What frustrates me more than that though is that there is plenty of hacker stuff that gets drowned out by non-hacker stuff.
This is a good point. The chances of a "rate my startup" or a good discussion around a startup business idea making the main page are a lot less than they were a year ago. I've seen submissions roll off the new page within 30 minutes when the site is humming, drowned out by mass-market non-hacker stuff. That's simply too fast for HN'ers to spot and upvote good stuff -- and the number of upvotes required to have staying power on the main page has increased as well, compounding the problem.
ADD: The problem is, with a loose definition of hacker-worthy news and an increased audience, the field of potential material broadens immeasurably.
It's the same problem with humor: I love to make a joke or read something funny once a day or so. But if 10 thousand people each joked on HN once a day, the place would completely change character.
At some point, this paradigm simply doesn't scale. To me at least, looks like pg and others have been tweaking things under the hood for a long time. We might be reaching a natural limit.
Between the 'aggregation posts' (techcrunch, crenk.com, digg reposts, /. reposts, schneier.com, fastcompany, greenspun, gigaom, oreilly, wsj, stackoverflow and a pile of others) there is only so much room anyway. Those will get posted regardless (and usually by the same small group) and it's not as though people wouldn't know where to find them.
> it's not as though people wouldn't know where to find them.
Yes, but I'd rather not visit those sites and only read the best articles (the ones that get linked from here). HN as an aggregator works very well in that sense. I think the problem (if there is any) is just the number of users, nothing more.
If general site dynamics hold here from other sites, a small number of folks are actively pushing as much mass-market stuff as possible into the site.
These are your golden users -- great people to have.
I simply think it's a matter of just too many people posting too much stuff.
I've toyed with the idea of a site like HN except it refuses to work with any domain that has too much traffic or submitters that submit too many articles. This would force folks a) to actually evaluate the material instead of the popularity of the source, b) be constantly re-tuning as certain sites grew in popularity, and c) spotlight some truly original thinkers/issues
I liked HN when we almost exclusively talked about startups: pitches, VCs, iterating, marketing, sales, etc. But that got boring to everybody (including me) because after a while it seemed like we were hitting the same material over and over again.
These are not easy problems to solve.
EDIT: You know what I'd like to see? Anonymous startup failure stories. I would pay to read a few insightful startup failure stories each day. The way it is, we get a good one about once a month here.
This is a good point. The chances of a "rate my startup" or a good discussion around a startup business idea making the main page are a lot less than they were a year ago. I've seen submissions roll off the new page within 30 minutes when the site is humming, drowned out by mass-market non-hacker stuff. That's simply too fast for HN'ers to spot and upvote good stuff -- and the number of upvotes required to have staying power on the main page has increased as well, compounding the problem.
ADD: The problem is, with a loose definition of hacker-worthy news and an increased audience, the field of potential material broadens immeasurably.
It's the same problem with humor: I love to make a joke or read something funny once a day or so. But if 10 thousand people each joked on HN once a day, the place would completely change character.
At some point, this paradigm simply doesn't scale. To me at least, looks like pg and others have been tweaking things under the hood for a long time. We might be reaching a natural limit.