Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking?

You can flag submissions you find inappropriate.<p>That said, I'd have to agree with you though, there is a lot of non-hacker stuff that makes the homepage and stays there.<p>What frustrates me more than that though is that there is plenty of hacker stuff that gets drowned out by non-hacker stuff.<p>Basically if a submission doesn't have 5 votes or so (on a normal day) before it scrolls off the 'new' page it will never make the front page.<p>That's not a bit loss for the submission itself (I use the 'new' page as though it were the homepage) but the discussion can be as interesting or more so than the submission, and that <i>is</i> a loss.

I have the same impression - less hacker stuff, more startup/business/tech celebrity/drama/fun stories.<p>I am experimenting with something that may help. Here is a URL to the RSS feed of Hacker News, filtered to contain only hacker stories:<p><a href="http://www.lemmatica.com/emit_topic?key=aglsZW1tYXRpY2FyDQsSBVRvcGljGLjCagw&#38;format=atom" rel="nofollow">http://www.lemmatica.com/emit_topic?key=aglsZW1tYXRpY2FyDQsS...</a><p>There is an automated text classifier behind it and I'm continuously training it for hacker stories. The classifier and my definition of what are hacker stories are, of course, imperfect, so there will be errors (I'm training the filter with some delay, usually once per day). If you want to filter your own feeds like this please ask me for an account.

<a href="http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html</a><p>"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.<p>"What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

I dunno, I always wanted to see more startup stuff here. Maybe I'm in the minority.

I'm one of the people to blame. I came here less than a year ago after someone recommended this site as a smarter alternative to reddit. I haven't mentioned it on reddit because I don't want it to be dumbed down, but inevitably, non-programmers like me will shift the content away from hacking, because we're only going to upvote links that we understand... which will make the site more attractive to non-hackers, and so on.

I'd say yes. I'm not a major contributor and do comment some but I've been here since the beginning and have noticed a general decline in the content and quality of comments.<p>It's a reminder to me that I ought to vote more. Thanks for posting this.

I remember early on, I almost exclusively visited links under the "new" link. These are almost always more diverse and usually interesting.<p>These days there is too much spam to make the "new" page work.

Maybe we could have a trial week where a bunch of representatives prune out anything that doesn't conform to a set of rules that enforce a strict interpretation of what hackers news should post. Then the following week we can discuss or vote on whether the guidelines should be changed.

I'm starting to suspect that many more stories are being submitted just to get karma. One example is people dredging up old vaguely-related articles and just dumping them here to see if they can get a few points.

This question asked several times before;nothing changed my habit of visiting HN daily. As long as i believe the quality of people in here remains as it is in the first day then i am ok.<p>What bothers me not the points,karma,content or improper comments; Its the number of fresh news that increased a lot.I started to use RSS reader and what i observe that there are so much news in HN(79) then Slashdot(13) even delicious(48)?! The more i spend time in HN the more i miss good links because given more choice to the people, they tend to put aside the quality and take all.<p>A bit thinking about the number of fresh news i think several problems lately addressed here(other topics) closely linked to this. More news leads to more comments and more comments creates more fuss(noise) Quality of a discussion greatly reduce as more participants, lengthy comments(self reference here) and deep reply branches.Like your favorite TV discussion program where after couple of hours everyone has a word and shouting each.The quality of comments may be,may be, increase if (high karma)&#38;(register date) take precedence. Think about the anchorman of your favorite tv discussion program: does he start with people in the backseats or starts with some wise figure?

My point of view, being mostly a lurker for 1.15 years: I'm a programmer, musician, comp sci graduate, neither a Windows user nor a Mac user, and generally an all around geek. I don't remember how I came across Hacker News, but it didn't take long for me to conclude for myself two things:<p>1) the proportion of interesting (to me) links was high; 2) the comments revealed a community of clear-thinking, logical, rational, articulate individuals.<p>That hasn't changed significantly since last year, though I admit that I get the sense that the community has grown lately.<p>I don't have a big problem with HN's current state. If it has deviated from its original goals or gone through some other metamorphosis, that doesn't bother me; I still like what it is today. In fact, if it were extremely focused on entrepreneurship and startups and such, I probably wouldn't be interested. What I get out of HN is great tech/geek links and insightful, intelligent commentary.<p>If the percentage of links that interested me eventually fell below some threshold, and if the comments started getting inane, irrational, nonsensical or just plain stupid, I'd probably just leave HN and find another community, or start my own.

HackerHackerNews.com seems to do a good job of separating the more sensationalist articles from the drier articles. (This is what I perceive your complaint to mean).

I see it as news for hackers, not news about hacking. You know, news related to things that likely interest hackers.

Personally, I think the point of view is that hacker-friendly jobs are hard to find, and thus founding a startup is almost a necessary evil for a good deal of hackers. I mean, let's face it: starting your own company so you can do whatever you want is the <i>ultimate</i> hack.<p>Now, I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with this point of view. But the point of this kind of social news site is that the readers get to choose what is and isn't relevant to them.<p>That said, I personally would like to see more hacker-oriented type stuff. My advice: submit more hacker-related content and vote it up when someone else submits it. Remember that it usually just takes one vote to move things to the front page if you catch it early enough. So your one vote can make all the difference.

Meta-posting is not the answer. Especially when the questions you're asking are subjective and your own answer to both is "I dunno." At least have an opinion! Otherwise you end up with aimless and impotent discussion. That, more than anything, seems to be what kills sites like this. People start spending their energy talking about the one thing which is not new to any of them and equally familiar to all of them, not because it's so very important, but because it's <i>so easy</i> to. Sure, community standards are important, but discussing them without the power to enforce them or the will to drive them one way or the other doesn't do much for the site.

I'm an offender, in that I participate in these metadiscussion "What is the true best topic of HN?" discussions routinely, but personally I would like fewer of these topicality discussions and good suggestions for new filtering features to be on the main page. They could live as comment threads under the existing feature requests thread<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363</a><p>and if participants aimed their comments and suggestions there at subthreads that have already brought up the same issue, it might be more clear which features are most in demand among regular participants.

You don't have to guess about this. Item ids are sequential.

yeah I kinda agree, I wrote a post yesterday about the emails we used and a copy of our press page from launch, thinking it would generate some discussion(hell you guys asked for them on the other thread), and maybe get tips on how to improve those for us and other people, and that didn't even get a single upvote.<p>And that post, just like all other posts was solely for HN, so why should I bother writing this stuff up and restoring an old press page, if I don't even get a single comment or upvote out of it on here?<p>It's like the twitter/facebook promotion we just finished, I was going to write a post with all the numbers, what worked, what didn't, what prizes are the best bang for your buck, the goals behind it etc etc. But now I'm not so sure.<p>Why? Because it'll take like 3-4 hours to put up a decent post with all the data, pics etc. So why should I waste my time, if there is a 90% chance the post won't even get a single upvote?

You want hacking? Here.<p><pre><code> // Hackerocity on a scale from 0 to 10 // for each entry on the front page of hacker news // Hackerocity determined by edw519 // Hackerocity = [] Hackerocity[01] = 1 ; // Ira Glass on storytelling Hackerocity[02] = 9 ; // Lisp OS: what has been lost: Kent Pitman Hackerocity[03] = 0 ; // They Killed My Lawyer Hackerocity[04] = 7 ; // MIT Open Courseware - Free Lectures Hackerocity[05] = 6 ; // Facebook marketing: one of the better campaigns I've seen Hackerocity[06] = 10 ; // JMatch: Iterable Pattern Matching Hackerocity[07] = 10 ; // Regular-expression derivatives reexamined Hackerocity[08] = 1 ; // Sorry, Shoppers, but Why Can’t Amazon Collect More Tax? Hackerocity[09] = 3 ; // Schneier on Security: Separating Explosives from the Detonator Hackerocity[10] = 9 ; // jQuery Plugins Hackerocity[11] = 0 ; // Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking? Hackerocity[12] = 8 ; // If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, You’re Sane Hackerocity[13] = 10 ; // Hello HN, take a look at my new (beta) app BonMp3? Hackerocity[14] = 7 ; // Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly Hackerocity[15] = 8 ; // Ask HN: How can I move to USA? Hackerocity[16] = 7 ; // Ample SDK - Open Source GUI Framework Hackerocity[17] = 9 ; // Palindromes (Clojure vs. Common Lisp) Hackerocity[18] = 3 ; // Incredible paper sculptures - many cut from one sheet of A4 Hackerocity[19] = 9 ; // If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, Don’t Do It Hackerocity[20] = 5 ; // Why Does Facebook Want to Suck the Fun Out of Unfriending? Hackerocity[21] = 10 ; // Machine Translates Thoughts into Speech in Real Time Hackerocity[22] = 0 ; // Ask HN: If there was a bury/upmod brigade on HN, how would we know? Hackerocity[23] = 8 ; // How to commit brand suicide Hackerocity[24] = 10 ; // The Pmarca Guide to Startups: product/market fit Hackerocity[25] = 0 ; // [dead] Ajax on Rails Hackerocity[26] = 5 ; // One year of Redis Hackerocity[27] = 2 ; // New wheel for your bicycle: The Copenhagen wheel Hackerocity[28] = 0 ; // In 2010, Demand For US Fixed Income Has To Increase Elevenfold... Or Else Hackerocity[29] = 2 ; // Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety Hackerocity[30] = 10 ; // Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition // TotalHackerocity = 0; for(i=1;i&#60;31;i++){TotalHackerocity += Hackerocity[i]}; // // Yep, TotalHackerocity aint what it used to be :-) //</code></pre>

The number of users rised a lot... Now HN is becoming like the next Reddit.com (and may be Digg.com), some users use it to promote their content or just increase their points.<p>My resolution was to search for another community. Joel Community is also good, but there is few members. Still better, the day it gets a lot; quality will drop.

When I looked at this thread, I counted twelve programming/technology posts on the front page, and seven directly related to start-ups. Of the rest, I reckon at least half were hacker-ish, though not directly related to computers.

if you want moar hackz plz, check out <a href="http://hackaday.com" rel="nofollow">http://hackaday.com</a>

I came to Hacker News late and so I have only known it as an aggregator site with a better than average community participation. Certainly more valuable than Reddit and Digg. But I can see how it's not really hacker news or startup news any longer and you have to wonder at what point it's not even going to be technology news.