I think that argues even more for flooding the front page with ultra-geeky stories. Several people (including me) discovered that we found a page full of Erlang stories more interesting than a lot of the more general common interest stories often found on the front page. We should try to create more "Erlang...Wow!!!" moments by promoting more articles with deeper content.

I tried to start a thread about promoting lots of deeper articles on a specific technical topic as a "theme of the day" kind of thing. The thread was killed, not sure if it was because it was thought to be an attempt at humor or if it just runs counter to the spirit of Hacker News. But I still think more articles with deeper content on the front page makes for a better Hacker News.

Permit me to disagree. The Erlang flood was not a favor to Erlang, from my perspective. Because if there is one thing I do not have it is the time to read an entire page full of in-depth links on a topic that I barely know the first thing about. Especially when at least half of those links aren't necessarily good: They were chosen mainly because their titles contained the word "Erlang". Yesterday was not about quality. It was about quantity.

All that yesterday accomplished for me was to create a subconscious association between Erlang and concepts like boring and spam and slushpile, an association which I must now work to overcome. Any good links in that pile were lost in the shuffle. And this is terrible, because the design of HN is such that a link cannot be submitted twice unless you find a way to hack its URL. (It's a perverse form of reverse SEO. I'm pretty sure that standard SEO advice is to give each piece of content a single, canonical link -- but text which is accessible by multiple URLs can be submitted multiple times to HN.)

If you want to promote excellent, deeper articles on a specific technical topic the correct plan is to release them gradually. Declare Wednesday to be Erlang Day and submit one Erlang link to HN each week. Or, if you want, declare Erlang Week and do one article per day. But don't waste our time. Don't overwhelm us with noise.

Actually it was the massive barrage of Erlang articles yesterday that convinced me to start learning Erlang.

The problem with Reddit was that it let users make their own reddits. That led to dilution. If PG were to divide Hacker News by his own pattern, we might maintain order.

That said, I'm against it. There's no need yet: the community's fairly intact.

I for one would be just as annoyed to see HN become purely programming/deep-tech oriented as I would be to find it turning into reddit/r/politics.

HN has a unique mix of contents that balances a lot of different interests. Please don't try to shove it one way or another.

I'm not an extremely avid programmer. I code, but my interests lie more in design. As such, I find that when we get into deeper, more technical moments - absolutely yesterday, with Erlang - I find that I've got nothing to contribute. On the other hand, when the conversation stays more social - not meaning off-topic, but rather focused on interesting unrelated subjects, with discussions about design and site launching and site events - I'm able to contribute more.

On the other side of the coin are people who are more interested in programming and less interested in that stuff, and the best part of the community is that both types of people have a place to talk to one another.

I've actually customized my reddit with sub-reddits, and I get more of my deep geeky stuff over there and more of my business-y stuff here.

It may have been a bit juvenile on my part, but I actually learned something from the experience. Not that I'm recommending repeating it daily or anything. :-)

To me, "Wow!" is an extreme form of "Interesting!" And by "interesting," I don't mean the same thing as "Capturing attention." The HN front page is full of stuff that captures attention, however "FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee Vivek Kundra" isn't interesting in the same sense that Boltzmann’s Universe (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/01/14/...) is interesting. The salient difference is that although the former is entertaining, it doesn't change me in any way. It isn't actionable.

Whereas the latter leaves me wondering, and I will still be thinking about its implications tomorrow.

So overall I would say that de-emphasizing attention-capturing stories is great, provided they are replaced by interesting stories. And when the traffic subsides, by stories that are interesting and attention-capturing.

And if so, won't that dilute the real identity of HN, actually making it more like that facade?

like a shamwow

already have shamazing used by my now-defunct blog.

1. HN is not a news filter website, it is a community. I am glad to be in this community.

2. HN as a web app is really a kind of a forum. It was shocking for me to realize this, because I hated forums from the days when they killed participation in mailinglists and irc in some of the communities I loved to be part of. I considered myself to be a person who "doesn't get" forums.

3. I am very interested to see how HN community will solve all those issues with filtering out trolls, foolish memes, menacing eternal september, boredom with the same type of news we will start to expect from each other and so on...

I hope to learn so much more :-)

I would hate to see too much forced change/active management to filter the user base, as I have learned an astounding amount from the links, the comments, and my observed behavior (compulsion/obsession?) with the site.

This is my first post, and so far, I have not had any content links to offer. I, for one, would be disappointed if I did not make the metric to continue to read/learn.

(Edited for correct grammar - sorry.)

4 points minimum is a start.