Maintaining Hacker News Culture
Some time ago, I read/imagined a post about how Hacker News is not a news portal, but a discussion forum. By posting here, people encourage healthy discussion about those topics.
I feel that HN is loosing that focus because a lot of people are using it as a replacement for Google Reader. For example, today, Amazon acquired Kiva. On the Internet, there are a lot of sources that will post this news. It'll flow from top of the line news blogs (TC and GigaOm) to people who simply reblog stuff to gain traction on their blogs.
On HN, within a span of a few minutes, two people posted the same topic, one a report from ZDNet and the other from TC (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3726164 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3726172)
This is counterproductive. Both posters got a good number of points for posting those items, but HN is not a numbers game. Your value is from your comments and not how many items your copy paste from the Internet.
To that end, I propose that HN should implement a technique similar to StackOverflow where as you type in your topic or attach the link, the system searches for similar items and hints at those to alert the poster that they're just wasting their time. If they still insist on posting, HN stalwarts who have negative voting rights should exercise them.
Now here's the irony - Someone would probably already have proposed this exact method on HN, but since there's no easy search or StackOverflow style hinting, I have no way of knowing about it...
(n.b. A lot of people will say that that tech will need a major overhaul for HN, which in it's simple form cannot support such searches and we don't want to upgrade. Why not? Some extra functionality never hurt anyone :) ) Social news sites usually have a life-span measured in a couple of years. Usually, their death - slow or rapid - begins when they reach critical mass and start adding tons of new features, and they miss the point- which is social news (duh). Anybody remember Digg? As an aside, technology wise it's probably actually worth discussing the same thing every six (or 3 or 1) months - the answer will be different every time. I'm annoyed that Hacker News isn't as active as Reddit. We need more (good) content and discussion. How can we achieve this while... maintaining the culture? I appreciate you're probably referring to /r/Programming or a similar sub but in my own, non CS educated, non Developer opinion, HN can be quite intimidating if you don't thoroughly understand technology and all its various intricacies. The primary reason for this being the instantly observable fact that 98% of those who contribute in the discussions blatantly know what they are talking about. /r/Programming has a lot of 'average' content that's easily understandable and the prevalence of memes and off-topic humour on Reddit significantly lowers the barrier to entry. I'm glad that HN isn't as active as Reddit, since if it was, it would be filled with bullshit. :) It's doubtful that you can, honestly. I went on a fairly sizable rant last night about HN's decline into mediocrity lately. well, one way forward is to have the moderator's role more clearly defined. This is a society that no one runs in essence. Thus, the good way to deal with it would be a little bit of tech as I described above and some more moderating... I think pg, and all of the people flagging and voting on stories would dis-agree (that nobody runs this 'society'). HN's ranking algorithm is pretty good, just give it some time, it will kick in to make sure only the good content stays on top.