eli_s, not an answer, but if you upvote that article, it's in your saved stories: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=eli_s
(from your homepage, 3rd link from the bottom)
That's already happening, since a few weeks HN now has an 'ask' section, which is effectively a first split.
I too have noticed a large increase in volume recently, but I'm not sure that's the problem. Rather, I'd say the site needs less churn - top articles should stay on the front page for at least a day. That just means a different ranking, maybe something like log(votes)*weight, where weight decays over time but gets bumped at each upvote.
If that's not enough churn for some people, I'd prefer a filter that lets them temporarily hide some stories. And ten there's /newest
I know there's also the /best section, but it's not linked to and I don't know how it's ranked.
A reddit-like url filter would help a little in catching reposts, but I'm not sure this is a big problem yet.
I don't use the 'ask' section link, but regularly click on them from the 'new' or main view.
What categories would you suggest? Business, technology, environment, programming, apple, facebook? Ok, probably not apple and facebook though those do get an inordinate amount of links.
Personally I wouldn't use them, and my concern would be that people who come only to read articles tagged in that column wouldn't cross-polinate their expertise into cross-over areas.
Just a thought.
The problem with sub HNs is for those of us who use feed readers to read HN and other news sites. I REALLY don't want to have to add ten extra feeds to my feed list, as the idea of sub-HNs implies. I, for one, am fond of the way this is currently set up, it works well with how I have my feed reader set up, and my desire for knowledge at all hours.
Noticed this, too.
The way I keep up with it is using google reader to star (mark) stories over the day and reading them when i get the chance.
I'm not sure sub HNs are the answer just now since I'd need to subscribe to pretty much all of them to not miss good content.
I agree. My RSS feed has 100s of articles every day. And I can't keep up :(
I miss Nick B.
That's what she said.
http://searchyc.com is the solution to your particular problem, not sharded communities.
It's unfortunate that pg petulantly refuses to acknowledge its existence. Even talking about in person, he'd only engage with me on the subject when I referred to the useless HNSearch Firefox extension that's linked in the footer because it's from WebMynd (YC W08).
Confounding things is the fact that HNSearch actually redirects to searchyc SERPs on some user actions!