Why I don't find HN useful anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#51

Post by TweedHeads » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:37 PM UTC

Sites based on user-submitted content will tend to be dominated by a maffia.

There must be editors who enforce and maintain the spirit of the community or it will become a propaganda outlet for the rulers.

We've seen it happen with Apple many times, one post about the GV fiasco is enough, not ten posts a day for a week trumpeting your own horn.

Or ten posts a day about dropping the iPhone.

Or ten posts a day about how much the AppStore sucks.

If you think we don't distinguish propaganda from real news, you'll be greatly disappointed.

HN is going down, whether we like it or not, and only PG can save it.

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#52

Post by aklemm » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:37 PM UTC

Not that I want politics to take over the front page, but those "politics" links are often technical/business opportunities for hackers.

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#53

Post by boundlessdreamz » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:41 PM UTC

biohacker42 wrote: post #43

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #10

This is pure whining. If you don't like the articles on HN 1. upvote articles you like 2. Submit more articles you like You have submitted just 3 stories to HN (excluding this) http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dag and frankly the story about warren buffet is not HN material and the fashion article is also not hard core HN material.So you want others to find articles you like and upvote them and not do the wor…

1. upvote articles you like 2. Submit more articles you like I am surprised people keep offering this as a solution. Isn't it obvious that if MORE people upvote and submit other stories like politics, then politics we will have? Isn't it obvious that majority rules?

hmm ? "majority rules". How can that be not obvious? It is called a community. The advice is to do something about it rather than just complain. More often than not the people who complain (like dag) have not contributed much articles. If i remember a pg comments only 10% of the users visit the new page. And something like 4 votes are often enough to put an article on frontpage.

I wonder how much upvoting of new articles happens by the people who complain. The only publicly available metric for contribution to articles is submissions and dag certainly hasn't contributed enough. So yeah, the advice still stands.

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#54

Post by brent » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:43 PM UTC

Different strokes for different folks. You apparently don't like news about copyright law or big tech employers that hire tons of hackers. I do. On the other hand, I don't care about resetting my sleep cycle, exploding ipods, or rails and apparently that isn't too offensive to you. This is a social media site that serves up news to tons of people, not just you.

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#55

Post by Agathos » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:45 PM UTC

No TechCrunch links and nothing about Twitter. That's an exceptionally good front page for HN.

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#56

Post by pohl » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:45 PM UTC

there wrote: post #45

mrlebowski wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you just added to the noise

pot, kettle

∞

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#57

Post by cema » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:48 PM UTC

TweedHeads wrote: post #48

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Propaganda, payperpost and FUD are killing HN.

I disagree, but had to mod you up from the zero you got before I came here: I think your opinion is legitimate and does not deserve a down vote. I think what is -- not killing, but corrupting -- HN is down votes on opinions one disagrees with. This is a crack for groupthink to seep in, which is dangerous.

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#58

Post by tocomment » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:49 PM UTC

biohacker42 wrote: post #38

there wrote: post #9

Why I don't find HN useful anymore http://imgur.com/8yx0Z.png

I never ceases to fascinate me how taboo meta discussions of HN are. We tolerate all kinds of topics, but this one almost everyone viscerally hates. It is as if everyone takes it as a personal insult on their tastes. Odd.

So is this a meta meta discussion?

Re: Why I don't find HN useful anymore

#59

Post by martincmartin » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 5:50 PM UTC

One way to solve this is "subreddits," but that has a lot of its own problems (e.g. its almost impossible to start a new subreddit, even for an important distinction).

I always thought a Netflix-prize like mechanism, e.g. "people who voted similarly to you also liked," would be much more fine grained & much more useful than subreddits.

Give PG's influence on using Bayesian classifiers (a form of machine learning) for detecting spam email, using machine learning on HN would seem to have a sympathetic ear.