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Ask HN: Could there be a Hacker News for 'all news'?

6 points| late | 9 years ago | reply

The question, in short, is in the headline.

Hacker News is a great source of computer science and startup related news from different corners of the Internet [1]. Sure, one could argue there is a slight bias towards Silicon Valley & the US in what's getting up-voted and commented on, but overall, the quality of things to read here and the related comments are generally of high value. This is, as evident, all thanks to the active community with little tolerance towards internet memes, jokes and non-value-adding information.

So dear HN, could there be a Hacker News for ‘all news’? Or do you think time and other ways to share information has passed the idea?

Sure, there is Reddit and other social media that can be used for the same purpose to some extent, but given HN rightfully serves a purpose of its own, it’s difficult not to think that the same news-centric-community-thinking (for a lack of a better term) could be valued in other contexts as well. Would highly value your insightful thoughts on whether this is something worth solving, or testing out.

[1] Based on purely subjective view by reading and following HN on a daily-basis for several years.

6 comments

[+] philiphodgen|9 years ago|reply

I think you can partly answer the question by looking at /r/news or similar subreddits. Why are those subreddits the way they are? Why is HN what it is?

A part of the answer is that HN does not attract the Great Bellcurve of Humanity. This helps in a variety of ways. Irrelevant, noisy, obnoxious people are less likely to be on HN. Reasonable minds may differ on this point. :-)

Another more important reason -- and why I think a generalized "news" site would fail -- is because it is difficult to define what is newsworthy. Here on HN it is easier to pick out the outliers (hint: they have the word "Trump") in the title) and flag them away.

But by far the most important reason is the presence of good moderators. HN has great moderators, who ply their trade quietly, with good will.

Good moderation doesn't scale. It requires individuals. Attempts at automating its effects seem only partly effective.

In the eternal fight of department stores vs boutiques, boutiques will win, because there is a human there.

[+] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply

r/truetruetruetruetruenews/ is pretty good though.

[+] thebarrywe|9 years ago|reply

You could build an app on top of the Big RSS data channel on Satori. Just have it filter all RSS feeds to surface only what you want to read by subject, focus, etc.

[+] late|9 years ago|reply

Somehow had completely missed this. While it doesn't answer the community-aspect which I consider the real source of value behind Hacker News, Satori's RSS data seems quite interesting from a technical standpoint. Thank you.

[+] lsiebert|9 years ago|reply

My go to for that sort of thing is metafilter.com. They charge a 1 time fee of $5 which cuts down on astroturfing, comment spam, etc, plus they have really good paid 24/7 moderation. They also don't sell or share your personal data.