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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.

#111
post #75
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way for you to get the "real" HN back is by submitting and upvoting content you deem appropriate. You've done that well previously. Visiting less often is certainly not going to help.

You're failing to see the positive feedback cycle at work here. 1) Political articles creep in 2) Political articles draw more of the politics crowd 3) Voting power of hacker crowd decreases as a percentage of total votes 4) Submit power of hacker crowd decreases as a percentage of total submits 5) This leads to a slow but steady increase in political articles 6) Go back to 1) This is not a self-correcting system. It…

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

#112
If there is one thing more boring than stories about politics, it is self-posts complaining about stuff not being appropriate for News.YC.

And what could be more like reddit than such a completely content-free self-post being reflexively upvoted till it reaches the top spot, with several times more points than the next story?

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

#113
post #39
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the "system" includes the guidelines, then it's not within the system. Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Does a submission count as a post?

Guideline-lawyer! :-) I assume that by post, you mean comment.

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

(1). I suggest that the "intention of the guideline" is to reduce cluttering the site with meta-discussion, and it would serve this purpose best if comment was construed as including a submission.

(2). in terms of the "letter of the guideline", what is the meaning of the words comments and submissions? The guidelines have separate sections for each, and clearly use the terminology used else on the site, which talks of comments on articles and articles that are submitted. A broader construction of "comments" as "things that comment on other things" is not the literal meaning.

Therefore, I agree that the excerpt about comments does not include submissions, and I was wrong. However, I think it should include submissions. :-) Another argument is that submissions about the site are not "On-topic", by this definition:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I'm not sure that complaining about the site, and attempting to modify other people's behaviour, gratifies one's intellectual curiosity (in contrast, a discussion about how a social site can be run does do this).

However, I think in future, I might leave all such discussions to my betters, and focus on things that I find interesting, instead of trying to "improve" the site.

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

#114
post #113
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a submission count as a post?

Guideline-lawyer! :-) I assume that by post , you mean comment . Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. (1). I suggest that the "intention of the guideline" is to reduce cluttering the site with meta-discussion, and it would serve this purpose best if comment was construed as including a submission . (2). in terms of the "letter of the guideline", what is the meaning…

"I assume that by post, you mean comment."

I feel I've been caught out on my speelling while commenting on someone else's. Shame on me!

"However, I think it should include submissions. :-)"

I agree completely.

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