[jt2190]

  > the sheer volume of content means I'm probably missing 
  > out on most of it.

I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else. (I'm quite biased toward consuming information that is useful and actionable rather than merely interesting, so I realize that puts me at odds with the site's stated policy.)

(edit: phrasing)

[dang]

> misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups

What kind of stories about startups do you think aren't being represented here? Links would be super helpful.

There certainly hasn't been any policy change about what's on topic.

[tptacek]

1000000000% agree. I think the site is pretty bad at hosting political discussions, and, worse, that the resulting discussions are tedious. There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

[krapp]

For example - any thread even tangentially related to the Paris attacks recently. There are probably still subthreads simmering over whether Islam is really a death cult or no more evil than Christianity or whether the West really had it coming, or whether maybe we should just nuke all of Asia and be done with it. Except really it was all a false flag operation by the New World Order because Snowden. For a while, the comments page was practically toxic - and every bit of it entirely predictable.

I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views. When your day job requires you to prove things to a certain degree of correctness, maybe it makes sense to believe the world and people should work the same way. There seems to be far too much cynicism, vitriol and condescension here around some subjects, and too many people who seem to think those are the qualities of a keen intellect. Maybe politics is one of those fields everyone just thinks they're an expert at.

[mindcrime]

I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views.

I really don't see engineers being in any way unique in that regard.

[Alex3917]

> There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

While the political discussions on HN are predictable, I do think the overall politics of the site have shifted significantly over time. Six or seven years ago I was pretty much the token crazy liberal or whatever. Whereas now my politics generally aren't even noticeably out of the mainstream, without my views having shifted significantly on most issues.

[mbrock]

The guidelines say "avoid bringing up flame bait unless you've something new to say."

I think a better guideline might be "avoid just expressing your opinion unless you can make it both polite and interesting."

[tptacek]

That's a much better guideline. The reason I think it won't be adopted is that HN's moderators feel like "make it polite" is already a guideline.

[mindcrime]

There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

The only issue I have predicting that stuff here is related to the surprise I sometimes feel at how much the bias of this site has drifted over the past couple of years. There's definitely been a pronounced uptick in the prevalence of left'ish wing /socialist'ist thinking here. At one time opinions focusing on individual rights, free markets, etc. were mainstream here. Now they routinely get heavily downvoted.

[brudgers]

Personally, I believe there is more diversity of opinion on political topics than behavior exhibited in the comment threads on political topics.

[pvg]

That's exactly the sort of thing a plant of the technonormative Big Karma oppressor would say.

[krapp]

karma is the opiate of the masses

[earleybird]

the medium is the oppressor

[mindcrime]

I guess I'm one of those old-timers who misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups and less about government policy, macro economics, and whatever else

Put me in the same category, FWIW. I've adjusted to the new way of things, and just accept it for what it is. But I would prefer less politics, world affairs, economics, etc., and more focus on tech and startups.

[mbesto]

From HN guidelines:

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I insta-flag anything that fits in this category. As much as I might want to discuss ISIS, HN isn't the place for it.

[tptacek]

Me too. More people should be doing this.

[davidw]

I don't think most of the policy stuff is even all that 'interesting'. 'Interesting' is learning something new for the sake of learning about the world. Most of the policy stuff is more like "look at this outrageous thing!". In many cases, it's true that the thing in question is important - probably more important than startups/hacking - but there are plenty of other places for those kinds of links/discussions.

[ethbro]

Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences.

At least as far as my conscious, I like to use "Does this better help me relate to the world?" as a yardstick.

I don't think anyone would argue that it's best practice to make decisions with substantial amounts of missing knowledge, yet I feel like there are a huge number of startups founded via the "I am a white, middle-class, college-attending male, and this is one of my problems that I want to solve" selector.

That's all well and good, I don't expect every freshman to be an expert on {insert problem outside that subclass} for {insert region outside US/EUR}, but... if we're serious about solving important world problems, then the people who are going to solve them need to at least be aware that it's a problem.

Aka the malaria argument

[davidw]

> Everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases for news preferences.

I simply don't view HN as a place for 'news' in the general sense of the term, but rather a much more focused community.

[mbrock]

That's probably why the submission guidelines say if you'd see it on the TV news, it's probably off-topic here.

[david_mitchell]

Someone should start a petition to change the name back to startup news.

edit: I should have written a more than a single sentence. Obviously I'm joking; hn is what it is now and it's not going to go back to the good old days.

There is a point that is worth making though: when the site was focused on startups it was a much nicer place and people posting new things got help in the comments section rather than just commentary and opinions. That has been lost mostly because of the growth in users but I can't help think that the increase in scope had a negative impact too.

[brudgers]

I think the change in proportion of news devoted to startups is at least partially driven by changes to business journalism and business in general. Covering startups as startups is much more common in mainstream business journalism. Culturally, "startup" has become associated with a larger cluster of concepts than it was five years ago and it is not surprising when I see a new small business referred to as a startup. A few years ago, 10 Strategies for Marketing my Startup would be more likely to fall in the intersection of useful and actionable and interesting. These days the level of general knowledge about startups is higher (e.g. Altman's Stanford class and recent handbook). There was a time when "growth hacking" was an HN "trending topic". Today, we live in a time where it's been dissected and found to be a poor fit for a startup's core business strategy.

The third factor is that I think the standards of HN have become higher. Many of the VC blogs that used to make the front page look a bit flat compared to today's median...it used to be that the the 200-500 word daily thoughts and opinions of "important" people made the front page despite lacking supporting evidence. These days that seems less common.

[thenomad]

Definitely. I read HN to get content I can't get anywhere else, specifically useful, actionable content.

If I want to read articles from Vice, The Atlantic or the NYT, there are plenty of other places for those to bubble up.

[dang]

What are some examples of 'actionable' content?

[bjwbell]

Brian Kernighan's recent lecture on language design, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU, is an example (not sure if it was on hacker news). I'm working on SIMD in Go and don't want to make avoidable mistakes.

[dang]

That got significant attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595195.

I'd particularly like to see examples of the kind of content people think used to appear on HN and doesn't anymore. My guess is that this is more nostalgia bias than reality, but if that's wrong, we need to know.

[thenomad]

Here are a couple of examples of the kind of content that I think would have been upvoted 5-6 years ago, but nowadays seems to die in the /new queue or not even make it that far.

They're not truly stellar, outstanding examples because I don't have enough time to dig through 100 to find 5 that would fit, but I found them pretty interesting and think that 6 years ago they would have gotten at least some upvotes and discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606780 - actionable suggestions backed up by practical experience. Slightly shilling his new startup, but also interesting and worth a read. I added it to my bookmarks. 1 upvote in the /new queue, from me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606876 - Found on Medium, wasn't even submitted to HN. Interesting discussion, actionable advice, focused on very HN-centric topic (Lean Startup). No upvotes so far.

Overall, I find that I have better luck discovering this kind of content on HN these days from reading /new than reading the front page. However, that still involves kissing a LOT of frogs because of the /new signal-to-noise ratio. I almost never see this sort of content make it to the front page in 2015.

Again, hope this feedback's useful!

[dang]

Very helpful. Thank you!

Edit: it might be beneficial to discuss this further. If you'd like to do that, email us at [e-mail].

[thenomad]

I've been meaning to test to see if I'm subject to nostalgia bias on this. Any suggestions for how to do so?

FWIW, I have a VERY strong feeling that the content on HN has shifted since about five years ago, to the point that I've been trying to find a site that has more of the entrepreneurship / practical advice that I used to see on HN a lot. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190783 )

However, I don't have data to back it up (yet).

I can't swear that these things don't appear on HN any more, but in terms of what I'm looking for, and used to find on HN, I'd say stuff like Brennan Dunn or Jason Cohen's writing on practical entrepreneurship:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/unprofitable-saas-business-model.... http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.htm... http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/the-freelancers-guide-to-re...

I very, very rarely see posts like that upvoted on HN any more. And if it does briefly appear, it tends to get significantly downvoted and criticised - I recall an Empire Flippers article recently that took a lot of flak in the comments section (despite defence from Patio11 amongst others) and disappeared.

More tech / programming-focused stuff bubbles up with some regularity, but the micro-ISV / lifestyle business and even startup advice hardly ever appears from what I see.

Hope that feedback is useful!

[elif]

I definitely see your perspective and agree with you in principle.. but on the other hand, for a lot of these topics it is really difficult to find a forum for intelligent and at least superficially science/fact-based discussion from more-informed-than-average people.

I also think that macro economics are pretty important if you're trying to divine a profit from the startup world. If you believe we're in a bubble, you can't really afford to not be aware of what's happening in both the financial markets and consumer markets..

[jdminhbg]

The problem is that once you allow that crack in the wall, articles that generate outrage and comments and clicks all flood through. For example, on the front page right now is this article about pharma pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10595041. Is it likely to draw measured, informative comments about how your business should approach pricing and PR, or is it likely to draw yet another tedious flamewar about health care policy?

I think it's reasonable that knowing macroeconomics news is important to running a business, but it's not the case that everything that's important to running a business has to be on HN. It's hard to run a business if you are constantly fighting with your spouse/partner/whatever, but that shouldn't mean flooding the front page with relationship advice.

[tedmiston]

Do you think breaking HN into (algorithmically determined) categories or "subHNs" would help?

[noonespecial]

I'm with you. But I've made my peace with it and found a way to make it useful. Most of the news these days is click/flame bait. I just check HN first. The top rated comments on most of these stories is a pretty good barometer of if I need to care or not. Usually not.

HN is a meta-filter for mainstream news if you use it right.

But yes. Very yes. The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed. A front page full of hope and awesome was a welcome sight each morning.

[dang]

> The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed.

Are you sure there are less of those? I'm not. Certainly they're as on topic as ever, and continue to make the front page. I'm not aware of a lot of such stories that get submitted but not upvoted.