Why I don't find HN useful anymore
Not exactly the most eloquent criticism, but I do see what the OP is getting at. For me, HN has gone from a daily read (too much noise, hit-or-miss quality), to a weekly scan of http://news.ycombinator.com/best - which is generally pretty good. Techmeme is my daily scan for news, which I can go through in less than a minute with Instapaper as my procrastination shield.
He does have a point - today was especially full of politics. The Schmidt stories are not politics but certainly the blue state blues and german story are.
Are you saying 50% of the links on the front page (btw, a sample set of 1) are very interesting to you?
That's a damn good batting average.
So does this count as wishful thinking, or public outrage?
Eric Schmidt resigns from Apple's BOD is Politics how?
Take your smug sense of superiority, turn that sumbitch sideways, and stick it up your candy ass.
I see what you're saying. I for one would like more science stories.
Why I don't find your post useful. http://www.notoriousbrk.com/blah.jpg
This seems to be inevitable as the number of users grows. See: daypop, del.icio.us/popular, reddit. All of these were wonderful when they were small, and then converged onto a mix of top 10 lists / funny photos / outrage of the day links as they got big. I predict if HN keeps growing, it will experience the same fate.
These articles that you think are useless put the technology we love to read about into a social context. I personally think this site has a great balance of low-level programming topics and high-level context articles. If the site ONLY had the articles you deem as "useful" then it wouldn't be so damn addictive and wouldn't be nearly as popular. I'm sure you'd love a small community so that you can feel special that you know about something no one else does - but I think Y Combinator is probably trying to build a popular site that they can potentially make money on some day. To that end they're doing a hell of a job so far.
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.
That's what happen when community shape in to a normal distribution :)
PS: I noticed sin curve of _goodness_ I see in HN content. Should be something related psychological patterns.
No TechCrunch links and nothing about Twitter. That's an exceptionally good front page for HN.
As the community increases the quality decreases to have a higher level of comprehension. If anyone is a webmaster they know that a -well- written article about how to hack X vs. a dumbed down version will lose out to the dumbed down version. Quality will simply continue to decline here. I have noticed this as well. Let's start a quality hacker site, this one is slowly turning into another Digg.
When people start doing something with a website of mine that I don't want them to, I just give them some other place to do it. So with a blog on a particular topic, if people get more social and off-topic, I'll create an "off-topic forum," and direct everyone there.
There is definitely an influx of politics into HN, and it will probably continue. Why not create a HN: Politics site?
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.
Sometimes, I find the "new" stories more interesting than the frontpage. If I upvote a new story, it shoots right up on the frontpage...
...thus restoring the balance (for my likes, anyway).
You seem to think the only value in HN is providing you links to click on. What about giving you a chance to discuss the issues of the day with fellow entrepreneurs?
shouldn't you have posted this to the reddit images section?
Not that I want politics to take over the front page, but those "politics" links are often technical/business opportunities for hackers.
From OP's profile:
user: dag
created: 593 days ago
karma: 305
about:
1. Why I don't find HN useful anymore (imgur.com)
76 points by dag 1 hour ago | 37 comments
2. Hack Your Own CNC Machine (buildyourcnc.com)
27 points by dag 77 days ago | 3 comments
3. Fashion for Geeks: Why bother? (urbanmonarch.com)
27 points by dag 508 days ago | 26 comments
4. The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville (classic Warren Buffett article) (scribd.com)
3 points by dag 550 days ago | 2 comments
an ironic complaint when you inspect the submitter's own submissions, which is only 25% HN-topical.
Flagged. Whining about not liking Hacker News is not Hacker News. Your post adds to the problem you're complaining about.
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.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Propaganda, payperpost and FUD are killing HN.
A jpeg? ("I can tell from the pixels...")
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 work yourself.
I would have given a point by point rebuttal of how many stories you have marked as insignificant was in fact interesting but it seems like you have already made up your mind. So good luck. Try joining/making another community