Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I disagree, it'll fork the community and attract people who only want to talk about politics and not tech stuff. I don't want "sub-hns" with vastly different tone and quality.

I find that HN's community and mods are pretty good at policing flamebait content in general, inflammatory topics don't last long on the frontpage in my experience.

I'd sooner ban politics entirely from HN (as has been attempted before) than create a sub-forum for it.

I also find that political talk doesn't tend to contaminate other threads the way it does in other communities. If you want to avoid political threads it's fairly easy to do so in general. So it's really not that bad from my point of view, and I don't really like political stuff either.

View on HN

There are clearly already sub-cultures within HN, having tags/filters would make it easier to find content.

What should be unified is the rules for contributing to HN.

I sometimes check this just to see where certain stuff falls according to their hackathon project:

http://www.taggernews.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337275

+1 for tags. Subsections will lead HN to become like Reddit with everyone living in their own bubbles. But tags for quick filtering would actually be nice to have. I definitely don't want to read depressing political news while having my morning coffee.

To avoid bubbles, users should not be allowed to save their tag based selections.

edit: added some more ideas.

I guess it wouldn't be as bad as a separate forum but I'm not sure I see the point either. Who's going to decide which tag goes where? Either the submission is obviously political and you can see from the headline alone or it's kinda-political-but-not-just and in this case where do you draw the line?

Look at the current frontpage for instance:

>Germany bans children's smartwatches

>TechShop shuts down all U.S. locations, declares bankruptcy

>Termination of the certificates business of StartCom

>There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It

>Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers

Which ones of these deserve to be tagged "politics"? And for those you'd tag that way, which ones are those you'd consider not part of "core" HN subjects? For instance the smartwatch ban one is objectively political, yet it's probably of interest for the crowd here since it's obviously also about tech.

>But tags for quick filtering would actually be nice to have. I definitely don't want to read depressing political news while having my morning coffee.

Both tags and better sorts for threads and comments would be ideal. "Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?" already had several hundred comments when I first saw it, and it's now at 800. Having the only choices to view that thread be by karma or whatever latest comments appear on /newcomments makes it difficult to browse, although I do appreciate long threads being paginated. This one feature Reddit gets more right than HN.

And to counter the likely argument that adding tags would make the UI noiser, and somehow reduce the intellectual quality of comments by attracting mainstream users, lobste.rs uses tags and they don't seem to have fallen down either slippery slope.

And, HN already has pseudo-tags in the form of "Ask HN", "Show HN", and "Tell HN". Might as well just make those #ask, #show, and #tell and turn the ask and show pages (and maybe jobs) into tag feeds.

I agree that browsing large threads is a pain on HN, I believe there are technical difficulties at the core that make it difficult to improve without ruining the performance (or at least, I know it used to be the case).

As for lobste.rs, a website I didn't know existed before your comment, looking at the frontpage I see that the "politics" tag is conspicuously absent, and instead all tags are about rather objective things like technologies being used (with maybe the exception of a lone "philosophy" tag).

I'd also point out that if I had up all the number of comments of all the stories on the front page currently I end up at a whopping 42 comments with most stories having none. I'm sure it's a very nice community but it's really too small to use as a reference.

I've seen parts of the site fail to update in sync or appear to revert from time to time, so something like race conditions or cache invalidation does appear to be an issue. Adding another complex graph with a tag system might be a serious drag on performance, with everything being limited to file read/write speeds and there being no separation between data and application AFAIK.

Of course, the answer for that is for HN to bite the bullet and actually integrate a relational database, if only to improve performance and scalability.

And as far as lobste.rs goes, the culture there seems to be more restrictive due to being invite only, and having a policy of banning not only offending users, but the users who invited them, and the users who invited them, as far up the (publicly viewable) graph as deemed necessary. This inevitably leads to far more posts than comments, and less diversity of thought or critical discussion, by design. Nevertheless, using tags doesn't seem to have interfered with any of that, so it shouldn't necessarily interfere with Hacker News' culture either.

HN, however, has open membership, and any tag system employed here would need to take the heterogenous nature of the community into account. Since politics is one of the more divisive topics here, a politics tag would probably be inevitable. Lobste.rs would just not allow anyone they consider too political to join in the first place.

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