Some alternative sites do this (for HN content) by AI :

https://histre.com/hn/

https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack

The most interesting things can't be categorized.

Tags, then?

Funny that's how I handled it[0]--by categorizing the uninteresting/populist things and the remaining will contain some of the most interesting ones.

Amazing what a couple handfuls of regexs can do. I do need to update that list[1].

[0] https://hackerer.news/

[1] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news

I do that. Many of my links come from HN. https://snafuhall.com/

I think they'd rather have one community rather than multiple communities oriented around different subjects. (See Reddit)

I have been thinking about making a classification model for "things that might be posted to Hacker News" and was thinking about training it on

https://tildes.net/

There are too many submissions which happen to touch many categories at once. This is almost impossible to do.

Why impossible?

When you submit URL: NH offers few general categories in a mandatory field. OP chooses most suitable. Homepage provides filters: ALL / CAT1 / CAT2 / CAT3.

Nothing drastically changes, but helps with content consumptions significantly. For example, I might be interested only in hardware stories, so I'll click on the HARDWARE cat/tag whatever.

Who does the categorizing? Sounds like unnecessary complication, Reddit already handles this niche.

User when posting.

I think things are fine as they are. You can get a gist of the subject from the title (at least after dang gets to it). If I want more, the search has been super helpful.

As others have mentioned, there are alternative HN frontends that attempt to do this. I personally would not trust submitter-categorized submissions, especially as more Redditors flee to HN.

Histre is a site/browser extension that adds (AI-generated) tags to HN: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/35904988

HN has a minimal tagging system based on the title:

- Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

- Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/show

- etc (some people create their own, like "Tell HN", "Thank HN")

Absolutely agree. It would enable users to follow their `special' topics without having to churn through every other topic as well. Hopefully HN and AI will have a love child, soon?