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Hacker News and Information Overload
I have been reading HN for almost a year now (always via Google Reader) and lately I'm finding HN increasingly difficult to use because of the high volume of posts. Each day HN has about 100 posts which makes HN quite time consuming to even scan. Actually reading the posts? Forget about it.
Increasingly more often I find myself skipping HN in Google Reader because it has become a time consuming chore to find content I'm interested in. This saddens me because quality wise HN is IMHO the single best aggregator for IT startups.
I'm not sure what to do about this information overload problem but I feel it's time to remove HN from Google Reader because in its current form HN is simply broke.
I'm open to all suggestions about making HN more managable.
- pg 17y agoYou mean each day 100 posts make it onto the frontpage at some point?
- rw 17y agoI emailed something to you about this last year. Is there anything you find useful in it? http://exponentialspace.com/hn-churn.txt http://exponentialspace.com/hn-churn.txt
- Perceval 17y agoFascinating set of proposals, thanks for posting them here. They seem to fall under the general category of 'automatic gain control': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_gain_control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_gain_control As the 'noise' of submissions goes up, a system that automatically adapts to the amount of activity in order to determine constitutes the 'signal' will probably help HN readers cope. I think OP's problem stems mostly from the format in which (s)he reads HN. Checking the frontpage two or three times a day doesn't lead to the same kind of overload as the RSS might. Whereas when checking the frontpage you'll see a mostly stable set of articles (with most of the churn down at the bottom few), on the RSS feed you'll see every single article that hit the frontpage regardless of how short of period of time it spent there. Perhaps, a quick fix for HN readers coming here from RSS feeds might simply be to not send every story out via RSS, but say, only those stories that stayed on the frontpage for >1 hour.
- russell 17y agoI really liked your option to hide already already viewed stories, although I would want to explicitly hide them, because there are interesting posts that I want to come back to. With a hide button I could go down the page and quickly hide all the "social" stories about get a date, pick a grad school, the latest twitter app, Arrington bashing, and go straight to the good stuff like Erlang. ;-)
- qeek 17y agoI have noticed the same thing and wholeheartedly agree with you. Simple solution: categories with separate feeds.
- rw 17y agoThat leads to the subreddit problem.
- fnid 17y agoSolutions to problems lead to more problems.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoHow about instead of having the submitter categorize the submission, everybody can categorize it, just the same as everybody can upvote? Not sure what "the subreddit problem" is. Just wondering if that would help.
- spitfire 17y agoIt's worse than that. Each time an interesting post (say a blog post on fractal dimensionality in the stock market) gets posted ALL of that persons previous work gets posted as well. So you have a head post, followed by 5 other follow up articles which just kills Signal to Noise ratio.
- fnid 17y agoDamn, that's a good post. I missed it. COuld you find the link to that fractal post?
- jacquesm 17y agothat one ? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417463 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417463 It's quite a bit older than your account so I doubt you 'missed' it.
- jwecker 17y agoActually, the article being older than his account would virtually guarantee that he missed it. He was probably disingenuous when he said that it was a good post, though.
- jacquesm 17y agoI was being disingenuous as well when I decided to find a relevant link being sure that such a combination of elements must exist if the original poster referred to it... Do not attribute to misunderstanding what can be attributed to malice ;)
- fnid 17y agoI was serious. I have a deep interest in the stock market and fractals both, so an article that brings them together ... well, it's gravy!
- 17y ago
- mgcreed 17y agoCould just need more points before reaching the RSS feed?
- jmonegro 17y agotry http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
- pkrumins 17y agoWhat are 'classic' posts?
- gruseom 17y agoPosts upvoted by users who've been around longer.
- tokenadult 17y agoClassic posts are posts upvoted by people who have been registered at HN for at least a year. I am not yet one of them.
- fnid 17y agoI don't find the classic version to be significantly different from the "new" version.
- pt 17y agoI just tried to add "http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic in Google Reader, hoping it would find an RSS feed on the page. There is no RSS feed on this page actually. Yet Reader added the following feed: http://friendfeed.com/ketan?format=atom http://friendfeed.com/ketan?format=atom I thought maybe this feed is referenced in the classic page somewhere, but it is not. Google Reader bug?
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoIt's been mentioned before -- categories and adaptive thresholds (automatic gain) I think every other site has categories. They seem like a natural thing to do.....
- jacquesm 17y agoCue some johnny-b-goode to point you to the feature request link at the bottom of the page ;) But you're right. For starters just two categories would do, hacking and everything else.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoIf I understand correctly, HN has always had two categories. They just haven't been explicitly put into the UI: Hacking/startups and things that interest hackers. We've kicked this can around quite a bit, and so far PG doesn't seem to be feeling enough pain to make a change. Perhaps things will change.
- tptacek 17y agoI left reddit as soon as they fractured it into subreddits. The cool thing about HN is that it simultaneously has a diversity of subjects and a community.
- skolor 17y agoI can't imagine trying to read it via a feed reader. Like you said, that's a lot. What I tend to do is just use the site, not even use a feed at all. When I've got 15-20 minutes to spend reading articles, I'll come to the site. When I don't, I don't bother. If its a particularly good article it will be on the front page all day, so I'll get to read it then. If it isn't, well, it probably wasn't worth reading anyway. Feed readers are good for something you want to read ever single post for. HN is not something you'll want to read everything on, you just (in theory) want to read as much as possible.
- windsurfer 17y agoSo your solution to his "It hurts when I do this" is "don't do that".
- tptacek 17y agoWhat's wrong with that?
- windsurfer 17y agoWell obviously he wants to do it, and he obviously knows it doesn't hurt him when he doesn't, so by saying "don't do that" you're being patronizing. It's pretty insulting.
- skolor 17y agoHis situation is more of "When I bend my wrist backwards, it hurts". He's using it in a way that is not necessarily good. Yes, it is included. And yes, it may be helpful/beneficial. But if you're having problems with doing things that way, stop.
- skolor 17y agoIn this case, yes. This isn't a broken leg, its a cut. You keep it clean (ie, don't refresh the front page every five minutes), and you don't poke it. If it was a broken leg (ie, the front page gave you only the chronological order), then there would need a fix.
- lleger 17y agoThis really is a problem. At the end of the day when I'm reading the HN feed, I usually have about 50 tabs open—this stuff is just too interesting. I usually only read the ones that are quick reads though; i.e., a few paragraphs or a list or two or maybe some sample code. Any bigger than that and I'll just skim it, but I mean like hardcore skim so I just get the thesis of the article and not the whole substance. If it's over a couple of pages? Instapapered. My Instapaper grows at a much faster rate than it diminishes. But this stuff is just too interesting to not at least open and skim. I mean, jesus, a blog post of the fractal dimensionality of the stock market? Come on.
- jamesbritt 17y agoThe greasemonkey script for sorting items by age, points, and comments makes it easier for me to find what are likely to be the more interesting discussions. A small addition is needed to have the script work when viewing older items (you have to add the URL for the subsequent pages. Proof left as an exercise for the reader). This is very handy since some of the better threads are not on the front page.
- timdorr 17y agoThere's a startup for that: http://www.feedscrub.com http://www.feedscrub.com I originally built it for Digg and Reddit, but HN is now one of my primary uses. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.