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It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#31

Post by LordDragonfang »

jolux wrote: post #24
Thorentis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of articles are actually what kept me here. The unique blend of comp sci, and socio-political-economic-whatever discussions is fantastic.

I really think it makes the site worse. I’m already an avid Twitter user, I come to Hacker News for discussions and content that I couldn’t find anywhere else. The political discourse on here is just lower-quality and less interesting than on Twitter.

If you think the discourse here is lower quality than on twitter, I'd really like to know how you're curating your twitter feed.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#33

Post by quicklime »

Traster wrote: post #20
mindcrime wrote: post #3

Funny, I'd say there's less, no, a LOT less, startup / business oriented discussion here than in the past. To me, the big thing that has emerged over the past few years has been a lot more "stuff" that can loosely be described as "politics / culture / public policy / society" or whatever. And if I could wave a magic wand and change anything, I'd ban that stuff. Because I agree, " I'd like to see conversations about s…

I actually think this is a problem hackers have in general. It's the Zuckerberg problem. You build something cool, you want to talk about all the tricks you did to scale to N billion users and all anyone can talk about is that genocide you caused. You just built the tech, right? It's all about the Tech. Except it's not about the tech when you're actually having an effect on people's lives, and we should be more willi…

Zuck and his employees at Facebook need to talk about the social impacts of their tech, for sure. But why does that topic need to be discussed on HN? We (both broader society, as well as the subset of it that makes up the "tech community") have other forums for that.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#35

Post by the_lonely_road »

Thorentis wrote: post #8
mindcrime wrote: post #3

Funny, I'd say there's less, no, a LOT less, startup / business oriented discussion here than in the past. To me, the big thing that has emerged over the past few years has been a lot more "stuff" that can loosely be described as "politics / culture / public policy / society" or whatever. And if I could wave a magic wand and change anything, I'd ban that stuff. Because I agree, " I'd like to see conversations about s…

These types of articles are actually what kept me here. The unique blend of comp sci, and socio-political-economic-whatever discussions is fantastic.

I second this. Twitter and Reddit are not places I’m interested in participating in any kind of political discussion but for whatever reason I’m inclined to participate here, frequently against my better judgement to just stay quiet. I’m coming here regardless because it’s how I keep my finger on the pulse of the industry and for better or worse use that to make most of my tech leadership decisions at work, so it’s nice to be able to do both in one place.

That said I probably spend too much time here because of it.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#36

Post by evandwight »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #15
mindcrime wrote: post #3

Funny, I'd say there's less, no, a LOT less, startup / business oriented discussion here than in the past. To me, the big thing that has emerged over the past few years has been a lot more "stuff" that can loosely be described as "politics / culture / public policy / society" or whatever. And if I could wave a magic wand and change anything, I'd ban that stuff. Because I agree, " I'd like to see conversations about s…

Yes please. People trying to discuss those topics on here makes me come back less. It’s probably the worst part of the site for me overall.

Would you be interested in a wrapper around hacker news that lets you filter to only technical discussions?

(I'm already playing with wrapping it so that probably isn't hard to add)

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#37

Post by 0des »

amelius wrote: post #29

Yes. Posts like "How to make $1 million with embarrassingly little work" are always going to make it to the HN frontpage. Which makes me wonder. Are we here to discuss technology? Or are we here to daydream how we get rich while sleeping? Also the "hackers" on HN are increasingly buying systems that are built to resist hacking and that have a target audience that can be described as "mom, dad and grandparents". Somet…

This is a website run by a venture capitalist org, ycombinator.

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#39

Post by amelius »

0des wrote: post #37
amelius wrote: post #29

Yes. Posts like "How to make $1 million with embarrassingly little work" are always going to make it to the HN frontpage. Which makes me wonder. Are we here to discuss technology? Or are we here to daydream how we get rich while sleeping? Also the "hackers" on HN are increasingly buying systems that are built to resist hacking and that have a target audience that can be described as "mom, dad and grandparents". Somet…

This is a website run by a venture capitalist org, ycombinator.

Yes, and they called it "hacker news".

Re: It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news

#40

Post by Kaibeezy »

krapp wrote: post #21
yellow_lead wrote: post #4

I think people want to browse HN and not have to put much mental effort in, so more "news" articles are upvoted, commented on, etc.

Most people here don't read the articles, so there isn't much mental effort being put in either way.

I think people do read the articles.

For a while, I was adding a reply to most of my posts where I pulled in a key bit of the article and maybe made a brief comment. I thought this would be a good way to encourage discussion, but I was advised it could also steer the discussion, so probably better to keep it to a minimum.

This I did, and while fewer posts gain critical mass without that condensation nucleus, it’s clear my best posts usually do end up going somewhere really interesting, and that the articles are definitely being read.

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