[philipodonnell]

> the result of having HN filled with these Facebook non-stories is that I'm going to stop taking an interest in them.

> the public at large do feel that they are surprising and shocking.

Not OP, but I don't think the point is that its a non-story to the public at large, I think the point is that its a non-story to anyone reading HN, which is decidedly not the public at large.

I get where they're coming from. If I go to reddit or local news and see a bunch of Facebook non-stories I would tend to discount that as the public finally waking up to this. When I come here and see a Facebook article I immediately assume it is important and I need to pay attention because the audience here is so different than reddit/local news. If I can't trust HN to filter for only truly important stories then I'll start to treat it like Reddit and look for a better source for truly important news, which would be a shame.

[chickenfries]

> If I can't trust HN to filter for only truly important stories

The HN frontpage is a pretty poor proxy for "importance." It's simply whatever the users of HN find interesting. AFAIK, there is no "only upvote truly important" stories rule.

[philipodonnell]

That's fair. I was using important to mean "worth spending the time to read" as my interests are fairly well aligned with the HN community (at least as far as my interest in Facebook-related news). Though over time audiences change, so as more of these non-stories continue to proliferate, perhaps HN is becoming more targeted to the interests of the general public and I should accept that or move on.