Yeah, HN needs subreddits. I really do not care about the medium tier SV people that get bought for $50m. I know they are friends with a lot of other people here, but the only time I care about an acquisition is if it it is either over $500m or from somebody from Toronto that I might know.

Also, I'm much more interested in data science nuts and bolts or technology's impact on foreign policy than I am about CSS or Go frameworks or libraries.

What HN really needs is self-organisation :) By remembering your votes and views and doing a bit of collaborative filtering the site can give you a 'filter bubble' where things you are quite likely to like float towards the top...

I prototyped and wrote a blog post about that too: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-... ;)

I too worked on this several years ago, and would like to revisit sometime. I created a browser extension to reorder the links on the front page by weighting links higher if the people that upvoted them had upvoted things you upvoted in the past.

There was a voting graph in the background. Nodes are users and edges between users are weighted by the total number of mutual upvotes they had over all stories. With this graph you could give more weight to a story to a particular user if "similar" users had upvoted it, and everyone sees a unique front page.

One of the hard parts was how to sort stories based on these new weighted links. HN never reveals how they sort, though there is some historical evidence when things were simpler. However I found if the sorting was linearly proportional to votes, and a power law in time, then it didn't matter so much what the particulars were, and you could still reorder posts in an HNy way.

If anyone wants to talk more about this I'd be happy to revisit this project! :-) Contact info is in my profile.

So this actually is counter productive. It leads to a loss of feeling that there is a shared space for everyone. It was in fact the original idea behind Reddit but they pivoted away from it. Also, I think Digg did something similar that tanked the company.

> By remembering your votes and views and doing a bit of collaborative filtering the site can give you a 'filter bubble' where things you are quite likely to like float towards the top...

The lack of such a "filter bubble" is why I actually treasure HN more than other similar news aggregation sites; it exposes me to ideas, sites, and viewpoints outside of those I'm normally interested in, whether I agree with them or not. :)

HN is a filter bubble, its just a collective filter bubble and not personalised.

(My prototype split above the fold into "unfiltered unrated" stories and the filtered stories, so everyone was always exposed to some irrelevancies.)

Or maybe just tags, then you could subscribe to tags of interest, e.g. 'security', 'AI'

To be honest that might be the thing I like most over Reddit's model. It prevents the echo-chamber effect and I get to see articles I normally might not have seen.