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Re:A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors by dang on Thursday February 21, 2019 @02:48PM (#19219943)
We are certainly not trying to keep non-technical users away. Where did you get that idea?

HN is for the intellectually curious. Many of the posts here are technical but there have always been plenty of non-technical discussions as well.

Re:A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors by krapp on Thursday February 21, 2019 @03:15PM (#19220186)
I was more referring to the community than the staff or its policies.

A lot of people here seem to believe the site is supposed to be for technical users and technical content onlym even though that never was the case. The negative impressions people seem to have about "turning into Reddit" or non-technical content diminishing the sites' quality feed into that stereotype, as does the belief that adding "features that reduce friction" would somehow dilute content.

But... the guidelines do use the qualifier "anything that good hackers would find interesting" for determining what's on topic, which does lead people to fill in the blanks for what a "good hacker" should find interesting.