Movatterモバイル変換

As of today we've expanded the focus ofnews.ycombinator.com fromnews about startups to news interesting to hackers generally. Toreflect that we've changed the name to Hacker News.

Now that the code behind news.yc is fairly robust, we'd been thinkingof spinning off a more general news site. We wanted to try torecreate the way reddit felt back in 2006, when the users weremainly hackers. As reddit became more popular, its focus inevitablychanged. This was good for most users, but it left some of theearlier ones feeling left out. We wanted to createa new home for people like us.

Then we thought, why not just make news.ycombinator.com be thatsite? Frankly, we ourselves were getting a bit bored reading storiesabout nothing but startups. And if we were, so probably were a lotof users. Paradoxical as it sounds, the thing that makes hackerssuch good startup founders is that they care about more than business.They have intellectual curiosity driving them as well as the desireto make money. So the way to make a news site for startup foundersis to make it be about more than just startups.

The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackerswould find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking andstartups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer mightbe: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

It may be easier to say what that doesn't include. It doesn'tinclude most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unlessthey're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. It doesn'tinclude videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.Basically, if they'd cover it on TV news, it's off-topic.

Of course, it's easy to have a good site when you start out with acore group of smart users. How do you keep it good as more peoplefind out about it? We think we have an answer to that. We're goingto have a group of human editors who train the system in what countsas a good story. Each user's voting power will then be scaled basedon whether they vote for good stories or bad ones. This shouldprotect us against the arrival of users who vote up dumb stories.The worse stuff a user upvotes, the less effect their future voteswill have. And vice versa: someone who consistently recommendsinteresting stories will be rewarded with a louder voice.

The other thing we're determined to do is keep the comment threadscivil. We're going to aggressively ban spammers, trolls, and meanpeople. The policy will evolve over time, but here is the coreprinciple: don't say anything in a comment thread that you wouldn'tsay in person. And in particular, no ad hominems. If you dislikesomething someone has said, point out why it's mistaken, insteadof making remarks about them personally.

Most forums degrade over time, but we don't think that's inevitable.We're determined to keep this site good, because we use it ourselves.