Suggest to HN: Categories | Hacker News Reader

Suggest to HN: Categories

20 pointssgt20 comments

Can we split HN stories into a couple of categories e.g news and esoteric, etc?

Personally, I like the fact HN does not have categories or tags. A simple list of stories keeps me curious.

I think the most common HN use case (mine anyway) would be to filter out topics that I don't want to see.

I use the <hide> option frequently on front page posts. It's not automatic, but it lets me manually filter rather than arbitrary automatic filter that might have more false positives than I desire.

I agree with this, it helps you to get exposed to new topics that are published by like minded people such that you're more likely to find them interesting than when just searching for completely random articles

The only one I need is rust. Or actually: "not rust". I'm really not interested in rust. Is that allowed here?

Then just ignore rust-related posts, you're not going to like everything on a news site. Other people like Rust because it's a cool language.

Would be simple enough to make a userscript to remove and posts with rust in the title

But what about rust (not the language) ?

Maybe HN should tag the posts automatically and then present a personalized homepage with topics based on your usage history like upvotes,clickrates, time spent reading the comment section and other engagement metrics?

I realise building and maintaining such a recommendation engine is not cheap, but a funding model can surely be found with such a big audience e.g. ads between comments.

Yeah... no.

HN doesn’t have that feature on purpose.

Was there a past conversation about this that can be linked?

I searched for dang categories in the footer (comments) and found the first useful result:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649809

I like that everyone gets the same view and not in personal/group bubbles.

However, I do like having mainstream stories separate from the deeper obscure hacker stories.

I use my own view that groups together a some keywords leaving the other interesting stuff up top. Written in Vue. It also uses stable ordering of only one day's stories instead of the slot machine doses of 'here's something I haven't seen yet'.

[0] https://hackerer.news/ [1] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news

'tags' likes on lobsters

I like the idea of tags, but it introduces extra work in terms of monitoring for abuse, arbitrating disagreement, and depending on the tags could even introduce additional editorial bias. I'm curious how this gets worked out on other sites, especially those with as wide a variety of posts as HN.

e.g. I'm looking at the lobste.rs tags and HN would probably need a much bigger superset, or a smaller set of higher level topics

Lobsters tags cannot be abused in the way that you're imagining. The main functionality of tags is to hide stories from logged-in users; an overly-tagged story is actually less likely to be seen and upvoted.

Oh cool, I misunderstood, that actually seems like it could work well then

One powerful effect of Lobsters tagging is that it limits the topics which are allowed in a very deliberate way. A story should be tagged `programming` at the least, because Lobsters is about programming. This helps make it more clear when something is news, politics, advertisements, or other off-topic content that doesn't relate to what we do.

Of course, there are tags like `meta` for discussing tags. There's also a recommendation system that allows users to suggest that a story be retagged. Posting a video or PDF causes the `video` or `pdf` tags to be automatically applied. It's a rich system, not just a many-to-many listing of labels.

And we’ll call them sub-hns?

I like the way it is. Sometimes it brings up UI/UX. Sometimes a story on modern assassination techniques. Sometimes something like crystal growth. It's quite hard to classify.

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