Lately I have seen more than a few "why is this here?" type comments on topics that have already gone popular on HN. The bottom line is that happens because not everyone has the same interests, and this is a social site with many different people on it.<p>If the fact that you have to share this wonderful digital playground with the other kids really, really bothers you, then this is for you. It's a Greasemonkey script called "HN Toolkit":<p>http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039<p>Part of the functionality is the ability to blacklist submissions, either by keyword in the title or in the domain (or entire domains, whichever way you want to look at it). It cycles through the list of stories and matches each against the blacklist, adding style = 'display: none;' to each match found.<p>Hope this helps.
If you haven't read Clay Shirky's essays on the difficulty of maintaining an online community, do it now ( <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a> and <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html</a> ). Actually, read all the source articles in Spolsky's Best Software Writing I ( <a href="http://brevity.org/misc/bestswi.html" rel="nofollow">http://brevity.org/misc/bestswi.html</a> )<p>Every online community, from the very beginning, has faced its own crisis of identity as it scales. Perpetual September is as inevitable as the second law of thermodynamics.<p>I long considered HN to be a counterexample precisely because the group is not only self-selecting, but constitutionally disinclined to enjoy shallowness. A group of true geeks and entrepreneurs does not have to be coerced into expressing a love of Erlang internals and a hatred of celebrity gossip.<p>But, inevitably, any given community will attract people with different interests. A war of sorts inevitably occurs as both subcultures clash and try to gain power. The result is one we've seen in every single online community that has ever been created.<p>imho, the culture of HN is smart enough to either find a solution or at least a way to delay this process. There's a reason PG tells us not to complain about "redditization": such complaints are the very thing that dissolves a sense of community and shared values.
I find that it's pretty easy to determine what is on topic. I usually click through about 60% of the articles that make it to the front page, plus a few random new articles from time to time. 95% of the time, one makes the realization that this is a new school of thought or an interesting piece of commentary on a current topic. 5% of the time it is just people self promoting their restating of things that someone else already said (on hacker new no less) and other people self promoting their company. On that 5% I leave a "why is this here" comment. And every time I get a well written comment telling me why this product is interesting or why this persons opinion should be considered. If you can't stand people asking questions about things they don't understand, then maybe you sir have problems sharing this "digital playground".<p>But whatever the case may be, thanks for the link, although not sure why this post is here instead of just a link post ;)<p>also, here is the on-topic rules for people too lazy to click the link: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<p>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
HN is still supposed to have a fairly narrow range of topics. With the userbase growing so quickly, a lot of people may not read the guidelines and the content could start spilling into subjects not really meant for HN. In that case, I think just educating people about what should and probably shouldn't be here isn't bad.
Any way to easily hide the articles you've already clicked/read and show stories from the "New" archives? I don't like toggling between the two, so i therefore look at much less "new" submissions than i would otherwise.