Ask HN: Is anyone else tired of reading the same articles?
I have spent the last hour reading articles from HN I've saved over the last few weeks. They are all the same. Lean startup this, A/B test that, Design is important, I failed, Build a community then revenues, etc.
After years of reading the same articles, I have learned very little. Everyone is repeating the same stories/advice, and, as a community, I don't see any progress.
Are we doomed to continuously repeat the same sad stories over and over again? Can we finally kick this habit? I don't know- but I am tired of reading the same articles written with slightly different adjectives.
30 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] threadA founder might make some egregious mistakes the first time around. The next time, s/he can bring some of the experience forward to make things smoother. The 4th or 5th time around, a newcomer might marvel at their prescience.
As such, things will continue to be reposted over and over.
So yeah, the site is doomed to that scenario.
Instead of reading every story, read the first few comments. They'll tell you if anything new or interesting has been posted.
Articles regurgitating AB testing homepages, green buttons, and, my favorite, 'Follow me on Twitter here' aren't progressing the community.
What's next? What can we do with this information that advances the discussion?
I don't have the answer. I'm raising the question.
I think the solution, as with any news site, is not to assume that everything on it will be stuff you don't already know. Which seems pretty obvious, really...
I'm going to work on building a site that will be the Best of HN. Somewhere people can go to see the best article on AB testing or Design. If a better article comes along, it will receive more votes and become the new #1.
More votes than what? A previous article's votes on HN?
As time goes on, there are more people reading HN, so even shitty articles posted today may get more votes than stellar articles posted two years ago.
An unfortunate habit I once noticed in myself was skipping over articles whose titles I didn't understand, even though if I want to learn about new things that's almost certainly the wrong way to go about it. You'll notice (and remember) what you're familiar with much more than what you're not.
If you really want to increase the diversity of content on HN, spend more time on the new page. There are ~25 links submitted in the past couple of hours (on a Sunday). Probably 80% of submitted links receive fewer than 5 upvotes, but there's tons of great stuff in there that simply doesn't get upvoted quickly enough to get a front-page vote-boost.
I think a great experiment for pg would be to set /new as the front page for HN and see what happens.
Articles without links have a penalty applied. This site is about finding cool stuff, not about musing over the site itself. If it isn't a link to somewhere else then it's less likely (although not certain) to fall strictly in line with the site's original intent.
Yes, it's a valid point to raise, but a better way to raise it would be to write a proper article, discussing the issue, proposing possible solutions, weighing their merits, then making specific suggestions, and finally, submitting a link to the item to wrote. This is much to be preferred over just complaining.
It would be cool if the best blog-posts could be somehow preserved, and shown when somebody is interested in them as if they were new, + personalizing the news/reading experience (Thoof comes to mind here).
In the past years I built this (http://www.logilogi.org), as a hobby/passion-project, but naturally it has not taken off either, as threads and/or "expiring the attention" that is given to posts, have the advantage that they focus readers on a limited number of posts, increasing the likelyhood of attaining critical mass in discussing/replying to them.
So there is a dilemma here...
Otherwise, if you see something you'd like to read on HN, submit it! If that isn't successful, then you can really start complaining.
treehugger, techmeme, betanews, techcrunch, and even ted will be good places for a wider inventory of stories.
1. how do you launch? answer: "lean startup this" 2. how do you make convert more users? answer: "A/B test that" 3. is design important? answer: "design is important" 4. what happens if you fail? answer: "that's okay, I failed" 5. what do you do first, community or revenue: "build a community, then revenue"
We're limited by the subject matter, which is what makes this community so valuable. Moreover, our answers are similar because we've all developed a very similar startup ethos over time.
Are there other questions we need to be asking as startups, which produce different answers?
If you can think of a way around some of those issues, more power to you. But it is an issue that tends to crop up to some degree on every forum I have ever belonged to, regardless of the topic in question.