a fragmentation of topics, i.e. the startup stuff will
be posted on the European site, but the "hacker" articles of general interest
will be posted and discussed here. Which seriously restricts the user base and
thus the helpful answers on the Euro site.

I could imagine something that works, if you're willing to fragment even
further and make language-specific sites, as this way you could post articles
in languages other than English and you'd get discussions from those users who
don't feel that comfortable in English. But that further restricts your user
base. Might work for French and German, but beyond that? (Spanish, too, of
course, but then you'll run into problems with the country/law specific stuff)

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ScottWhigham
I don't mind the region wise fragmentation personally. I cannot be global - I
can't keep track of every single world hacker-related event and, if it is
forced on me, I will reject it (whether consciously or subconsciously).

I have the largest interest in my community and I mean "community" in both the
sense of the hacker community, but also my regional community: Texas, United
States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Europe, Australia, and then "The
Rest of the World" in that order. If "The Rest of the World" begins to
dominate the stories or even if Australia, for example, starts dominating the
stories then I will head to somewhere where more of my interests are shown.

And I think that's just basic human nature. We can only read so many
headlines, articles, posts in a day and it makes sense that we self-filter to
select the sites that show us things that are the most interesting to us.

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MrMan
I have no regional community. I live in a certain place, but my servers are
not here, my collaborators are not here, my customers are not here. What is
"here?"

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ScottWhigham
I don't buy that. You do have a regional community. You may choose not to
participate in it or may not wish to but you do have a regional community. I
would venture to guess that you are fairly young to make that comment as well
and also have no children. Once you have a spouse, children, parents who need
support of one kind or another, your idea of "community" becomes centered much
more in the real world than in this virtual world.

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MrMan
I meant community in business, work. I am middle-aged, with children. I do not
make money from the community in which I live, I make it globally. It is an
accident, not a matter of choice initially. I choose to keep it that way
because I find it liberating. My work environment is spread between clients,
algorithms, infrastructure, all global. My network of family is thankfully
centered around my physical home, and my network of friends is global.

Sry to go on at length, but I found your comment provocative and I wanted to
paint a clear picture.

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codedivine
What about a tag system? You can tag posts about a location with the
location's tag and for each location you can see all posts tagged with that
location.

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ScottWhigham
What's the proper protocol for disagreement again? I don't want a tag system
so should I comment? or downvote?

Not trying to be a jerk - it's a serious question. "I see you" and appreciate
your making the comment but I personally wouldn't want tags.

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Lukeas14
As the community's size grows the content will inevitably get more diverse.
The solution is not separate sites where the content is forever fragmented but
rather a hash tag solution (ugly but its something we can implement
ourselves).

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jerf
What's with the weird assumption that you can only visit one website? I don't
think that's how this Internet thing works. If there was a local version for
me, I'd use it, but I wouldn't necessarily stop using this one.

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ericd
People generally only frequent a small number of sites, this takes up one of
those spots. Add 10 more and you've more than exhausted that number for most
people.

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jerf
When engaging in cultural protectionism, I think you should consider the
opposite side of what you are telling people to do. In this case, sites cooler
than HN-classic should not be made, and if they are made, people shouldn't
visit them, because that might hurt HN-classic.

Is that really a sensible position to be taking? If HN can only survive by
people purposely not visiting better sites, HN doesn't _deserve_ to survive.

This entire line of logic is silly when you actually translate it into
concrete recommendations you are making to real people.

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ericd
I'm not saying anything about coolness or quality of sites, or that some sites
should exist and others shouldn't, I'm not sure where you're getting that in
my comment. I'm just saying that fragmentation of a community can be a very
real problem, as with more subcommunities, people stop visiting the main one,
and the main becomes less diverse. Your original comment trivializes that,
because "you can visit more than one site".

If the designers of Hacker News want a community that's segmented, let them do
it. I don't think it's right to use the HN name to do it for them, though.

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jerf
"I'm not sure where you're getting that in my comment"

I explained it to you. If you want _non-_ fragmentation, that is exactly
equivalent to telling people that they should stay where they are. "Not
fragmenting the community" can't happen in the abstract, it can only happen in
the concrete choices of others. Therefore, when you advocate against the
fragmentation of a community even as it naturally tends to it by the natural
result of people doing what they desire, you are advocating that other people
should not follow their desires to go somewhere else. They're not even two
sides of the same coin, they're just the same thing. But it sure sounds a lot
less friendly, which in my opinion is the more accurate way of looking at it.

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ericd
No, they aren't equivalent, and I'm not advocating those things. I said it
could be a problem for HN.

There's a difference between fragmentation of a community because of site
structure and people going elsewhere because they like it better. In building
a community, the choices of the designer of the community's home influences
the structure of the resulting community without needing to tell them
explicitly to do one thing or another.

My original point was not to say I agreed or disagreed with the post's plea to
stop fragmentation, though it seems that you took it that way. I was saying
that your original point of adding more options being inconsequential because
there are lots of sites out there was an oversimplified trivialization of the
problem. Too many options on a site is frequently a real, important design
problem, and you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Having HN1, HN2, HN3, etc
is different from having HN, Digg, Reddit, etc.

I'm done. I didn't mean to get into an argument, I was just pointing out
something you didn't seem to be considering when you made your comment. HN's
existence as a single entity might be an intentional design decision, and it's
not necessarily a bad one.

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duck
Take a look at Hacker News "India" (<http://hackernews.in>) and you will see
this isn't a problem or anything to be concerned with. Hacker News is what it
is because of the traffic it gets. You can argue with more traffic you get
worse results on the homepage, but with not enough traffic you will _never_
get that community feeling you do here. You will notice that this new site
doesn't have a single new story in the last 6+ hours and the comments for any
given article is weak at best. I'm sure with time it will improve, but it
won't take anything away from what we have here.

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drawkbox
Also it looks like they just want local content and not just a carbon copy:
<http://hackernews.in/item?id=232>

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space-monkey
If you don't like it don't use it. If people are using it, it's addressing a
need.

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powrtoch
It could still qualify as a hack. It's a non-sustainable but low-cost way of
addressing a need. The more hacks go into a system, as opposed to forward-
looking real solutions, the less stable that system becomes. I think what the
OP is saying is "bear with us for a little while and we'll try and find a real
solution to this".

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grovulent
I think some kind of regional functionality is important - whether that takes
place within on external to hacker news.

We need some means of generating stronger local communities.

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malandrew
Hacker News could use Quora-like tagging and following to improve its utility.

#28 on PG's essay "Ideas We'd Like to Fund" is "Fixing Email Overload"
<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> . For many of us, HN overload is as
serious as HN overload. There is a front-page story daily for every new hack
invented to manage it.

HNI fragments HN as does techstartu.ps

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adrianwaj
Speaking of which, would someone here be willing to setup an arc forum on my
Linode dedicated to health. Perhaps they can work with me to fill it with
posts and comments.

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MrMan
I agree that fragmentation will ruin the HN experience. I want MORE Indian
news here, not less! DC, I don't know.

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invertedlambda
Why not create a "Bay Area" HN? :P

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jrnkntl
I thought that's the one we are on right now.

