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.
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.<p>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.
It's worse than that.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
It's been mentioned before -- categories and adaptive thresholds (automatic gain)<p>I think every other site has categories. They seem like a natural thing to do.....
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.<p>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).<p>This is very handy since some of the better threads are not on the front page.
There's a startup for that: <a href="http://www.feedscrub.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.feedscrub.com</a><p>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.