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Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

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Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#11

Post by ajkirwin »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #7

On a site where items are simply voted up or down, items are promoted that have the greatest positive emotional impact to the mob. During this political season, this is going to be politics and finance. You can't flag it. This is stuff that hackers are interested in as you can tell by simply looking at the number of comments and votes. The site is supposed to self-regulate, but no amount of pointing out that the syst…

Exactly. And if there's say, an article that gets posted about say, the financial crisis, it's nice reading the takes on it from people such as myself, people who are running startups, and it's even greater when someone like pg weighs in on something.

I like to think Hacker News is just what it says, News for Hackers. We have this pseudo-democratic up/down voting systme for a reason. If people don't want things 'off-topic' getting in, then why not just go register a tumblr account and post things you think are 'relevant'.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#12

Post by ivankirigin »

eru wrote: post #10
ivankirigin wrote: post #8

Asking others to vote differently and submit different content is lame. It's like complaining about getting down modded. If you want better content, submit it yourself and upmod it on the new page.

While it may seem lame it's entirely within the system. Voicing your opinion with a comment/submission is as acceptable as up and down voting - as far as I am concerned. Though I do not like to read complaints that much, either.

It is indeed within the system. I wasn't saying he shouldn't be allowed to post it. I'm saying it's a lame post that I won't upmod.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#13

Post by mattchew »

A continued focus on political articles will attract people who enjoy endless and mostly pointless arguments about politics. It is a path to HN becoming another reddit.

Political articles are like junk food. Tempting while they're right in front of you. A little bit of indulgence is OK. Not good as a steady diet.

PG has said that he thinks he can prevent deterioration of content on HN. I think this problem is actually very difficult. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few months.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#14

Post by nihilocrat »

Oh cool, the Hacker News community has gotten so big that people are coming out of the woodwork and saying that they're "hardcore" and don't like some of these new people that are diluting the content. They are telling the new kids on the block to take a hike; this is our turf. A classic milestone in any community.

My advice: Your post is getting comments about how Hacker News is adaptive and how you should just do your best to influence that. So, either weather the storm and wait for the community to create sub-communities, or move on and find something else. It's nigh impossible to force people to adhere to the behavior of the "hardcore" group.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#15

Post by maxklein »

Wrong approach! Appeal to people to start UPVOTING hacker news instead of appealing to people to stop SUBMITTING political news.

You see the subtle difference? One dedicated bad apple can submit a lot of political news, but it will go nowhere if the average opinion of the CROWD is that political news should not be voted up.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#16

Post by sapphirecat »

When everyone's votes are weighted equally, it becomes inevitable that the core users can't keep out the "barbarians at the gate", so to speak. Reddit became so weighed down in politics that a subreddit was created for it, back then. (I think. I wasn't into reddit much at the time.) Now the same thing is happening to Hacker News, as far as being overrun with politics.

Basically, I think Giles Bowkett is right: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope... -- I'd incorporate his ideas into a smarter site, if I wanted to waste my life on running it.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#17

Post by imgabe »

ivankirigin wrote: post #12
eru wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it may seem lame it's entirely within the system. Voicing your opinion with a comment/submission is as acceptable as up and down voting - as far as I am concerned. Though I do not like to read complaints that much, either.

It is indeed within the system. I wasn't saying he shouldn't be allowed to post it. I'm saying it's a lame post that I won't upmod.

I agree. The signal to noise ratio isn't helped by adding more noise.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#18

Post by ssharp »

Business and economics are extremely relative to this user base. A core understanding of how the economy is doing, where it's headed, etc. is very important. If Web 2.0 is moving to the enterprise, then understanding what's happening in business is VERY important.

Since this is an entrepreneurial community, this information is significantly more relevant than the 20,000th person asking what to do to start learning LISP.

Re: Pleading with YC: Enough with the political & financial news. More Hacker News please.

#20

Post by pmorici »

I think you forgot one major sub category... ...submissions about submissions being off topic.

I don't think business is off topic seeing as this site is half about starting a business

Economics effect those businesses so in a particularly bad week esp. one in which events that haven't happened to the great depression transpire you are going to see some stories about it.

What political news are you talking about? The only posts even remotely politically related was the Palin e-mail story and that was about a vulnerability in Yahoo's password recovery system. Something people writing their own might want to keep in mind. If it had been a sports star who's e-mail had been compromised would that be a "Sports story"

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