As the quality of Reddit declines, Hacker News becomes more and more interesting as a consistent user-friendly and respectful forum for technology and science.<p>However, a notable difference from Reddit is the absence of the "subreddit" concept.<p>Do you think it would be good for Hacker News to slowly try to fill that niche? It doesn't have to be a free-for-all creation of subforums, personally I believe that manually curated categories would be useful.<p>Has this ever existed on HN?
The current format promotes intellectual diversity both in content and comments, instead of creating segments with lower diversity. It also seems to help promote a forcing towards higher quality content as there is less available space to compete in. Attention-wise, it's nice to only have to check one page - and consistency-wise, simplicity seems to promote longevity.
No. See <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491978" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491978</a> for reasons.
No, if HN had 'subreddits', it would be an entirely different thing than it is right now. And there's nothing about the technology or design or management or clientele of the site that would assist it in being a general-purpose forum hosting site like Reddit is.<p>Might as well ask "should Apple stop selling electronics and become a company that drills for and refines oil?" Because there's about as much relevance between the two.
Is the quality of reddit declining? If so, why make HN more "reddit-like"?<p>I dont think HN has enough sprawl to meaningfully support subreddit-like fragmentation, personally.
dang wrote something about this a couple years back: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098</a>
I'm not sure Hacker News has the audience for subreddits. It's a big site sure, but it's not Reddit level popular, and splitting content across different sections of the site will hurt its activity even more. I guess tags or categories that merely let you search by the type of ccontent rather than splitting them up entirely could work though, since the general feed would contain everything by default.<p>But that's not really how subreddits work.
I don't know. Maybe forums are over now; no longer cool and relevant as a website architecture. I used to help run one, and having topics works, but it also silos. Finding a good balance between granularity to help manage content without shutting potential contributors is always the challenge.
I once read something somewhere about the architecture of either Bell Labs or IBM or somewhere like that back in its heyday. Apparently it was set up so that people had their own individual rooms to work in which were situated down long corridors that fed into a large atrium which was where people ate lunch and was also the only way in and out of the building (probably a firefighters nightmare). The author credited this as causing a lot of the innovation and success of the company; people had spaces where they could get deep work done uninterrupted but then the nature of the building contributed to people bumping into each other and being exposed to lots of different ideas from different parts of the company. Hacker News reminds me of this atrium.<p>I kind of feel like subreddits would somehow end up leading to me discovering less interesting content. I feel like I come to Hacker News to discover random stuff from a very broad church that is mainly rooted in STEM but also has things that are often related such as philosophy, psychology, productivity and the like. I think something would be lost if it went down the specialist sub areas route.<p>I do however get the appeal. I myself have searched for “hacker news for finance” when wanting to know more about the topic and found someone else had already asked the same question on HN.
Lobste.rs is very similar to hacker news but has gone down the tag route suggested in the other comments mentioned here. <a href="https://lobste.rs/about" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/about</a>
I'd rather avoid the hierarchical approach, and just let users add tags to a submission (similar to stack overflow), and then one could easily filter by those tags.
I don't think it would be good.<p>I think if there's reason for a niche, starting a clone is a better idea. In fact, that's already been done, like with <a href="https://lobste.rs/" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/</a><p>I think that all forums degrade when there's more users. When people with a passing interest in a topic start bleeding in and leaving uninformed comments, that's kind of the beginning of the end for quality.<p>Also, we're always talking about the "small web," and this is a great example of how to keep it smaller.
Could be really good. But maybe a supported platform for open communication with the team behind the site would be more helpful to get in place first. Kind of like [1]. Externalized but internal, offering better organization and structure for growth, just as subreddit-alikes would.<p>It'd also show that 1) the input of the community is valued 2) the community is less a drag/energy drain for the admin team and more of an input and 3) more expansive changes of this nature could be made and are not just a waste of submitter brainpower...<p>1. <a href="https://metatalk.metafilter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://metatalk.metafilter.com/</a>