Ask HN: Should the techies and nerds reclaim HN for themselves? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should the techies and nerds reclaim HN for themselves?

5 pointsColinWright8 comments

Are you content with the current spread of topics on HN? Would you like to see it return to being almost entirely about startups, computing, and similarly technical material?

You can do it. Just two or three flags will banish pretty much anything from the front page and relegate it to obscurity. It only takes two or three similarly minded people to ensure that nothing gets to the front page without their permission.

So reclaim HN today.

Do it for the geeks.

View on HN

From the guidelines:

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

There's only one item in the top 10 at the moment that isn't relevant to the criteria as you've laid them out.

I for one would like to see less meta complaining about the impurity of HN. Submit something really interesting that gets to the top instead.

I think this policy needs to come from the top - it just doesn't matter if users start flagging stuff that is more general tech fluff.

Websites have big traffic and SEO incentives to get their stories on this site and they'll keep doing it while they're officially allowed/ignored with their employees and auto-submitters and spam. On the other side is the growing user base who collectively average and resemble diggers and redditors more and more each day and want content that would better suit digg and reddit and is often written specifically for sites like digg and reddit to upvote.

There isn't a good mechanism for preventing or reporting this stuff, and if you flag stories excessively you lose the option permanently.

I suggest that we take a look at the submissions of pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

and of some of the other veteran, high-karma participants, e.g.,

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tptacek

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=raganwald

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=grellas

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davidw

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mechanical_fish

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jerf

(this listing is NOT exhaustive) and consider what the union of the topics that these experienced users find interesting is. Anything in that union of sets of interests, I think, may as well be considered fair game for HN if it otherwise meets the site guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

and comes from an original source that is a reliable source. That's my friendly suggestion for the broader education of the geeks.

I understand the desire to keep a community focused- I'm on HN because of the focus of the content and community.

However, I appreciate some of the seemingly comp-sci and business-unrelated discussion regarding economics, science, and sociology as well, because it helps to create a backdrop of context for startups in real life. We as a community can create the 'front page' that we want by not up-voting vacuous, sensational, or overly political content. I don't think a flag-war is necessary.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078727

HN was meant to be about startups, because YC is about funding startups. It still focuses on that. The problem you refer to is that the content has somehow declined in quality. I have not been a member here long enough to tell. But one thing, this place is about what you make of it. Only you decide to make the best or worst of it.

I don't know if a "flag war" is going to benefit anybody. What if a group get together and start flagging anything about "startups, computing and similarly technical material."

Nobody who isn't a techie or nerd hangs around HN very long...without getting hell banned.

It's just not possible without a massive level of moderator intervention.

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