Can you list some of the stories you didn't like seeing on the frontpage? (You can probably still find them by clicking on More at the bottom.) I'd be curious to know if they're statistically distinguishable from older frontpage stories.
I do understand that this is only my viewpoint and that others may have liked at least some of these submissions, but this is coming from someone who was never a member of a link aggregating site. I started reading Reddit towards the end of 2007, but that didn't last long, as I quickly tired of seeing the same headlines and C-C-C-COMBO-BREAKER!! posts, so I left.
Hacker News served its purpose for me for quite a while: giving me the ideas and motivation to create my own startup. I also like some of the interesting science and hacker-related articles. Lately, though, it just hasn't been what I've been looking for.
All the rest, as far as I can tell by statistical measures, are like the stories that would have made the frontpage in the past. They also seem to me personally about the same.
Funny, I completely agree with BrandonM's list except for this one. Yes, it has been covered at least a dozen times. And yes, it would be easy to google what you're looking for. But I never mind these threads. Remember lots of people come and go, so OP probably never saw the first dozen or so threads. And there's a big difference between an impersonal search engine and real hackers answering YOUR question. I've done it myself, without reservation. I think that repeating the answers to these noobie questions every month or so is a small price to pay to make them feel welcome into the community. Who knows, your cordial response may encourage them enough to stay and maybe change the world someday.
As one of the principal posters in that thread, I obviously agree with you.
Do folks not understand how teaching works? How coaching works? How leadership works? How a community works? This group isn't just a dusty library, filled with books that may be out of date and librarians who tell you to be quiet and RTFM.
People like having their questions answered by real humans. They crave contact. They crave personality. They need to know that someone is out there, listening. The voice of an actual human telling you what to do is often more real than your own voice, or the disembodied voice of an old book.
Yes, the questions are almost always the same. That's how teaching works: You're surrounded by novices, and once they stop being novices they leave and are replaced by another group of novices. The secret to being a good teacher is to take enough joy in helping others -- and, less charitably, in the sound of your own voice repeating itself -- to be able to do it again and again with only minor variations.
You're absolutely right. I was stretching a bit with that one, and looking back, I'm not really sure that I should have included it, because I have many of the same sentiments that you do.
That said, I have seen similar Ask YC posts that do cover the exact same ground as old ones and annoy me a bit more than that one. I guess I was trying to use that one as an example of such a submission, although it wasn't really a good example.
The third worst, ironically, is the one complaining about the problem
Why is that ironic? No solutions are presented. No value is generated. An individual starting a company or hacking on a problem does not grow as a result of having read the story. It is self-referential, self-aggrandizing, and as you point out, among the worst entries in the derby.
It sounds as if vote-weighting has a good deal of merit, based solely on the three pieces of evidence presented.
How about setting up a dedicated place for the discussion of these things, so that they need never cross the front page again, and we can discuss them all we want without feeling bad about it?
Feature requests might work, maybe not. In any case, it would also be necessary to fairly ruthlessly kill navel-gazing articles on the front page, or at least move them to navelgazing.news.yc.com...
IMHO, the biggest concern is HN going the reddit way. So here's a stab at trying to fix that:
- If we can get the list of the top 10-50 hostnames (xkcd, etc) posted on reddit, and deny publication of those hostnames on HN, the signal to noise ratio should go up (how much I don't know?)
- Obviously, some good posts would be missed, but it's alright to have a few false positives, since this is a website of aggregated news and not email
I don't usually come to News.YC for the links, I come for the comments on the articles. Your idea would prevent News.YC comments on popular articles, so I disagree.
instead of/besides a fixed top 10 sites, I would add any site that has been on techmeme. If it's been on techmeme everybody here has probably heard of it already.
A plan for spam is born :) Yes, I can tell you in advance, they are distinguishable - these are the stories that YOU will never vote up. And one can predict how you will vote on the stories with a pretty good accuracy with statistical factor analysis like SVD: http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html.
