Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mahn | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder when will HN consider creating subcategories ala reddit. Surely the site gets enough traffic to take it to the next level.

View on HN

Hackernews isn't that active, it has a very big user base that view but the number of people actively contributing (comments, submissions) is pretty small. During the last 6 minutes there has been 30 comments on HN, for reddit there has been over 100 in the last 10 seconds. The new queue is a good place to look to decide if creating subcategories would be a good idea, most submissions don't seem that great and giving them air time would be more inclusive, but would it be for the better?

Also for me personally I enjoy that HN is just one big list of submissions centred around one goal ("Anything that good hackers would find interesting") it means it's easy enough to discover new fields of interest I'd never have thought to search out, whereas on reddit discovering new fields of interest is much more difficult.

It might be too few buckets for too many things to talk about. Maybe jedberg will pop up and answer if I ask what Reddit looked like before subreddits.

yes, then we could have /h/hngonewild, shudder.

It doesn't necessarily have to turn into a jungle, we could limit it to 10 or 15 subcategories max. for the whole site and see how it goes.

What benefits do you foresee from it?

Ability to just see all programming and science posts and not, say, finance/VC or political/latest geek soap opera ones.

This would actually be extremely useful. Even a basic tagging system would make the site a lot more useful to me (though who gets to tag and whose tags get taken seriously would probably have to tie into the rep system, so it'd hinge largely on how interested the most active users here were in accurately tagging entries).

and /h/jailbait for any languages not older than 24 month

Would these be chroot jails?

Good lord this would be hilarious, I can see it now --

First time coding in [P]ython, be gentle ;)

We already have posts like that.

E[le]ven year old, just released this generic iOS game, how did i do?

To be honest, in the last few days, most of HN has already been /h/wtf

or /h/hndrama

and not /h/secretpopcorn

I've thought this for a while. At least having subcategories for /programming and /startups would solve a few issues that people have - if you only want programming related links, only read /programming.

Though personally I think there should also be categories for /illinformedrants, /pointlesstechdramaoftheweek, /motivationalfluff, etc. The people who like that kind of stuff can have it, and the people who don't like it can not have it.

Why would anyone want HN to be on that level?

It would be interesting to discuss and share some news in a different language other than English. I had in the past stopped my self to publish some interesting stuff because I am too lazy to translate content.

HN is at its best just the way it is right now. There no need for subcategories.

"HN is at its best just the way it is right now. " How exactly is it the best? It doesn't even have a "forgot password" button.

True hackers don't forget their passwords

It doesn't need one. Leave the password field empty when logging in. This is a site whose user base is very technical. Figuring out password resets is not really big of a deal.

I'm a big fan lobste.rs's many-to-many approach of submissions and categories.

Makes me wonder when web fora will go all the way and simply recapitulate everything Usenet has allowed since the 1980s, by pushing all the complexity involved in threading and filtering into the clients and making servers just big, dumb message storage bases.

That way, all of these discussions would be rendered moot because threading/no threading and subreddits/no subreddits and troll filtering/no filtering and so on would be under the individual's control, as it should be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com