Ask HN: Why is HN not categorizing submitted items?

10 points by ddano ↗ HN
It would be extremely helpful to have some basic categories: tech, economy, world news etc. on the homepage that you can filter by.

14 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 53.3 ms ] thread
There are too many submissions which happen to touch many categories at once. This is almost impossible to do.
Why impossible?

When you submit URL: NH offers few general categories in a mandatory field. OP chooses most suitable. Homepage provides filters: ALL / CAT1 / CAT2 / CAT3.

Nothing drastically changes, but helps with content consumptions significantly. For example, I might be interested only in hardware stories, so I'll click on the HARDWARE cat/tag whatever.

I think they'd rather have one community rather than multiple communities oriented around different subjects. (See Reddit)

I have been thinking about making a classification model for "things that might be posted to Hacker News" and was thinking about training it on

https://tildes.net/

Who does the categorizing? Sounds like unnecessary complication, Reddit already handles this niche.
User when posting.
I think things are fine as they are. You can get a gist of the subject from the title (at least after dang gets to it). If I want more, the search has been super helpful.

As others have mentioned, there are alternative HN frontends that attempt to do this. I personally would not trust submitter-categorized submissions, especially as more Redditors flee to HN.

Absolutely agree. It would enable users to follow their `special' topics without having to churn through every other topic as well. Hopefully HN and AI will have a love child, soon?