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Suggest to HN: Categories
Can we split HN stories into a couple of categories e.g news and esoteric, etc?
- hstaab 5y agoPersonally, I like the fact HN does not have categories or tags. A simple list of stories keeps me curious.
- andy99 5y agoI think the most common HN use case (mine anyway) would be to filter out topics that I don't want to see.
- Jtsummers 5y agoI 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.
- yur3i__ 5y agoI 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
- based2 5y ago'tags' likes on lobsters
- andy99 5y agoI 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
- myWindoonn 5y agoLobsters 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.
- andy99 5y agoOh cool, I misunderstood, that actually seems like it could work well then
- myWindoonn 5y agoOne 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.
- adamnemecek 5y agoHN doesn’t have that feature on purpose.
- Jcowell 5y agoWas there a past conversation about this that can be linked?
- floatingatoll 5y agoI searched for dang categories in the footer (comments) and found the first useful result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649809
- harryvederci 5y agoThe only one I need is rust. Or actually: "not rust". I'm really not interested in rust. Is that allowed here?
- ibraheemdev 5y agoThen 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.
- recov 5y agoWould be simple enough to make a userscript to remove and posts with rust in the title
- linkdd 5y agoBut what about rust (not the language) ?
- d--b 5y agoAnd we’ll call them sub-hns?
- spdionis 5y agoMaybe 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.
- karmakaze 5y agoI 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/ https://hackerer.news/ [1] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news
- muzani 5y agoI 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.