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Ask HN: Too much soap opera news as of late?
84 points by vishaldpatel on May 21, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments
So am I the only one that has noticed the rise of company-vs-company soap opera news. All these he-said-she-said stories and analysis.

Is it just me or is HN turning into more a CNN type outlet than hacker news (useful / fun shit we should care about)?

And who's upvoting it all to the frontpage anyway? Why?? :-/




There are also too many meta-posts, which is why I almost killed this one.

Yes, there have been a lot of fluff posts about Facebook, Apple, and Google lately. These posts are not so harmful in themselves. The problem is that they are too easy to upvote.

But it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things return to normal.

It may happen that one day things never return to normal, of course, but based on experience so far I'm inclined to give these runs of bad stories time to run their course before worrying about them.

I have been gradually adding protections against fluff posts. E.g. "Ask HN" posts like this have for a long time had an automatic penalty applied when being ranked on the frontpage. I'm always mulling over other things I could do. But we're definitely not out of options.


The problem is that we seem to go from one soap opera (App Store 3.3.1) to the next soap opera (Faceboook privacy settings) with barely any break for sanity in between.


This might be a matter of recent circumstance. iPad release, Apple's new developer guidelines, Gizmodo iPhone scoop, the Facebook privacy hubbub, and Google IO happened one right after the other. We could just be experiencing an uncommonly dense (and hopefully short) sequence of sensational tech news events.


Or maybe pace of change is increasing.


Or we could be experiencing the future…


If you don't like it, the best way to do your part is to submit lots of great stories of the kind of stuff you'd like to see, and to upvote good stories in the "new" queue. If more people did this, the overall quality of the site would benefit.


I think there are too many stories, it's like a firehose. We should concentrate on killing more bad stores so the amount of stuff on Hacker News is a reasonable amount for someone to read.

Quality, not quantity.


I notice the patterns a lot because I frequently check HN, I'm sure the people who check only daily rarely actually see a pattern on a long basis. If it takes 2-3 readings of different subject articles to get your fill, we who check frequently have read all we want or need on Facebook Privacy Settings on Monday, however those who only check daily are only getting their fill on Wednesday.

At least that's my perception of the pattern.


A lot of these 'soaps' can be rolled in to one, if there is a significant overlap between stories linked on the front page and a new entry it could just count as a comment in the existing thread and an upvote for that thread instead of getting a new thread of its own.

That way the number of stories is limited to one per soap per day.

Tricky to build though. But at least that would concentrate all the relevant discussion to a single thread.


True, could be the answer is to group stories, Techmeme style.


Anecdotally, a couple days ago I noticed that 13 of the top 20 stories were about Google.


Maybe due to all the announcements from Google IO?


Here's a suggestion: figure out the 'topic' words in the subject (shouldn't be too hard to do a moderately good job by looking at word frequencies in the titles submitted so far and whitelisting/blacklisting some); start attaching a penalty to each topic word based on how many stories were submitted recently, how many votes/comments they got, and a time decay. The goal is to make it so that a story about a very frequently seen topic will need more upvotes to climb higher in the rankings.


There might even be some room for auto-moderation with regard to the both the quality of the content (for links) and the subject matter (being the tenth post in an hour linking to an article on the same subject would result in a lower position on the front page). I'm working on a maybe-startup involving text classification that might be able to do just that.


I don't know whether this is good or bad, but that would also protect against Erlang floods.


I like the 'Ask HN' post a little more than the average post. I did not know there was an automatic penalty to an 'Ask HN' post, maybe that is why I like them a little bit more... only the really good ones float to the top.


I thought he was referring to the meta-type 'Ask HN' posts . . .


But it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things return to normal.

Agreed. Perhaps restricting self posts to those who have been active members in the site for a long time (karma count?) could help that. Given that upvotes have a karma min, I don't think that putting a karma min on self posts is unreasonable.


I think one important distinction is between stories about companies/products and stories about people. Perhaps you could penalize stories with "Zuckerberg", "Jobs", etc. in the title?


What if there was a way to label topics into some sort of folder-like system? I think the hacker news community would be happy to self enforce a categorization so when we go through one of these cycles, all related threads would show under one trending topic thread. I'm not sure how this could be programmed in. But it's an idea.

If a thread on the home page has a keyword like Google or Facebook or Apple or iPad then there should be a high penalty for other threads with the same keywords.


Do you think it might be possible to do individual scoring?

As an example for what I'm getting at, lets say I upvote a story that jondoe also upvoted, when I see a another story upvoted by jondoe instead of his vote counting for one, it counts for two just for me.

Is there any way to get this data so that I might be able to do a greasemonkey script to do the calculations in the browser?


I gather you're against just excluding both categories entirely. Why? (I don't have an opinion.)


You're not wrong. There is a lot of drama on the front page.

Maybe what's happening is that nobody particularly wants "drama", but they do (overtly or subconsciously) take sides in these things, and they vote up stories that confirm their theories.

In any case, I'm not concerned about this (to provide one data point). What I am concerned about are the meta-stories about it. I feel like I can ignore the Apple vs. Google stuff, but that the meta stories might produce HN policy, and so I feel like I need to read them.


I think it is mostly because of a very limited number of sites that seem to spin very large amounts of yarn out of a very limited amount of fibre.

There is hardly any substance to any of that stuff. Why X leaves facebook, why famous IT personality (in their own minds) Y has ritually burned their iPhone and will now use the one and true Android and so on.

Case in point, the current #5: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367616

We could lose it easily, not to mention the 'Today is draw the prophet day', because that so brought out the best of HN.

Maybe it's time for some stricter flagging.


>Maybe it's time for some stricter flagging.

I've only been flagging spam, in faith that HN is self correcting. But I've been getting annoyed more frequently, and am about to re-consider my position on flagging. Maybe a "flag more" culture should be encouraged?


I think flagging HN-inappropriate posts is completely reasonable. I don't hesitate to flag posts which I consider to be contrary guidelines. This kind of empty sensationalism is technical but intellectually bankrupt in my eyes.


I would like to see more programming and hacking on Hacker News again. Lately I've been seeing programming articles floundering in New and never making it to the front page.

Bit of a shame, really. It used to be I only needed to go to HN to get my fill of technical discussion. Now I'm not really sure where else to go. Perhaps someone has suggestions?


Someone mentioned http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/ in a comment a day or two ago. I've been enjoying it.

Edit - I found it in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094 which has a bunch of other suggestions.


I think there are too many "HN is going down the tubes for x reasons" self posts.

At any given time there are thirty (often unique) stories on the HN frontpage. From time to time some of them will be off-topic, link-bait, sensationalist. The current x vs y soap opera is not any worse than Apple vs Adobe opera or Apple vs Windows opera or any other opera for that matter. These are predictable patterns and happens ALL the time and anyone who has been hanging around long enough should know that.

I don't think it is any worse than last year or the year before that.


Frankly [my dear], I too have been finding the stories and the discussion here pretty dull lately. On-the-plus, I've been hitting f5 less frequently :).

Perhaps old-timers with good karma should have a higher weight to their story upvotes.

That, and we should start submitting more "appropriate" stuff that the old-timers would like and upvote, and their upvotes being heavier, these stories would propagate the frontpage.


I somewhat agree. So I think in future, if I visit the front page and see a lot of fluff, I'll check out /newest for things worth reading and upvote them. (And try to find things to submit, though it's not easy when most of my news is from HN or reddit in the first place.)

I'd encourage you (and others) to do the same, if you're not already.


http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365094


I think it's just because there's a lot more current soap-opera-type news lately. Google vs. Apple, Apple vs. Adobe, etc. Some of it is interesting. A lot of it is boring and repetitive. But it will pass. No site can ever completely escape a bit of TMZ, so there will always be some of it hitting the front page.


A lot of these were probably the result of the Google IO conference, which is now over (I think)? When the iPad was announced there was also too much iPad stuff for a while, but by now it seems to have settled a bit.

So just relax, things will be fine again.


I think there's just too many stories about Apple. Apple always makes for intesting topics but other sites will always cover Apple... I go to Hacker News for the deeper, rarer stuff.


I've only been here a short time. But I agree. I come here to find interesting tech articles, hacking, coding, whatever. I understand that the other items could be of interest, but really, after the 3rd facebook privacy/apple is the devil discussion, I think everyone has had enough.

It seems like we could meet everyone's needs with a simple tagging system.


There are some extraordinary events playing out right now. I think it would be unhealthy to ignore it. This is a huge sea change moment. It's going to impact everyone involved in the tech industry probably for decades to come.


Yeah. Enjoy the slow flow of users from reddit. From /r/technology to /r/android to /r/iphone, the general level of technical knowledge is pathetically low seen by the posts that were upvoted on android the last few days that ranged from fake twitter accounts to lies about the froyo platform and such




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