Personally I find nearly all the mass-media submissions to be a dilution, no matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN.
I think they're so popular here mainly because smart people tend to have varied interests. You have to have a good amount of intellectual curiosity to become a hacker, and that comes before and extends to other areas beyond computer science.
I've spent enough time around them to know that if you get 50 hackers together in a social setting, they talk about a wide variety of subjects. CS often doesn't even come up. I suspect this site has a higher ratio of talk of CS than would be found in real life even among the same participants.
For a site like this to sustain the interest of brilliant people, it has to allow them to roam enough to be entertained while still retaining the core focus. It seems to succeed. If those mass media links were to US Weekly, we'd be in trouble.
"... no matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN ..."
A lot of the times these articles have the benefit of being written where tech & the broader community collide. That's interesting. Also it's the comments that are spawned from an article that are the best HN component. If I wanted to read tech-articles alone I'd trawl delicious, friendfeed, twitter et.,al.
I'm not just looking for tech articles, there's DZone for that. Rather, what I value more from HN is the first person viewpoint, rather than the commoditized views channeled through a reporter/editor to serve a general audience, rather than one personally engaged.
That said, there are general audience articles that I think are significant because they reflect a viewpoint that's important to to entrepreneurs. But they're few enough among the submissions that I'm scanning URLs before I even click, tending to avoid NYT, businessweek, etc. since my experience is my time is better spent elsewhere. I can get the mass media viewpoints off my Wii. ;)
That exact sentiment is the only reason I think that some of the big printed media companies will survive. Blogs just don't have good writing. For a publication to offer consistent, good writing is expensive, and a significant number of people will always want that enough to pay for it.
I'd be tempted to add TC, Mashable and the like to that as well. Though the stories are good, how many HN readers also visit those sites anyway.
Maybe a grey-list for anything linking to those sites, and then one of the top 100 users needs to vote it up in order for the article to be white-listed? Something like that? Unfortunately, that means that the most dedicated users are burdened in cleaning things up for the rest of the community, but by definition, they are already dedicated and would probably/hopefully like the site cleaned up for everybody.
I'm curious where the 'Rate my start-ups' fit into this? Do people like them? Or do you find this to not be the best venue to view them.
I posted my start-up here and the feedback I got was amazing, but that doesn't mean the community wants that stuff here.
I don't mind the "rate my start-up" questions that have a clear question about something specific that can be evaluated and responded to directly. Things like "here's what we're trying to do here and how, how effective do you think we're being at this?" as opposed to an open-ended "rate my start-up" with a url where we're supposed to do a top to bottom review to solve their business or presentation problems for them.
I really like the "Rate my start-ups" posts, assuming the HN doesn't get swamped with them. It's fun to hear the feedback of different people with different attitudes. We're all (or mostly) "start-up minded" here at HN so that's a plus too.
I've never submitted one of these, for reference, I just like to read them.
I've been here just a few months and tend to be far more of a reader than a contributor, but I've noticed lately that there are more stories here that I've already read.
I'm guessing most of us have the likes of Techcrunch and El Reg in our RSS readers, yet seemingly every other post from the former and quite a lot from the latter races to the top of the rankings here. One of the things I enjoy here is seeing articles on sites I've never been to before and might be interested in reading further.
