That said, I'd have to agree with you though, there is a lot of non-hacker stuff that makes the homepage and stays there.
What frustrates me more than that though is that there is plenty of hacker stuff that gets drowned out by non-hacker stuff.
Basically if a submission doesn't have 5 votes or so (on a normal day) before it scrolls off the 'new' page it will never make the front page.
That's not a bit loss for the submission itself (I use the 'new' page as though it were the homepage) but the discussion can be as interesting or more so than the submission, and that is a loss.
Do you think that there's a need for a HackerNews feature or maybe a separate site altogether that would allow one to add their favorite HN links ( both the original post and the HN commentary ) as public bookmarks?
One could then link to their faves list in their profile so that others can see these links. Like-minded individuals could then see what links their counterparts found interesting.
I suppose this wouldn't have to be a specialized site. Any HN member could build a page in static HTML or whatever programming-language listing their favorite links.
I wrote a quickie AWK script to demonstrate what I'm talking about. The first link below is my blog post about it. The second link is a very spartan list of HN links that I've saved in a text file.
It comes in cycles. Sometimes, there are just slow news days--or weeks. And then one of these meta threads comes up and people discuss it.
And then someone comes in and points to the guidelines and how it's a newbie mistake to feel like the whole board is going to hell.
Then edwin519 comes and tells us, flag and submit more what you find interesting and vote up things that you want.
So far, this community seems to be self-correcting, as long as we're self aware that we're not learning from the front page like we use to. We can all get our yuks and giggles from elsewhere.
What frustrates me more than that though is that there is plenty of hacker stuff that gets drowned out by non-hacker stuff.
This is a good point. The chances of a "rate my startup" or a good discussion around a startup business idea making the main page are a lot less than they were a year ago. I've seen submissions roll off the new page within 30 minutes when the site is humming, drowned out by mass-market non-hacker stuff. That's simply too fast for HN'ers to spot and upvote good stuff -- and the number of upvotes required to have staying power on the main page has increased as well, compounding the problem.
ADD: The problem is, with a loose definition of hacker-worthy news and an increased audience, the field of potential material broadens immeasurably.
It's the same problem with humor: I love to make a joke or read something funny once a day or so. But if 10 thousand people each joked on HN once a day, the place would completely change character.
At some point, this paradigm simply doesn't scale. To me at least, looks like pg and others have been tweaking things under the hood for a long time. We might be reaching a natural limit.
Between the 'aggregation posts' (techcrunch, crenk.com, digg reposts, /. reposts, schneier.com, fastcompany, greenspun, gigaom, oreilly, wsj, stackoverflow and a pile of others) there is only so much room anyway. Those will get posted regardless (and usually by the same small group) and it's not as though people wouldn't know where to find them.
> it's not as though people wouldn't know where to find them.
Yes, but I'd rather not visit those sites and only read the best articles (the ones that get linked from here). HN as an aggregator works very well in that sense. I think the problem (if there is any) is just the number of users, nothing more.
If general site dynamics hold here from other sites, a small number of folks are actively pushing as much mass-market stuff as possible into the site.
These are your golden users -- great people to have.
I simply think it's a matter of just too many people posting too much stuff.
I've toyed with the idea of a site like HN except it refuses to work with any domain that has too much traffic or submitters that submit too many articles. This would force folks a) to actually evaluate the material instead of the popularity of the source, b) be constantly re-tuning as certain sites grew in popularity, and c) spotlight some truly original thinkers/issues
I liked HN when we almost exclusively talked about startups: pitches, VCs, iterating, marketing, sales, etc. But that got boring to everybody (including me) because after a while it seemed like we were hitting the same material over and over again.
These are not easy problems to solve.
EDIT: You know what I'd like to see? Anonymous startup failure stories. I would pay to read a few insightful startup failure stories each day. The way it is, we get a good one about once a month here.
So long as you don't find too many things inappropriate, apparently. I've had my flagging rights revoked. The first time I made a case to get them restored. The second time I simply decided to stop being as involved.
That said, I'd have to agree with you though, there is a lot of non-hacker stuff that makes the homepage and stays there.
What frustrates me more than that though is that there is plenty of hacker stuff that gets drowned out by non-hacker stuff.
Basically if a submission doesn't have 5 votes or so (on a normal day) before it scrolls off the 'new' page it will never make the front page.
That's not a bit loss for the submission itself (I use the 'new' page as though it were the homepage) but the discussion can be as interesting or more so than the submission, and that is a loss.