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Ask HN: Too much soap opera news as of late?

• jacquesm 16y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094
• tptacek 16y ago
  You're not wrong. There is a lot of drama on the front page. Maybe what's happening is that nobody particularly wants "drama", but they do (overtly or subconsciously) take sides in these things, and they vote up stories that confirm their theories. In any case, I'm not concerned about this (to provide one data point). What I am concerned about are the meta-stories about it. I feel like I can ignore the Apple vs. Google stuff, but that the meta stories might produce HN policy, and so I feel like I need to read them.
  • jacquesm 16y ago
    I think it is mostly because of a very limited number of sites that seem to spin very large amounts of yarn out of a very limited amount of fibre. There is hardly any substance to any of that stuff. Why X leaves facebook, why famous IT personality (in their own minds) Y has ritually burned their iPhone and will now use the one and true Android and so on. Case in point, the current #5: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367616 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367616 We could lose it easily, not to mention the 'Today is draw the prophet day', because that so brought out the best of HN. Maybe it's time for some stricter flagging.
    • RevRal 16y ago
      >Maybe it's time for some stricter flagging. I've only been flagging spam, in faith that HN is self correcting. But I've been getting annoyed more frequently, and am about to re-consider my position on flagging. Maybe a "flag more" culture should be encouraged?
      • Locke1689 16y ago
        I think flagging HN-inappropriate posts is completely reasonable. I don't hesitate to flag posts which I consider to be contrary guidelines. This kind of empty sensationalism is technical but intellectually bankrupt in my eyes.
• pavs 16y ago
  I think there are too many "HN is going down the tubes for x reasons" self posts. At any given time there are thirty (often unique) stories on the HN frontpage. From time to time some of them will be off-topic, link-bait, sensationalist. The current x vs y soap opera is not any worse than Apple vs Adobe opera or Apple vs Windows opera or any other opera for that matter. These are predictable patterns and happens ALL the time and anyone who has been hanging around long enough should know that. I don't think it is any worse than last year or the year before that.
• pg 16y ago
  There are also too many meta-posts, which is why I almost killed this one. Yes, there have been a lot of fluff posts about Facebook, Apple, and Google lately. These posts are not so harmful in themselves. The problem is that they are too easy to upvote. But it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things return to normal. It may happen that one day things never return to normal, of course, but based on experience so far I'm inclined to give these runs of bad stories time to run their course before worrying about them. I have been gradually adding protections against fluff posts. E.g. "Ask HN" posts like this have for a long time had an automatic penalty applied when being ranked on the frontpage. I'm always mulling over other things I could do. But we're definitely not out of options.
  • akkartik 16y ago
    I gather you're against just excluding both categories entirely. Why? (I don't have an opinion.)
  • mattmiller 16y ago
    I like the 'Ask HN' post a little more than the average post. I did not know there was an automatic penalty to an 'Ask HN' post, maybe that is why I like them a little bit more... only the really good ones float to the top.
    • percept 16y ago
      I thought he was referring to the meta-type 'Ask HN' posts . . .
  • philwelch 16y ago
    The problem is that we seem to go from one soap opera (App Store 3.3.1) to the next soap opera (Faceboook privacy settings) with barely any break for sanity in between.
    • 16y ago
• SlyShy 16y ago
  I would like to see more programming and hacking on Hacker News again. Lately I've been seeing programming articles floundering in New and never making it to the front page. Bit of a shame, really. It used to be I only needed to go to HN to get my fill of technical discussion. Now I'm not really sure where else to go. Perhaps someone has suggestions?
  • branden 16y ago
    Someone mentioned http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/ http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/ in a comment a day or two ago. I've been enjoying it. Edit - I found it in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094 which has a bunch of other suggestions.
• Tycho 16y ago
  I think there's just too many stories about Apple. Apple always makes for intesting topics but other sites will always cover Apple... I go to Hacker News for the deeper, rarer stuff.
• philh 16y ago
  I somewhat agree. So I think in future, if I visit the front page and see a lot of fluff, I'll check out /newest for things worth reading and upvote them. (And try to find things to submit, though it's not easy when most of my news is from HN or reddit in the first place.) I'd encourage you (and others) to do the same, if you're not already.
• rewind 16y ago
  I think it's just because there's a lot more current soap-opera-type news lately. Google vs. Apple, Apple vs. Adobe, etc. Some of it is interesting. A lot of it is boring and repetitive. But it will pass. No site can ever completely escape a bit of TMZ, so there will always be some of it hitting the front page.
• RevRal 16y ago
  Frankly [my dear], I too have been finding the stories and the discussion here pretty dull lately. On-the-plus, I've been hitting f5 less frequently :). Perhaps old-timers with good karma should have a higher weight to their story upvotes. That, and we should start submitting more "appropriate" stuff that the old-timers would like and upvote, and their upvotes being heavier, these stories would propagate the frontpage.
• Tichy 16y ago
  A lot of these were probably the result of the Google IO conference, which is now over (I think)? When the iPad was announced there was also too much iPad stuff for a while, but by now it seems to have settled a bit. So just relax, things will be fine again.
• angrycoder 16y ago
  I've only been here a short time. But I agree. I come here to find interesting tech articles, hacking, coding, whatever. I understand that the other items could be of interest, but really, after the 3rd facebook privacy/apple is the devil discussion, I think everyone has had enough. It seems like we could meet everyone's needs with a simple tagging system.
• jsz0 16y ago
  There are some extraordinary events playing out right now. I think it would be unhealthy to ignore it. This is a huge sea change moment. It's going to impact everyone involved in the tech industry probably for decades to come.
• drivebyacct 16y ago
  Yeah. Enjoy the slow flow of users from reddit. From /r/technology to /r/android to /r/iphone, the general level of technical knowledge is pathetically low seen by the posts that were upvoted on android the last few days that ranged from fake twitter accounts to lies about the froyo platform and such