Dear HN: please use "flag" more often
3 comments
Every medium.com story should be added to the list.
medium.com articles are already super-heavily punished such that they rarely make the front page.
Yet at least once a day a Medium story manages its way to the frontpage.
I'm sticking with the first rule: "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." - it's like the Prime Directive of HN.
I'm sticking with the first rule: "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." - it's like the Prime Directive of HN.
Examples currently on the front page that are not by any stretch "hacker news": "one man has written virtually every pop song in the last 20 years", "why is the american dream dead in the south". Also suspect: D&D's 40th birthday (sure, nerds care, but does this make me smarter?) and a Roman glass gaming die that's for sale at Christie's (are we Craigslist?).
I know why these articles get submitted: they are interesting, so they get up-voted, and HN has karma points, so people try to get more of them. Merely refraining from up-voting these things isn't enough -- HN has a lot of general audience traffic these days who will up-vote without considering relevance.
And yes, I know crying "this isn't news for hackers!" is basically the same as old fogies who used to cry "this isn't news for nerds!" on Slashdot. But look what happened to Slashdot. You have the power to preserve the relevance of HN to hackers, by flagging stuff that is off-topic, even if it's really interesting.