I think there's something to this - there's a plethora of websites sprouting up using the 'Hacker News for ___'. The semi-casual-professional platform makes sense for most industries. I work in arts/film, and although it probably wouldn't work for us, I'd love to see it done.

I traditionally come here for the non-technical stuff so it'd be a great way to get specific. Otherwise, there are news sites which allow the user to deselect certain subject matter and leave the rest. Also an option.

I'm running http://www.trejdify.com/ which is like HN but with business news only, and I have a modified spam-filter that sorts the articles automatically in the different categories. Maybe HN needs something similar?

How do you do the sorting?

I've thought about doing something similar with the metadata of posted urls but obviously that might be ridiculously easy to game.

I use the same spam filter as in the book "Programming collective intelligence"

It should definitely be a thing! I'd love to see a separate politics subHN. Or the one with all the Medium posts ;)

I could see how hashtags or tags could work as well.

Lobsters[1] is the closest equivalent to "HN with tags"

[1] https://lobste.rs/

Are people misusing the system as in do they add all tags available to get more traffic? I saw one who added these tags to one link: "assembly c compsci go java lisp lua php python scala"

The more tags post has, the less people will see it because users have an option to hide posts with certain tags. And of course moderators are there to adjust the tags if necessary.

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I was imagining.

Unfortunately it's invite only.. To each their own.

The site is pretty much dead anyways. Note how there is only one story on the frontpage atm with a single comment. But the code is somewhere in github if you want to make your own.

this would appear to be it: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters

That would turn it into reddit. The purpose of HN is to promote YC, and not to make it into a general link aggregator.

And yet, it's a forum and to a degree, also a link aggregator. If it's only purpose was to promote YC, only YC members would have accounts, but people already discuss all kinds of things here, not all of which directly relate to Y Combinator.

People keep complaining as the site grows that the content no longer reflects their particular views. To me, there are two possible solutions to this, or three, if you count "just ignore it": enforcing a more narrow definition of what can and can't be posted, or else smarter filtering of content.

I agree. But, the purpose is to promote YC. It may have started as something else, but this website is more powerful than a lot of big name news outlets. Money is made here, believe it or not. That is why a change in the formula is not something that may happen. Why change something that is already helping YC make lots of money?

I can certainly see how, if it's working, they might not want to 'fix' it. But... users who feel better served by the content they get here might be more inclined to stick around, participate, become involved and eventually apply. Each of these "hacker news for x" sites that pop up are clearly attempts to exploit what appear to be gaps in what Hacker News provides, and maybe by extension they're taking a bit of the focus off YCombinator itself. Apps like hnnotify are providing functionality that could be added to the site.

Just because it happens to be making money now doesn't necessarily mean some aspect of the design isn't keeping them from making even more money.

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But, let me ask you something: Would HN become what it has become without a strict dictator?

Maybe, maybe not.

The morphology of the site must in some way shape the interaction between users, and by extension the way they perceive the community as a whole. Different decisions both in policy and in design would lead to at least subtle differences in what Hacker News is.

But i'm not confident that adding a feature to organize the posts a bit more necessarily undermines something fundamental about the nature of HN. Nor do I think the only thing keeping this place civil is pg keeping his thumb on the ban button.

Like reddit?