

Tell HN: We separate the wheat from the chaff - X4

Hello dear HN folks,<p>I&#x27;ve subscribed to all of your ideas, wishes, projects, startups, failures and successes thanks to HN and I&#x27;m grateful that I could remotely participate with all of you creative and innovative people. You&#x27;re truly awesome, keep up your spirit!<p>The founders of Hackernews have interviewed so many innovative heads, listened to so many ideas, but still don&#x27;t understand the fundamental concepts that platforms exchanging information have to obey. Here&#x27;s why HN is losing it&#x27;s initial spirit and distracts many thousands of people all over the world: &quot;Categories &amp; Sub-Threads&quot;.<p>We&#x27;re seeing an increasingly large amount of surveillance, security and other remotely related topics to Startups. That&#x27;s ok, unless we have to pick ourselves what we want to listen to. This work could easily get removed by creating a dropdown with categories that&#x27;s added to known our title&#x2F;url scheme.<p>Please don&#x27;t let us peasonts separate the wheat from the chaff on HN. Do it for us instead and let us focus on innovation and helping others innovate.<p>--
Thanks<p>a HN reader
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DanBC
Allowing 'sub HN' pages is risky. People are already reluctant to flag poor
content. Sub HN pages would probably see even more reluctance to flag poor
content. It also means that some threads will be diluted, because people are
discussing something in thead_A or thread_B, but not both. Threads A and B
might be in different subHNs too.

Really what is good for HN is an active base of users, upvoting the good
content; providing great answers[1]; and flagging content that should not be
here.

Filtering is tricky, but achievable. There's probably an extension or plugin
or script, or perhaps someone could create one?

All the privacy stuff is a bit overwhelming at the moment. I can understand
people's frustration with it. I've noticed a few people dragging in irrelevant
comments to other threads. Downvoting those may help keep privacy stuff in
it's own group of threads?

The political aspects aren't so interesting, but the technical stuff can be
quite detailed. Keeping something secret, or anonymous, or both, is actually
very tricky. Designing better secrecy and anonymity tools for normal people to
use should be a priority; and building in privacy to your startup idea may be
a useful selling point now.

~~~
krapp
On the other hand, how many people consider 'poor content' to be 'anything
they would rather not read?' If people started flagging PRISM content now,
that doesn't serve the pool of people who still actually want to read it.

I think tags would be a good idea. "ask hn" and "show hn" are practically tags
already. Although that would probably just add another layer for people to
practice political infighting over (particularly if users can submit their own
tags and vote for them, and tags are weighted), it might also be simple if you
want to see PRISM content, or want to exclude it, to just search by #prism or
!#prism (or what have you.)

Thread folding inside discussions could also go a long way towards giving the
perception of segregating content without actually doing so.

~~~
DanBC
There are a few different thread-folding addons and scripts.

Here are a few.

([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
collap...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
collapse/bbkfcamiocfccgmcjngdljolljhifdph))

([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540722))

([http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-
for-...](http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-hacker-
news/))

etc etc.

EDIT: I would like a nice way to see "SHOW HN" posts, because these are often
interesting and fun bits of stuff. I usually upvote these because I like the
micro-encouragement. I guess having a separate "Shown HN" page risks people
spamming it, but it should be easy enough to detect and ban those people?

~~~
krapp
a 'show hn' page might be a good idea. It could go right next to 'ask'.

~~~
X4
Yep, I'm also for it.

------
venomsnake
I totally agree that yet another article about Elon Musk, "silver bullet
workflow" and "new stuff that compiles to Javascript and then to JVM" are much
more important for any startup founder than events that can shape what the
digital landscape and the internet will look like in the next 20 years.

------
Peroni
_Please don 't let us peasonts separate the wheat from the chaff on HN._

That's the fundamental premise of this site. If you aren't satisfied with the
content then browse /newest and upvote and comment on the content that appeals
to you.

~~~
X4
Sincerly, I do exactly that and others also do that. But because upvoting is
democratic, it means that the majority will have another opinion. We lived
with that right? But the HN audience changed thank to it's popularity.

Upvoting is no quality guarantee. I could throw up an algorithm that picks
higher quality content and flags it as such, but that's overkill for HN. Sub-
Threads would solve the problem that likeminded people like each other's stuff
oly when they like it.

The theory is that quality per information in a randomly organized source
cannot be measured democratically.

 _btw: I 'm writing my thesis in a field of information management_

------
user24
So you're essentially asking for subreddits?

~~~
X4
I'm glad that you really grasped the essence of the question. I didn't want to
mention subreddit, because people would associate me of being a redditor,
although I'm solely on HN and classical new sites only.

But I admit that reddit is a great, esp. when it comes to organizing
urls/threads/comments.

~~~
schrodinger
Totally sincerely, why not just use reddit for that? Hacker news is not
"better" than reddit, it's just (meant to be) highly focused on news that's
specifically relevant to the hacker community. The PRISM situation impacts
privacy for many software startups, and that's why it's so well covered.

