Increasingly more often I find myself skipping HN in Google Reader because it has become a time consuming chore to find content I'm interested in. This saddens me because quality wise HN is IMHO the single best aggregator for IT startups.
I'm not sure what to do about this information overload problem but I feel it's time to remove HN from Google Reader because in its current form HN is simply broke.
I'm open to all suggestions about making HN more managable.
http://friendfeed.com/ketan?format=atom
I thought maybe this feed is referenced in the classic page somewhere, but it is not. Google Reader bug?
Feed readers are good for something you want to read ever single post for. HN is not something you'll want to read everything on, you just (in theory) want to read as much as possible.
This isn't a broken leg, its a cut. You keep it clean (ie, don't refresh the front page every five minutes), and you don't poke it. If it was a broken leg (ie, the front page gave you only the chronological order), then there would need a fix.
Each time an interesting post (say a blog post on fractal dimensionality in the stock market) gets posted ALL of that persons previous work gets posted as well. So you have a head post, followed by 5 other follow up articles which just kills Signal to Noise ratio.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417463
It's quite a bit older than your account so I doubt you 'missed' it.
As the 'noise' of submissions goes up, a system that automatically adapts to the amount of activity in order to determine constitutes the 'signal' will probably help HN readers cope.
I think OP's problem stems mostly from the format in which (s)he reads HN. Checking the frontpage two or three times a day doesn't lead to the same kind of overload as the RSS might. Whereas when checking the frontpage you'll see a mostly stable set of articles (with most of the churn down at the bottom few), on the RSS feed you'll see every single article that hit the frontpage regardless of how short of period of time it spent there.
Perhaps, a quick fix for HN readers coming here from RSS feeds might simply be to not send every story out via RSS, but say, only those stories that stayed on the frontpage for >1 hour.
With a hide button I could go down the page and quickly hide all the "social" stories about get a date, pick a grad school, the latest twitter app, Arrington bashing, and go straight to the good stuff like Erlang. ;-)
I think every other site has categories. They seem like a natural thing to do.....
But you're right. For starters just two categories would do, hacking and everything else.
We've kicked this can around quite a bit, and so far PG doesn't seem to be feeling enough pain to make a change.
Perhaps things will change.
Simple solution: categories with separate feeds.
Not sure what "the subreddit problem" is. Just wondering if that would help.
But this stuff is just too interesting to not at least open and skim. I mean, jesus, a blog post of the fractal dimensionality of the stock market? Come on.
A small addition is needed to have the script work when viewing older items (you have to add the URL for the subsequent pages. Proof left as an exercise for the reader).
This is very handy since some of the better threads are not on the front page.
I originally built it for Digg and Reddit, but HN is now one of my primary uses. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
