Comment by gruseom
17 years ago
You're talking as if the site guidelines don't exist.
Off-topic submissions are a smaller problem here than the kind of complaining you're engaged in. Looking through the HN posts I've upvoted, I see that I've learned things about history, music, language, physiology, mathematics, economics, and psychology, in addition to much about computing and startups. That's obviously the point of the site. People have been complaining about HN "turning into reddit" for a year or more. It hasn't, and it isn't.
The mechanism for politely expressing your tastes is the upvote. I see no evidence that it needs augmenting.
> You're talking as if the guidelines that have been established for this site don't exist.
They are, perhaps intentionally, rather fluid and vague. I mean, if you wanted to argue about it, you could say that the problems with Zimbabwe are politics, and certainly aren't new: they've been covering that country's decline for years in The Economist, and if I recall, had one of their reporters kicked out of the country.
Naturally, reasonable people will disagree. How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here? That some stuff seems uninteresting is a feature, not a bug; it's an aspect of the intellectual diversity that is the raison d'etre of the site.
Speaking of the guidelines, I don't think anyone pointed out the one that actually addresses the "off-topic police" explicitly:
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
> How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here?
I know this one! Hacking and startups:-) My concern is not 'uninteresting' at all, but the slippery slope that reddit went down, where a trickle of genuinely interesting articles on politics and economics became a flood of crap.
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I did not complain, I merely pointed out, in a fairly neutral tone, for other people like myself, that this article is not hacker news. That you chose to interpret it as a complaint is your problem.