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Poll: Would you like to see this site become CS/Startup related only?
41 points by mattmaroon on Aug 17, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 80 comments
The exact guidelines as to what belongs on this site, as written in the current edition, are as follows:

"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.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "

This is pretty vague, and there seems to be a lot of crossover, as it's entirely possible for an article about politics to be intellectually stimulating. For instance what is going on in Zimbabwe is sometimes covered on TV news, but usually never with the sort of depth found in the link that inspired the thread that inspired this poll.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278342

So my question is, would you like to see the site's guidelines narrowed such that only CS/startup related links are considered on-topic? This is for no purpose other than to satisfy my own curiosity about what the general consensus here is.

no, anything intellectually stimulating
402 points
yes, cs/hacker stuff only
140 points
ambivalent
25 points



I would add a forth choice personally:

mostly cs/hacker stuff, with some intellectually stimulating stuff

That's actually the balance I feel we have right now.

I voted for "no, anything intellectually stimulating" because that seems to be what we have no and it seems to be working (for me).


I didn't put that in because as a guideline it's unenforceable. But given the current guidelines, it does seem to create what we have now (which I too like).

I only posted this poll because the only thing I'm 100% sure is valueless and off-topic is the "this is off-topic" comment that invariably ends up on anything not overtly CS/startup related.


the only thing I'm 100% sure is valueless and off-topic is the "this is off-topic" comment that

Actually, I'm not even sure about that. It seems to me that the average opinion here is in favour of most posts being about technical/startup topics, but that it's good to have a few interesting posts that fall outside that category - provided they don't overwhelm the 'normal' content of the site.

In that case, then, the comments saying "This is off-topic" - and the degree to which they are voted up - provide a barometer: They indicate to what extent people feel that the 'off-topic' posts are: a) Low in quality, b) drowning out 'normal' tech/startup content. This, in turn, provides social pressure to reduce the number (and increase the quality) of 'off-topic' submissions.

(Of course, you then hit a form of Giles's paradox of social news sites: the people most likely to submit to this social pressure may be the ones with the most interesting 'off-topic' links to share)


Your average opinion seems to suggest the opposite of the poll results.


Damn data. How dare it not conform to my preconceptions?

That said, what I was trying to express was my feeling that the poll options you chose don't tell the whole story, because you only offered "Startups and CS, no exceptions" and "anything goes".

My contention is that if there were an option for "I like seeing other interesting articles, but keep a pretty strong CS/startup focus", it would be the clear winner. I could be wrong, but the poll as stands doesn't tell us one way or the other.


This is a tough vote for me, because I enjoy spending my time with CS/hacker related content and yet I fancy politics.

But what I do have a problem with is the links to subscription-only content. Very often, it appears that the Wall Street Journal articles are submitted and approved to HN, but when I go to try and view this article(usually with a great title- often that might be something I would like to read), it turns out that I need to be a subscriber to the WSJ - hogwash! If this is all about what good hackers would find interesting, IMO, it should be in the realm of the free too. In other words, articles that require a subscription should not be submitted... unless of course all of HN's readers have a subscription and I'm just missing out...


I think we can all agree that stuff behind a paywall sucks.


Surely its not a CS/politics dichotomy? Really the voting system works quite well except for those articles where we vote to show our support.

I think staying away from American politics is a good rule of thumb - there is little chance that articles will be rated on their quality or relevance.


...staying away from American politics...

Good gracious. Might I suggest that America does not have a monopoly on political controversy (nor on visitors to this site)? It may be an election year, and the country fairly heavily polarised at the moment, but fierce partisanship is no more exclusively American than apple pie is.

(For an immediate example, take a peek at the proportion of reddit currently obsessed with the situation in Georgia.)


I didn't mean to suggest there is anything special about American politics but Americans do form the largest proportion of visitors to this site.

Georgia and Russia were at war, its nothing like the minutia of American politics that gets discussed on reddit.


I think the WSJ articles go subscription 1-2 weeks after they are published. So they are free for a while and then they disappear from the internet.


It doesn't appear to be as simple as that. Some new articles are accessible but others are not. It's confusing.


I've never seen a WSJ paywall on HN? Is it possible I'm blocking a cookie or something which disables them?


I wish I could vote for 1 and 2, like "yes, cs/hacker stuff that's intellectually stimulating."

news.ycombinator.com is less interesting to me now than when it was known as Startup News. In the year that it's been called "Hacker News" the posts have been far more general than I'd like. If I wanted that I'd spend time at Reddit.


I'm actually finding more hackerish stuff on Reddit than here now that Reddit is so customizable. The re-write really helped people to adjust the signal to noise ratio on Reddit. I just don't think that too many people have tried it out, yet.

My current sub-reddits:

    * Worldnews
    * Programming
    * Business
    * Geek
    * Python
    * Scifi
    * Cogsci
    * Politics
    * Funny
    * Science
    * Technology
    * Linux
    * Lolcats
    * Energy
    * Math
    * Ruby
    * Haskell
It gives me a pretty decent mix of Hackerish news with some fun stuff and politics mixed in as well. The startup news and quality of discussion on this site is still far superior to Reddit, however.


* Lolcats

Aren't you supposed to keep that a secret?


news.ycombinator.com is less interesting to me now than when it was known as Startup News

aka Evolution.

EDIT: And for every single person who find HN less interesting, there are 100 new users who love what you have helped built. Be happy.


Hardly.

Not to sound rude or anything, but I don't give a crap about the other 100 users. I care about what news I read.

Ultimately this is pg's site and he can do whatever the heck he wants with it. Whenever I state my dislike of a specific article, I'm not making some grand statement about what YCNews should be to fulfill the purpose of the universe, only about what I personally would prefer to see (or not) on this site.


Sure and HN revolves around username swombat. I do like your energy but you are wasting it for the wrong purpose. HN will go where the majority drives it.

And nobody said anything about PG owning it or his authority over it. And even He said that sometimes he is surprised to see some post make it to the top, but overall he was satisfied with the content.


HN will go where the majority drives it.

I hope not... I believe, perhaps foolishly, that pg will take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen.


> Not to sound rude or anything, but I don't give a crap about the other 100 users. I care about what news I read.

Fair enough.

In this case, I'm more concerned about how realistic the alleged 1:100 ratio of unhappy/happy users is.


A poll, naturally, will convey what the group of people here voting tend towards, which seems rather pointless. You can get a feel for what the voting crowd would like by seeing how they vote.

The important question in my mind is, "Why did you come here and what will make you stay?" And for me personally, another important question is, "What is your connection with startups?" A much more interesting poll I found was this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223846

It established that most of the voting crowd here actually has nothing to do with startups and only one in five of the folks that vote here have founded one.

From my perspective that, if the trend continues, endangers my reason for being here (and I suspect the reason that most of of came here in the first place). If Hacker News moves in the direction of simply being another nerd-news outlet, it'll be a second-rate one. The opinions I value, honestly, are not that of the majority, but of the interesting minority that are the raison d'être of this site.


Maybe I'm just defending my own pride here, but I have to believe that "not currently working at a startup" and "has nothing to do with startups" are distinct, if not disjoint, sets.


Around what it is now, I think.

Though you've got to remember a lot of people here aren't in the US, so while all the US politics would be interesting to the American hackers, what about hackers from other parts of the world, which very likely make up more of a percentage combined than Americans?

Thats why I would prefer for submissions to be: "Something an english speaking hacker anywhere in the world would be interested in."

:)


"Something an english speaking hacker anywhere in the world would be interested in"

This is exactly what got me hooked on HN in the beginning, and this is exactly what I want to keep seeing! Excellent way of phrasing it.


Ambivalent. I began reading this site for the startup/programming articles and discussion, and if the site were to adhere strictly to such topics, I wouldn't mind at all.

However, folks here are generally quite intelligent and civil. I do enjoy seeing and participating in discussions on a wide variety of topics here -- from religion to politics to economics to whatever -- where the discussion stays mostly kind and thoughtful. I really can't just "go to Reddit" for that, or to anywhere else for that matter.


Right. I feel that even as this site covers slightly more mainstream topics, it does so in a much different way than Reddit. The bar is higher, the discussion more intelligent and civil.

You really can't go to Reddit/Digg for intelligent "mainstream interests". You can go there for unintelligent ravingly liberal interests. I find myself slightly left of center, but those sites seem to border on socialist.


I hope we can avoid rabid libertarianism here. It seems to me that I've been downmodded recently because I might disagree with that ideology, even though my position was entirely orthogonal.


Seems like every one of the "this is off-topic" comments would be a vote again #2

I'm okay with #2, but I think #1 is in the best interests of the board. Anybody can run a #2 board.

People who are saying 'this is off-topic" are actually customers providing feedback that the content not only sucks, but shouldn't even be part of the offering. And they feel that way enough to write a comment and not simply down-vote and/or leave the board. To me, there's some valuable feedback going on there.

So I withhold my vote.


You're wrong because they're usually wrong. Again it comes down to the guidelines. If they quoted the guidelines and then explained why it's off-topic, it might be useful.


If you are asking what the rules to the site should be, then it's a circular argument to expect commenters to use the guidelines as a reason for things to belong or not.

The question was: what sorts of things would you like to see? I made the observation that the current customers repeatedly don't like the things they are seeing -- to the point of making comments that they feel the articles are out of place.

The question isn't whether they should have made an observation about how the articles meet the guidelines. The question you asked is whether or not topics should be accepted or not as _part_ of the guidelines. In that context, of course we should consider those customers that speak up. Whether they realize it or not, they're basically saying screw the guidelines -- it doesn't look right to me.

I look at commenters as customers. Obviously, some significant percentage of customers are going to be unhappy with any sort of system.


I see what you mean. I'd guess the problem is that it accounts for very few votes for #1, but the same people casting the same vote over and over again. I know every time I dig through the comments of someone who says that something is off-topic, I find multiple instances of it.

Either way, I'd have less problem if they said "I wish this were off-topic" because then they'd at least be factually accurate.


I'll be happy to see anything here but TechCrunch links. The fkin TechCrunch links for god sake!


TechCrunch seems to fit within everyone's definition of on-topic here.


Not mine. News for hackers ought to be more than just industry linkbait. It ought to be somewhat above trends and hype.


I didn't see baseless hype/analysis anywhere in the definition.


I'm curious to know why TechCrunch is not appreciated. Has it, in your opinion, become some sort of new "Startup Mainstream" that purveys a consensus that's become a bit separated from reality?

I find TechCrunch to be a good news source for its particular niche. But I don't always find news intellectually stimulating.


Because it tends to be a linkbait machine, and generally doesn't seem to be intellectually stimulating, newsworthy, well researched, or well written.


So it has the same problems as a lot of the news, then?


I voted for the yes cs/hacker stuff only because I think the narrow focus of the community is what keeps it small, which is what keeps the quality good. Other articles are good in moderation, but I'd hate to see HN become reddit (or worse).


What about non-cs/hacker startup info?


Aye, some people are tipping more VC money to go to cleaner energy startups than internet related ones.


Whoops, you can see from the title I meant to include both, but forgot to in the options. My bad.


I vote for stronger wording and more moderation of off-topic stuff. add a caveat to the current description that tells people to strongly consider what they are posting if it isn't CS related.


I think how the community defines itself should drive the decisions of what gets submitted.

How would you describe 'hacker news' to a friend who hadn't heard of it before.

I'd say 'it's a social news site like digg or reddit, but it focuses on cs/it/hacking and start-up technology news'.

I think having a tagline which describes hacker news might guide new members to post appropriate items. If you came to Hacker News and didn't know what it was all about, you might be inclined to post anything.

But as rokhayakebe said, the quality is pretty good, now maybe it's just a matter of keeping it that way.


I would say it's like Reddit but with a more intelligent audience.


FWIW, I kinda like the way the site is now, so I voted no, but I promise to still love you if you disagree.


I as well like the site the way it is now. It has a nice array of cs related content to keep me satisfied, but also a lot of other non cs, intelligent articles that I enjoy reading. It reminds me of reddit in the early days. What kinda worries me is that too many political articles/off topic stuff will trickle to the top as more and more users start using the site.


I'd like it if the site were a little less self conscience. As a lot of sites like this grow, it seems like they all go through a sort of navel gazing, meta lovefest.

This is odd to me because the whole voting thing should mean that whatever the site is, is what we want. There should be enough wiggle room for the site to magically change with our changing interests. And, yet, not so much wiggle room that it can be completely taken over by people with completely different interests (politics, etc).

But, it's never been clear to me what use there is in talking about this...


The reason that I frequent this site is because of the self consciousness that most individuals uphold to allow themselves to compose thoughtful and meaningful posts. I don't think the concern for most of the community is the genre of the articles, rather, the quality of those posts and the conversations that follow. There really is use and interest in talking about such matters within the community because for the most part, the HN community is mostly composed of refugees from sites like reddit and digg that no longer find a use in wasting their time in thought and contribution to a hopeless cause. The greatness of this community is the ability scale yet retain users that post over one sentence and thankfully avoid trying to be the thread clown and get the wittiest post (yet when they are lacking in quantity they make up for in quality).

I don't know if I have made my point clear (which is not out of the ordinary), but there always seems to be posts on the current state of the community which to me is always a good thing. When the most sites grow they tend to be come deluded and the core users become disenfranchised and subsequently the site runs on a wild course. I have had a long day and I don't even know what I am talking about at this point, but to me the greatest fear this community should have is the quality of posts, not the topic of conversation (the focus should be on intellectualism).


Let's lighten up.

Stories that some find totally unrelated to HN are probably 1 in 200. In most cases those stories are interesting enough to make it to the top 10.

A little concern to the problems outside tiny SV doesn't hurt anyone. Be concerned.


Here's another thought: if we made people write a sentence or two before downvoting we'd get to know very quickly what kinds of articles we don't want here -- the ones which prompt people into having a mostly irrational, emotional responses.

I'm just guessing, but I think we want intersting, reasoned discussions -- whatever the topic.

In that sense, what's okay or not has less to do with the site than the people who populate it. I bet you could re-run some of the stuff from last year and get completely different user responses this time around.


I tend to like most of the stuff I find on this site. I like the CS/Hacker stuff, as well as the science, tech, math, and other 'intellectually stimulating' stuff. I dislike articles that seem to have nothing to do with intellectual curiosity, or seem to be appealing to a very specific viewpoint (aka politically/culturally biased, instead of being intellectually enlightening).


It's simple:

Hacker news is an open community right now - and the time policing the content would be a bigger waste of time than the current proportion of less interesting content, which you only need to skip.

I'm glad I don't police the site - because I can't get into LISP and I would block all LISP content. And that might hurt some one's feelings.


I'm sort of with you, sort of not. I tend to skip a lot of the more technical articles, stuff about LISP, stuff on raganwald, etc. But I also wouldn't vote it down, because I don't have anything against it, I'm just not part of the audience for which it is intended. I'm not entirely sure I'm part of the audience for which this site is intended.


There are lots of places for general-purpose news. I think HN's strength is in specializing.

However, what are you really proposing? How is the topic list enforced? What does PG think? If you intend to use after-the-fact methods like complaining to people who post offtopic stuff, that's just going to make things unpleasant.


This site is the first place I go every day because it offers enough interesting things about my industry in addition to a smattering of other eye-opening intellectually stimulating items. If anything I think the standard should just be a little higher for anything non-hacker/cs.


I really do want to see more bias towards science/computer science stuff, but this is one place where I can come for general intellectually stimulating reads.

So long as the content continues to be mostly well written/well thought out, with a geeky bent I'll be happy.


if you want cs/hacker + politics, go to reddit. I personally think the way the site is no is perfect, sure some offtopic stuff goes to the front page, but almost all of the content is cs/hacker/startup only


Thank you for your suggestion.. but I like the simplistic and minimal nature of HN. Further, I think what really gets to me more is the submits requiring a subscription.


Reddit is cs/hacker + socialist politics + flamewars.

Also, I find that comment to be very akin to "if you don't like something about America, move to another country."


The USA has inclusiveness in its charter. A social news site is free to be as inclusive or exclusive as it cares to be. If the mix of topics on HN is not to someone's liking, then moving elsewhere is a valid suggestion. For me, it wouldn't be a good one, though.


The USA has inclusiveness in its charter. A social news site is free to be as inclusive or exclusive as it cares to be.

Sure, but that attitude still makes you an asshole.


Really? What is name calling supposed to make you?


Would it help if I explained that by 'asshole,' I meant 'anti-social jerk,' and was applying it to the flippancy of a 'love it or leave it attitude,' which, irrespective of any legality thereof, still makes one an asshole?


The problem is that its a slippery slope, as you relax the rules on the content, it'll get worse and worse. So before long HH will be another reddit clone with 1/10th of stories on the front page being even remotely relevant, and the rest is nothing but regurgitated blog spam


I don't know if it'd ever get as bad as reddit... PG's a smart guy, but he needs to give us a sign of how he's going to deal with the problem. A shoe, say, or a gourd...


stick to cs/startup stuff only. there are too many generic sites already.


CS/hacker is too narrow. Does OvercomingBias count as CS/hacker? Not really, it's more techno-philosophy.

I think general interest stories posted here should at least have some sort of technological angle.


My vote goes to "Anything intellectually stimulating that relates to CS/hacker stuff and startups".

But since there's no "Both" option, I'm going with ambivalent.


"... So my question is, would you like to see the site's guidelines narrowed ..."

KISS, less rules & meta, more ideas.


i stopped using digg 3 months ago and life has been great. this site is about where digg was 2 years ago no. when it first started it was hard core, now its mostly mass interest stuff.


cs/startup stuff only. too many generic sites out there already.


isn't hacking a subset of the intellectually stimulating?


+1 for "no, anything intellectually stimulating"


hack senses fail


yes, please


It's best if the site is officially hacker stuff only. The balance now is pretty good; if other topics had explicit approval they'd get a lot more common.


Other topics do have explicit approval, given the current guidelines. That seems to be the cause of the constant stream of "this is off topic" comments.


I would say no, anything stimulating should go, at least stuff relating to maths and science. Dijkstra said c.s. has as little to do with computers as astronomy does to telescopes. Meaning that computers are an aid to understanding the theory of computation and information, which for Dijstra is properly a branch of maths, and are not an end in themselves, just as telescopes are an aid to understanding the stars, not an end in themselves. Therefore as c.s. may be viewed as a branch of maths and science, it should seem fair to allow posts relating to other branches of math and science too.




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