Comment by mattmaroon
17 years ago
I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I'd argue that we should simply flag accounts as hackers, thereby, by definition, greenlighting anything they post, except I wouldn't be one of them.
Vanity Fair, Matt? That's what you want to see on this site? Look, I enjoy your blog but if HN starts with the NYT, VF, US News, et al posts all day long, this won't be a place you or I want to visit. And that's the problem everyone one of us (myself included) who post as the off-topic police are trying to prevent. We have a fun group and this is not where we come to get news; this is where we come to talk to other really smart people about hacker/startup-related topics.
I know nothing about Vanity Fair, but that article was good. So yeah, that's what I want to see here.
When you post as the off-topic police, you're defining off-topic in a different way than this site's guidelines suggest, and that is what I find annoying.
> I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police.
Do you think I should submit this link?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin
(I read it today to satisfy my intellectual curiosity.)
I'm interested in Isaiah Berlin too, but I wouldn't submit that link. It's not particularly good. It probably wouldn't get many hackers interested in Isaiah Berlin. But if you felt the article was particularly good, I don't see why you shouldn't go ahead and post it. It would be within the HN guidelines to do so.
It's impossible to follow the guidelines precisely, because good hackers aren't all interested in the same things. For any post outside the safety zone of, say, programming, startups, math and maybe physics, there will be some good hackers who aren't interested. But it doesn't follow that others won't like it a lot. The trouble with the "off-topic police" is that they're trying to speak for all hackers about what's not interesting. Le HN c'est moi.
Edit: How about this? Do you think I should submit it? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858701285435131.html
Sure. Though I generally dislike Wikipedia entries, this is meant to be a marketplace of ideas, rather than a site that appeals to my tastes above all.
I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.
I am tired as well, with all these off-topic articles. Giving it is a rest is a bad idea, since that will only accelerate HN going the reddit way. For all practical purposes it is going that way, just that you are helping accelerate it.
But they are, by definition, not off-topic. Given PG's guidelines, for something to be off-topic it has to not gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity and not be of interest to any hackers.
So to say that something is off-topic here, you have to be willing to assert that it is not of interest to any hackers, which means that whoever posted it and whoever voted it up are not hackers. Are you willing to assert that for something that now has 22 points? I wouldn't be willing to assert that for anything that was submitted at all unless it were blatant spam.
It seems that everything posted here is, by definition, either spam or on-topic. Perhaps you are looking for a social news site that defines on-topic as being CS-related, but at least according to the current guidelines, that is not this site.
That's why I'm constantly annoyed at the off-topic police. They're trying to make this site into what they wish it were, rather than what it is. Please reread the stated purpose of this site and explain to me how it is possible that that article does not fall within the guidelines.
Edit: I would appreciate that anyone who downmodded this explain my logical error. Not because I care about the karma, but because I'd like to see at least a reasonable explanation as to how I'm incorrect.
I like articles like this, but what I'm really worried about is the fact that they attract non-hacker types who just want to talk politics. Next stop: reddit. First come articles like this, then more, good, interesting in-depth articles about Obama, then just plain old Obama articles, then McCain is a big old dufus articles, and so on down the drain. See, for instance, maxklein's comment below. That's exactly what I fear happening when these types of articles turn up.
Perhaps we could create a HN-offtopic on some site that implements social news, by invite only, for HN users, and use that for politics/economics/whatever. Any other ideas for a constructive solution to this problem(+) that don't involve lots of PG's time?
(+) With "the problem" being defined as: "we are interested in off topic articles, but are afraid of what they'll do to the site in the long term".
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I bet someone could through together a formula for the best ratio of article types to keep the site both growing and hacker focussed.
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