You've only made 3 submissions yourself. HN isn't a service being provided to you, whereby you sit and expect it to present you with interesting stories.
Please do not make this a personal attack on me, one member of the community.
I argue that submitting nothing is better than submitting garbage links. Additionally, I am not bringing the site down by voting up egregious headlines.
I think what kyro is trying to say is, if you don't like what you see on HN - why not submit the type of articles you'd like to see, hopefully starting a trend?
imho it doesn't help that your post sounds more like whiny bitching than constructive criticism
but look at the behavior of the community right now. The highest voted comment on this post is basically a "screw you dude" and all of my responses are downvoted without any reasons given.
Below in comments I stated what I personally would like to see change, but that too is downvoted without explanation.
These reactions are reinforcing my original point: Though many precautions were taken, Hacker News is no more immune to large group behavior than were Digg and Reddit. The community has reached a tipping point.
You essentially just called a community stupid. When provoked with such nonconstructive criticism, I'm not sure why you would expect said community to respond with anything but "No, you're stupid."
This is exactly one of the problems. People downvote because it is how they feel not because there is any logic to it. Unless the negative points reaches threshold, it is suspect. Downvoting should also consist of a comment as to why. When a professor marks your paper wrong, does he not place things on it like "W.C." and so on? How are people supposed to learn from their mistakes if they think what they wrote was reasonable yet some HN user comes along, misunderstands what was written, and just votes it down?
I downvoted you because you quickly played the "personal attack" card in the same breath as you laid all the blame for what you perceive as a slide in HN quality at the feet of those who upvote different stories than you would -- which amounts to a personal attack. The obvious loop in your argument makes your comment uninteresting.
Are basic electromagnetic principles big news to such a large segment of the populace? (A segment that is internet-savvy and fancies itself as being more sophisticated somehow.) Unfortunately, when basic physics comes up with my Stanford-educated girlfriend, I see more evidence of how far the US education system has degenerated. (When I explain, she gets it, but the education system simply didn't effectively equip her with the knowledge.)
Not only do they not know, they don't even have a framework for knowing the magnitude of their ignorance.
And the cycle continues. Diggeres move to reddit and complain about digg all day. Redditors move to Hacker News and complain about Reddit all day. You will all be bitching about HN as soon as you find another home, I'm sure.
Hacker news is becoming digg.com with all the Hacker News related content. This is one of the reason I stopped going to digg.com. It was becoming annoyingly self serving and distracting to the original purpose of the site.
What you can do is filter the results using searchyc. If you are only interested on start up reviews search something like "ask hn review" and grab the rss.
That doesn't sound like "Hacker News" at all. That sounds like "Startup News". Why are people building websites the only ones you find helpful? Why are academic subjects bad?
I agree that there are more than a few links that don't interest me, but that doesn't mean I throw up my arms and say, "Well, that's it! This site has jumped the shark!"
a community made exclusively of people actually building websites
Do you actually believe that "Startups" and "Hackers" ONLY build websites?
Assuming that you yourself "actually build websites", this seems like a good project to take on. The HN code is open source, it would be neat to see someone make an adaption of HN that fits the spirit of what they believe the site should be about.
I'd be very curious to see what the community and activity level around such a site would look like.
I think you're just at the wrong site. A community made exclusively of people building websites would exclude a lot of smart and interesting people. That's only a small subset of hackers, even in the narrow sense of the word.
In the end, what it comes down to is that you want something (which I also want, except for limiting new members) which is personalized. I couldn't agree more. HN is too general. There needs to be a way to customize, and only a client-side script won't do.
