Or better yet, a simple userscript. That way a single script could be run on all modern browsers with a couple of small tweaks required for the big 3, and easily installable out of the box on Opera and Safari.
Not a bad idea in the geekier circles, but the idea of installing something that supports userscripts and then installing userscripts isn't an obvious step for many users, whereas Google pushes Chrome apps and extensions quite heavily as an easy thing to play with.
Or personal scoring and coloured thread titles to suit. This isn't about the HN ranking mechanism, it's about finding and highlights article titles that might be interesting to the user.
In my case it really is about filtering, though, rather than discovery.
I like seeing things I wouldn't specifically choose to see, but I know if it has 'bitcoin', 'snowden' or 'CIA' in it, it's almost never going to appeal to me.
But yeah, if it was generic enough, such a thing could be used to highlight or hide, appealing to both approaches.
http://hn-filter.appspot.com/#preset=AngularJS didnt spend much time but appears to be cookie based as this didnt work just by changing the preset in the url but opening in a different browser seemed to have taken the filter
It's either not case insensitive or matching parts of words, as it didn't filter this: Bitcoin?s roller-coaster ride gets wilder as Wall Street, China climb on (arstechnica.com)
So the upvote system is broken then? The users on this site upvoting the articles to the frontpage are not upvoting articles they actually care to read about?
Yeah, that'd be a perfectly reasonable claim. Upvotes (/flags) are a community measure and it's possible for the dynamics of the community, as moderated by the software, to result in the presence a bunch of Bitcoin articles which are only of interest to a subset of the readers, and a recurring annoyance to others. So why not have filters?
Heck, if all were right in the world, we wouldn't have Hacker News as a website per se, you'd have a Hacker News as some sort of "news group" cough on a standardized protocol, and you'd have client software that could filter that sort of thing for you automagically. :P
1) Only about 10% of HN readers have an account, thus many people do not have any voting or flagging rights at all.
2) The difference between making the front page or not making the front page is a few votes in a short time frame. A tiny number of people interested in a topic can easily skew that.
3) Not enough people visit new to upvote great content, comment on good and great content, and flag things that don't belong here.
4) Not enough people down vote comments that don't belong here.
Allowing people to filter articles makes HN a nicer place for those people. It's concerning that they may stop flagging articles that really don't belong here. Some of the Snowden articles were just pure political nonsense, with heated pointless threads.
Point 3 struck home. I've changed my textexpander snippet to take me to newest rather than the main page. Though I never get peeved at what is on the main page, I now wonder what I've been missing. Thanks.
I can't downvote anything, despite my account being active for more than a year. I would most definitely downvote a lot of stuff, but HN just won't let me.
The heart of your complaint is that you don't agree what people are upvoting is 'good and great content' - either from not registering to vote, or by voting for things you don't like.
That is completely subjective and does not mean the 'system is broken'.
You can add more keywords in the match function if thats what you meant. Anything more sophisticated should be coded as an extension / userscript rather than a bookmarklet.
Observing that Hacker News is using a collaborative filter and that bitcoin articles frequent the front page, one might be forgiven for concluding that bitcoin articles might be popular with the audience.
The poster wasn't hand-wringing and complaining "There shouldn't be Bitcoin articles on HN", but instead took initiative and created his or her own filter to have a HN article list closer to what he or she wanted.
It's reifying my desire to finish a Chrome extension I made a while ago that will blog any post on any "social" websites (HN would be one) that have certain keywords for certain periods of time.
That way, you could block live trends like "The Bachelor" you don't care about, or permanently block mentions of things you never want to see, or just temporarily "unfollow" someone.
I built the blocking but not the timing.
ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT ME this is cool. I like Bitcoin, will not use, but I'm 100% on board.
Someone should generalize this to a filter which removes articles discussing any of the n most important technological advances of our time. Why just make it for n=1?
A reverse-filter would be nice too - I'd like to see only Bitcoin articles, as the ones posted here tend to be much more interesting than ones that hit r/bitcoin
This mechanism would make a superb Chrome extension for the regular site. (Or, heck, any site with long lists of links.)
Try this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
Or better yet, a simple userscript. That way a single script could be run on all modern browsers with a couple of small tweaks required for the big 3, and easily installable out of the box on Opera and Safari.
Indeed, many extension could be implemented as simple userscripts and as such could reach a much wider audience.
Not a bad idea in the geekier circles, but the idea of installing something that supports userscripts and then installing userscripts isn't an obvious step for many users, whereas Google pushes Chrome apps and extensions quite heavily as an easy thing to play with.
With user-supplied words to filter too.
Or personal scoring and coloured thread titles to suit. This isn't about the HN ranking mechanism, it's about finding and highlights article titles that might be interesting to the user.
In my case it really is about filtering, though, rather than discovery.
I like seeing things I wouldn't specifically choose to see, but I know if it has 'bitcoin', 'snowden' or 'CIA' in it, it's almost never going to appeal to me.
But yeah, if it was generic enough, such a thing could be used to highlight or hide, appealing to both approaches.
It's 1994 on HN: Exclude all Web articles. Can't here it anymore.
This is not silly in the way that you think it is silly.
huh?
Rage.
Can you extend this with filtering all AngularJS articles as well? :)
http://hn-filter.appspot.com/#preset=AngularJS didnt spend much time but appears to be cookie based as this didnt work just by changing the preset in the url but opening in a different browser seemed to have taken the filter
And anything remade in pure CSS3.
Well done sir.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/well_...
How do I filter all these posts complaining about bitcoin?
How do I filter posts about filtering posts?
http://hn-filter.appspot.com/#preset=Filter%20HN
Filtering out "bitcoin" should do the job.
It's really interesting to click through the people who post these kinds of comments and see they only ever post in Bitcoin-related threads.
Aside: How much of your savings did you dump into it?
10% at the time
It's either not case insensitive or matching parts of words, as it didn't filter this: Bitcoin?s roller-coaster ride gets wilder as Wall Street, China climb on (arstechnica.com)
There are two bitcoin articles on the front page at the moment.
One is an explanation of the protocol.
The other is this one.
Where have you been the last 2 weeks?
Can I still complain?
X is not a problem at some fixed instant in time, therefore it is never a problem, right?
So the upvote system is broken then? The users on this site upvoting the articles to the frontpage are not upvoting articles they actually care to read about?
Bitcoin'ers upvote everything mentioning bitcoin because they have a vested interest in people buying bitcoin.
Yeah, that'd be a perfectly reasonable claim. Upvotes (/flags) are a community measure and it's possible for the dynamics of the community, as moderated by the software, to result in the presence a bunch of Bitcoin articles which are only of interest to a subset of the readers, and a recurring annoyance to others. So why not have filters?
Heck, if all were right in the world, we wouldn't have Hacker News as a website per se, you'd have a Hacker News as some sort of "news group" cough on a standardized protocol, and you'd have client software that could filter that sort of thing for you automagically. :P
Yes, the upvote system is broken.
1) Only about 10% of HN readers have an account, thus many people do not have any voting or flagging rights at all.
2) The difference between making the front page or not making the front page is a few votes in a short time frame. A tiny number of people interested in a topic can easily skew that.
3) Not enough people visit new to upvote great content, comment on good and great content, and flag things that don't belong here.
4) Not enough people down vote comments that don't belong here.
Allowing people to filter articles makes HN a nicer place for those people. It's concerning that they may stop flagging articles that really don't belong here. Some of the Snowden articles were just pure political nonsense, with heated pointless threads.
Point 3 struck home. I've changed my textexpander snippet to take me to newest rather than the main page. Though I never get peeved at what is on the main page, I now wonder what I've been missing. Thanks.
Perhaps we need a user script that places the N latest /new submissions at the top of the main news page?
If they're not voting, then they don't really care much about what stories they see.
It's not like creating an account is a laborious process on this site.
I can't downvote anything, despite my account being active for more than a year. I would most definitely downvote a lot of stuff, but HN just won't let me.
Ridiculous.
The heart of your complaint is that you don't agree what people are upvoting is 'good and great content' - either from not registering to vote, or by voting for things you don't like.
That is completely subjective and does not mean the 'system is broken'.
A quick hack made in 10 minutes.
The "5000" length check is to avoid the upper nest of "tr".
I don't think that will deal with the weekly "BTC - $x" stories, unfortunately
You can add more keywords in the match function if thats what you meant. Anything more sophisticated should be coded as an extension / userscript rather than a bookmarklet.
if only there were a filter for all the articles glorifying Snowden.
Safari extension from almost 3 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2613271
Clearly we didn't know what we were going into.
If only there was a filter for concern trolling.
A community built around people making money on/from tech continually whining about content on the future of money in tech.
Observing that Hacker News is using a collaborative filter and that bitcoin articles frequent the front page, one might be forgiven for concluding that bitcoin articles might be popular with the audience.
The audience is heterogenous though.
The poster wasn't hand-wringing and complaining "There shouldn't be Bitcoin articles on HN", but instead took initiative and created his or her own filter to have a HN article list closer to what he or she wanted.
My buddy just made this https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unworthy/eboeobmfo... to do the same for Upworthy and Facebok.
It's reifying my desire to finish a Chrome extension I made a while ago that will blog any post on any "social" websites (HN would be one) that have certain keywords for certain periods of time.
That way, you could block live trends like "The Bachelor" you don't care about, or permanently block mentions of things you never want to see, or just temporarily "unfollow" someone.
I built the blocking but not the timing.
ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT ME this is cool. I like Bitcoin, will not use, but I'm 100% on board.
Is that headline generator from last week on the loose again?
Here's a similar 3 year old HN submission - "Greasemoney script to exclude all bitcoin articles" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2551753
Someone should generalize this to a filter which removes articles discussing any of the n most important technological advances of our time. Why just make it for n=1?
I like how this submission filters itself
Can I alter it to filter "San Francisco"?
A reverse-filter would be nice too - I'd like to see only Bitcoin articles, as the ones posted here tend to be much more interesting than ones that hit r/bitcoin
Would that I could upvote this more than once, this is clever and cool and functional.
A nicely scratched itch. +many.
Please add regex filtering for "X in Y lines of Z"