I think it's more there are SO many NSA articles it tries to make sure only the actually important and good ones get to the front.

That's as much of a problem as it is IMHO because hacker news doesn't appear to be designed to handle a wide variety of topics, a broad userbase and complexity of discussion.

The first is stifled by the lack of metadata (tags, categories, subboards, pick your poison) so everything rises or sinks within the same channel.

A broader userbase means groups of people who want to see posts about x and others who think x is destroying the community, and the strife caused by what may be the inevitable fact that some users want variety and others want bubbles.

This leading to the third problem, complex threads which can in practice be composed of more than 40 comments and more comments than upvotes without necessarily being a flamewar. Hacker news appears to be set up to promote upvotes and comments directly to the OP post, and discourage discussion between users. If that's what their ideal model represents then they should just move to a flat commenting system which makes it more obvious, visually.

I disagree that limiting a website for discussion on a small set of topics - an "information bubble" - is necessarily a bad thing. A web site can be designed to become a platform for a wide variety of topics (like Reddit) - or it can be designed for a small subset.

The internet is the platform that provides the variety: Hacker News for some topics, and for example RCGroups, SpaceFlightNow, or hundreds of other topical forums for others.

While it is silly to complain about "community X is going downhill", I do miss the old "information bubble" that HN was many years ago. The YC alumnus Reddit has taken over the role of a general link-sharing and discussion on every possible topic platform for every topic - but there is no longer any website (that I know of) focused on the advice, thoughts and discussion of technology startups mostly by founders of technology startups.

But for that to work you'd need a lot more restriction on signup and posting rules than currently exist, practically a closed, invitation only network. I'm not arguing that it's necessarily bad, I agree with you - the programming and technology content from professionals is why I'm here, it is unique. But there are a lot of people here who aren't startup founders, as an inevitable consequence of the site's popularity and the practically nonexistent bar on entry.

Invitation-only schemes only delay the inevitable, yet make the early members even more insufferably vocal about the gilded days of yore, the comments even more thoroughly interleaved with links to the Eternal September wiki page.

Are there any downsides to the subreddit approach? If not, wouldn't that be a good solution to the broad userbase problem?

Downsides would probably be that the site as a whole might appear slower, and people might tend towards isolating themselves in sub-communities. Also if this is making money for pg as it is there's always the problem of killing the goose that lays the golden egg I suppose.

Tags for posts might serve the same purpose but allow the community to remain more cohesive.

Thank you

You can apply this logic to several other topics of the day as well. What about bitcoin posts? What about all the Linux/MogoDB posts?

I find it interesting only the NSA articles get penalized. When in reality, you can make the same argument for a host of other topics not getting penalized.

I think we have to take the referenced article with a grain of salt. If I read it correctly, there is nary a mention of the flagging function. So, to put it bluntly:

Correlation does not equal causation

NSA articles may be more often penalized...but they are likely more often to be flagged. It's not that people here are defending the NSA or anything, it's that people have often said that they are tired of reading NSA all the time. And so, their reaction may be to flag those stories, giving them a penalty.

The referenced article does not really account for that, AFAIK

The behavior I saw with NSA articles is they were already penalized by the time they hit the front page, while other articles were up for minutes or so before getting penalized. This implies (but of course doesn't prove) the penalty is automatically applied, not the result of flagging. (And I mention flagging three times in the article.) Also, there is code in the published source to automatically penalize articles based on "rallying cry" words in the title. It's possible people are flagging NSA articles right off the "new" page, but it really looks like they are getting automatically penalized.

Edit: Several people said I should have said more in the article about flagging. There's no way to distinguish between penalties applied by administrators and penalties due to flagging. So there's not much I can say.

Ah, my bad...I was reading on a tablet so didn't do the Ctrl-F-find-the-word to back up my assertion. I think I'm likely biased into thinking that flagging plays a larger role, and thus expected to see it more in your analysis, whether it's the reality or not. But yes, capturing the state of article ranking as they hit the front page would help control for independent flagging behavior. It's possible that people are flagging on the New section but I have to doubt that...those would be HNers with a bit too much time on their hands.

Couldn't it just as easily imply that people reading the /newest page tend to flag NSA stories?

On the other hand there's an article with "N.S.A." in the title at the top of the front page now.

This remind me initial war with Gmail on trying to change colors of links in your HTML email body.

Google was replacing #000000 with blue links to make sure some won't deceive users that underscored black text is or is not a link. So of course people start using #000001 color, then this one got blocked they went into #000002. Gmail quickly realized they wont win this one :) so they revert it back to replacing only 000000.

Maybe they should search for [Nn][^A-z]?[Ss][^A-z]?[Aa] instead ;)

Thus the back-and-forth continues.

My guess is that it isn't actually the "NSA" keyword that is penalizing those articles but maybe some other type of filter. For instance, what if it instead penalizes topics basic on keywords relative to other articles? Basically a way to keep the content of the homepage fresh and unique, instead of having 6 different topics at one time on the NSA, or 6 topics on bitcoin, it instead penalizes those popular keywords to prevent a flood of similar content, with this filter actively changing based on the popular keywords at that time, If this was the case- I would actively encourage this filter, the thing that I love about HN is that it doesn't beat a dead horse.

<hat type="tinfoil"> No, the NSA are MITMing and deep packet inspecting everyone's HN traffic, and preemptively clicking your [flag] link on NSA articles… </hat>

I find it really disheartening that there is at least one person who isn't completely tired of NSA articles at this point and even wishes to read more on the same topic. Same with Bitcoins, Snowden and so on.

That depends on the content of "more". "More new and game-changing information" != "more of the same expressed in different words". Government surveillance or non-governmental money are very broad topics, which can have a lot of different aspects. OTOH, reading yet another story "NSA spies on you" is excessive, I agree - we already know that.