[lt]

I've long had this notion that there are two kinds of content on a site like HN:

- temporal, like news, announcements, analysis and discussion on current events. It's usually irrelevant after a while, it gets stale fast.

- atemporal, like essays, history, theory, articles, knowledge in general that while it may get superseded, expanded or invalidated over time, it's interesting content that you learn from, from a current or historical perspective.

While the first kind tends to get more attention due to the clickbaity nature, I much prefer the second kind and wonder if a site focused solely on that would be more interesting.

[davnicwil]

I know where you're coming from, but I think the shallower current events type discussions bring a lot of value in holding a mirror up to the deeper, more theoretical and timeless pieces.

It's about keeping them honest. You know the latter have value if you see their themes and lessons play out frequently in the former.

A decent test of the most useful theory is how often it's relevant and referenced in shallow quick fire current events discussions.

[Majestic121]

A similar concept is the book serie 'A Map that Reflects the Territory' : https://www.lesswrong.com/books.

It's a selection of essays that were written for the LessWrong community, and the community voted for the best essays 2 years after publication, ensuring that only the 'atemporal' ones got into it.

[dredmorbius]

You can generalise this to much document-style information (in the Paul Otlet sense).

Nothing has the lack of persistence that news does. (Though a surprising amount of "news", for reasons closely related to this rapid-staling and unpredictable nature of it, is actually repackaged evergreen or procedural content.)

At the same time, there's little that's as timeless as highly-insightful observations or commentary. These can live on for years, decades, centuries, or millennia.

(I suspect that copyright attacks both ends of this equation, by creating moats around current material to keep it in flow, and by denying markets to older material, which would otherwise compete with the new. This has limits imposed by works which were in fact subject to copyright in the first place, which is most works published since January 1, 1926, in the US.)

I'm finding classic works, philosophy, and much academic publishing to be far more interesting than news, of late.

[pr0crastin8]

I feel much the same way but I'd like to add some support for having the former type of content on HN.

You do get a large response of unqualified opinions, anecdotes and repetitive arguments/flamewars but, amongst the 'noise', you can roughly cluster voices, average out within clusters and get an idea of the range of (mostly) intellectual opinions held.

This 'fuzzy' information won't be neatly laid out as with the atemporal articles but to me it acts almost like a primary resource surveying what the HN community (whatever that represents in reality) believes at a point in time.

[hyperpallium2]

Yes. I think this also aligns with the origins of HN as "startup news" (news is temporal), which was expanded to "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" (timeless) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Suggest: two sites

[Chris2048]

Agree, and while the former might best be represented on a dated "timeline", esp as an ongoing thing of related events; The latter is maybe best as a "slow journalist"/"community wiki" style of aggregating useful comments.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

MetaFilter might be for you then