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

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

#41

Post by andrewtbham »

evandwight wrote: post #36
rachelbythebay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

If I could filter all politics out of hacker news that would be great. the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots"

I have filtered a lot of politics on twitter by blocking prominent politicians and mute words.

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

#44

Post by the_lonely_road »

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.

I’m not interested in rust, or elixer, or Python or…the list keeps going and is much longer than the list of tech I am interested in. This means I’m unlikely to even grep the title of articles about some keyword specific to them let alone engage with them. I would assume a large number of if not a majority of tech readers are in the same boat. Better believe I’m clicking on any Ruby related articles and probably engaging further as well. Most people here are probably skipping over those same articles I’m engaging with.

An article about Iran or Google is probably going to pull a big audience simply because it’s relevant to a wide audience of the readers here.

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

#46

Post by jiggawatts »

Something I noticed about Slashdot was that it started out talking about the latest processors, software, and Linux kernel patches. Then the conversation ever-so-slowly started drifting towards CEOs, the sharemarket, politics, and the like.

It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers!

Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.

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

#47

Post by Ericson2314 »

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.

Yes it is good. I truly believe there is no engineering in a vaccum — I don't mean morally, like it's "not right" to not consider the context, but rather not considering the context is simply incomplete engineering.

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

#49

Post by obeid »

quicklime wrote: post #33
Traster wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I too, would like an echo chamber, please.

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

#50

Post by geon »

dougmwne wrote: post #43

I think it may be time for a userbase fork. All the politics, policy and economic, and general business news to one side, all the hardware, software, science, startup, and tech business news to the other.

So you want subhackernewses? Like /h/business ?
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