HN Explorer

Where is the new Hacker News?

38 points by agravier ↗ HN
How to win rock-paper-scissors... I see from this type of submission or from the [pic] frontpage elements that the HN user base is growing. This is not meant as a criticism, as I know it's probably the fate of all good social news portals, but can anyone point to a fresh community oriented towards [technological] innovation, star-ups, etc?

41 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 96.1 ms ] thread
Confusion
From the guidelines:

  If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying
  that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
Granted, yours is 391 days old, but your participation is pretty low, so you should wonder whether you are actually in any position to make this complaint.
MikeTaylor
It wasn't a complaint, it was an inquiry. And it seems like a legitimate one to me. It's well established that every online community, no matter how well guarded, will find that as it becomes more successful, it has a wider base of users, and so the tight focus of the smaller initial base will inevitably be broadened. Some people want the smaller user base with the tighter focus: asking where else that can be found seems a lot more constructive than complaining about how this one has changed and trying to persuade people to revert it.
david927
I've been here three years, and I remember seeing this kind of allegation all the time.

This time, it's true. In the last three or four months the quality of HN has dropped dramatically. I think some point soon, sadly, we can call it: HN has jumped the shark.

presty
I have 894 days and I'd like to complain.
sovande
870 days and second
kaens
Maybe we should all post some Erlang articles instead of feel-good business articles and light reading.
Zev
861 days and I'd like to have a rocking chair and a cane to shake at people who are complaining. Which, I suppose, is a complaint in itself. I suppose that if the cane's short enough, I could shake it at myself. But then it would be rather useless for walking with..

Nonetheless, flagged.

chroma
The programming subreddit is sorta similar: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming

I haven't found anything really comparable to HN. IMO, the quality of submissions and comments has gone downhill. It's a common problem of fast growth in a forum: Too many newbies show up, outnumbering the old members. The newbies don't learn the old culture/mannerisms/whatever. Bam, endless September.

quadhome
The growth factor also lends itself to a simple expansion of interests. More people mean more attention to a more diverse set of subjects.

The Internet couldn't have supported Wikipedia before the Endless September.

chroma
Wikipedia has to fight entropy as well. They have admins and other moderators who enforce policy about what users can do. Becoming an admin requires spending at least several months editing, and collecting enough friends to get you voted in. HN lets anyone join and submit/comment/upvote stuff right away.

I know it would be a lot of work, but it would be nice to have a "filter all comments and submissions by people who joined after time X" feature. Or at least let me ignore specific users. Oh, and anything I flag should never again be seen by me.

naradaellis
>> but it would be nice to have a "filter all comments and submissions by people who joined after time X" feature

That's a bit much I think, very elitist.

tspiteri
Filtering comments by people who joined after time X would have resulted in people not seeing your own comment, you being only 49 days hn-old.
csomar
When there is no interesting technical/startup/business story, and other stories are worth read, so why not read them?

If there are startup stories, articles or discussions that are worth reading, they'll hit the front page in HN.

That being said, HN is community for self-improvement. The story "How money restricts life's pleasures" has no relation to hacking/finance/startup but can be life changing and may be even change the track of your startup.

You are your startup. Improve yourself and your startup will also improve.

nzjames
I definitely think HN has become somewhat of an Apple PR centre as of late. Anyone on here is surely going to get that news from another outlet aren't they?
Yaggo
Most news can be received from various outlets. It's the context that matters; I enjoy discussing about Apple-related news here with my peers.
malte
I wouldn't call it an "Apple PR centre". Most of the Apple related submissions recently are of critical nature (e.g. antenna issues, restrictions of the iPhone SDK). I agree, sometimes the Apple related share of stories on the front page is overwhelming, but you should also consider how many startups/developers depend on things happening around Apple.

For me it's not about getting the Apple news from HN, but following the (high level) discussions about them.

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Kototama
It's here : http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
haasted
Could you elaborate? What is "classic"? A special way to rank the stories?
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niyazpk
In the classic page the ranking is based on the votes from accounts older than 1 year.
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zemaj
I've been here 1184 days, and consume the majority of my online news from links on HN.

It's always been like this.

Like any social news site, you can never get content that perfectly suits what you want. When you start looking for content you think doesn't suit your tastes, you will find always find it.

Nothing has changed.

Vote up posts you think suit HN and ignore ones you don't.

koevet
I don't think the value of a site like HN lies in the submissions - or at least not entirely. What I find really engaging in HN is the quality of the comments, very often insightful and pointing to interesting resources.
djhworld
I'm new to HN, I only signed up a month or two ago and it's been a great portal for tech stuff for me, it takes pride of place in my RSS schedule.
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pbhjpbhj
Indian hacker's bras? [curse my poor English language education]

I guess there's a website for everything.

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MutinyCmbntr
For my mileage HN is better than digg, reddit, delicious.com/popular and anything in my news reader.
neuromancer2600
Not sure to what extent HN is bother you, but maybe slashdot.org is more what you're asking for. Other than that, I believe that today's news about Flipboard (flipboard.com) is the future. So, maybe it's time to filter stories through multiple Twitter accounts accordingly...
tkahn6
Maybe only allow commenting to those accounts older than say, 50 days? I know I lurked here a long time before I made an account and started commenting.

It would keep the trolls out and select for those users who truly value the community.

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mechanical_fish
Took me five minutes to figure out what you were talking about. The submission is off the front page, already.

Consider: editors sleep. I've noticed a tendency for less-topical stuff to appear on the front page on weekends and at, say, 9am UTC, when the entire USA is asleep, and when it is 2am in Silicon Valley. From this I conclude that a sizable fraction of hardcore HN vets, including the team with Super Moderator Powers, lives and works in the USA, particularly in CA. This, of course, is no surprise at all.

So, try reading HN at the better times. Or, recruit more English-speaking, tasteful HN readers in Central Asia, India, China, Australia.

Or you might just try to laugh off the occasional stupid story.

Or, launch your own. An HN rival launches every week. Sometimes one even grows large enough to be noticed.

revorad
As long as there are people like pg, patio11, gruseom, grellas, cperciva, tptacek, edw519, jacquesm, vaksel, swombat, mechanical_fish, jgrahamc, raganwald, DanielBMarkham, mahmud and many more participating and engaging in awesome disucssions, HN is the place to be.