[jasonkester]

Nice. Notice how it so neatly slices off exactly one demographic from here and transplants it over there, without anything that would distract them. It's focussed just on one topic: Software development stuff for Software Developers.

There are four main camps here at HN:

- "Software Entrepreneurs", building Big Important Startups or quaint little "lifestyle businesses" that let them drive their cute little "italian supercars" around their quaint little midwestern town.

- "Computer Programmers", talking about languages, deployment strategies, open source stuff and how to configure their dotfiles to automatically convert tabs to spaces.

- "Tech Gossip Afficianodos", excited about what Techcrunch has to say about who got funded, and taking sides in fights between giant corporations.

- And the guy who just wants to point out that pirating movies off the internet is technically just "copyright infringement" and therefore not bad at all (and really HBO's fault anyway.)

These guys grabbed just their team, and now they're free to talk shop without any of the myriad distractions they'd get trying to do it here.

It's a little selfish to note that I actually see this as a good thing for a slightly different reason: If Camp 2 leaves, that's more HackerNews for those of us in Camp 1, which is the reason I'm here. We'll still have to flag stuff from the other two distracting groups, but it just might make this place a little nicer as well. Everybody wins.

[Iv]

What amazes me is that in 2012 we still haven't found a decent auto-moderation tagging system that would allow these demographics to emerge naturally and we have to hope for someone to leave.

I just want 2 moderation buttons : "insighful" (make this contribution more visible) and "relevant to my interests" (make the things this user tags as insightful or relevant more visible to me. May include a partial transitivity of the "relevant to my interests" operator)

Does such a system exist? Is it flawed.

[manmal]

It's tempting to install such a system, but it would establish a strong tunnelblick for users. Also, what if I change my interests (interest reset button?)?

I could imagine an opt-out system, like "funding stories don't interest me at all", but then, Facebook's IPO would fall into that category and I followed it with interest.

[notyourwork]

I would assume you could tune or adjust your interests over time, similar to any other user specific preferences.

To your second point it is merely a matter or design choice. Does "funding stories as a whole" trump your more specific interest of Facebook IPO or does your specific interest in Facebook's IPO trump your desire to opt out of the funding stories as a whole.

The problem I see is making such a system intuitive to your user base and clear. It seems the more complex the system is the more complex the user preferences become.

[mjw]

Personally I thought the demographic here was supposed to be 'hackers'. I kinda wish the other various demographics would get a room:

- Silicon valley gossip scenesters - The "I read an Ayn Rand novel, would you like me to turn this into a debate about why Government Is Always Bad and Tax is Theft?" crowd - The "I know what would improve my productivity! spending all morning reading mediocre blog posts about productivity!" crowd - The business self-help book reading group.

Each to their own I guess :)

[thronemonkey]

There are also a few scientists!

[slurgfest]

I am puzzled - why do you want computer programmers to leave HN?

[jasonkester]

Same reason I'd prefer "Apple Sued Somebody! Better post it!" guy to leave. Not because he's a bad person or anything. Just that he clogs the homepage with things I don't care about.

Take a quick spin through the articles on the Lobster homepage. Lots of (presumably) good articles there, but not one that I'd consider clicking on because it doesn't interest me in the slightest (even though I make my living programming computers).

That sort of article tends to occupy about a third of the homepage here at any given time, likely pushing things that might actually help me build a software business out of the way. If they were gone, it'd make my life a little easier. That's all.

I definitely like computer programmers. I've spent the last 20 years working with them (and being one) every day. I'm just not all that interested anymore in hearing about how they configure their text editors. Or rather, I'd prefer they discussed that elsewhere. This site we're discussing seems like a great place for that.

EDIT:

Actually, thinking it through a bit more, I don't think that's my actual reason. It occurs to me that most of the "programming" talk that goes on here is actually quite good.

The thing is, there's a certain type of rank & file developer, who we're all familiar with, that is just plain no fun to be around. He's the super negative guy with a few "social issues" who's always complaining about how much things suck (and how stupid everybody is for not just doing X, which is obvious).

You can see that guy near the bottom of most threads here these days, with his snarky one line comment. Every once in a while he'll have the top comment on a thread or get in a loud fight with somebody. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the guy who really likes all those terrible distracting articles from camps 3 & 4. He's probably having a great time. But he's making the place worse. Making his behavior seem less unacceptable by virtue of it being visible as an example.

My hope was that he'd leave with the rest of the programmers, but I bet you're right that he would be the one guy who'd get left behind. So you'd still get the snarky negativity piled onto every launch announcement, but we'd lose a bunch of smart people.

So yeah, scratch that part. You're right.

[thomasjoulin]

But this website name is Hacker News. Configuring text editors is closer to hacking than talking who got funded no ? I think the combination of the two groups makes HN interesting. We probably all agree that the two last groups are the one we want to avoid.

[thaumaturgy]

It was originally called Startup News.

[thomasjoulin]

Thanks for the trivia, I had no idea. Anyway doesn't change my point : Hacker News née Startup News is great because of these two cultures.