I like articles like this, but what I'm really worried about is the fact that they attract non-hacker types who just want to talk politics. Next stop: reddit. First come articles like this, then more, good, interesting in-depth articles about Obama, then just plain old Obama articles, then McCain is a big old dufus articles, and so on down the drain. See, for instance, maxklein's comment below. That's exactly what I fear happening when these types of articles turn up.

Perhaps we could create a HN-offtopic on some site that implements social news, by invite only, for HN users, and use that for politics/economics/whatever. Any other ideas for a constructive solution to this problem(+) that don't involve lots of PG's time?

(+) With "the problem" being defined as: "we are interested in off topic articles, but are afraid of what they'll do to the site in the long term".

Once again, I take issue with your definition of off-topic, since the guidelines seem to suggest that anything intelligent is on-topic. This a good, interesting, in-depth article about Obama would be on-topic, whereas anything below that in your progression would be off.

I don't think PG will allow it to progress to "McCain is a big old dufus articles". He has stated that he would not, and that he has constructive solutions to that problem that he will implement if he feels it necessary.

I'm a hacker and I read reddit quite regularly. I browse the politics, business, programming and world news sections.

I quite enjoy it. I find those articles interesting, though the debate is usually less so. Yet I'm a hacker. Does that mean that reddit is publishing hacker news?

Of course not.

Just because it's interesting to "some hackers" doesn't make it hacker news. Similarly, if an article about fluffy toys is interesting to some people in the medical profession, should it be published in the British Medical Journal, as a medical article? No.

You're talking as if the site guidelines don't exist.

Off-topic submissions are a smaller problem here than the kind of complaining you're engaged in. Looking through the HN posts I've upvoted, I see that I've learned things about history, music, language, physiology, mathematics, economics, and psychology, in addition to much about computing and startups. That's obviously the point of the site. People have been complaining about HN "turning into reddit" for a year or more. It hasn't, and it isn't.

The mechanism for politely expressing your tastes is the upvote. I see no evidence that it needs augmenting.

> You're talking as if the guidelines that have been established for this site don't exist.

They are, perhaps intentionally, rather fluid and vague. I mean, if you wanted to argue about it, you could say that the problems with Zimbabwe are politics, and certainly aren't new: they've been covering that country's decline for years in The Economist, and if I recall, had one of their reporters kicked out of the country.

Naturally, reasonable people will disagree. How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here? That some stuff seems uninteresting is a feature, not a bug; it's an aspect of the intellectual diversity that is the raison d'etre of the site.

Speaking of the guidelines, I don't think anyone pointed out the one that actually addresses the "off-topic police" explicitly:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

> How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here?

I know this one! Hacking and startups:-) My concern is not 'uninteresting' at all, but the slippery slope that reddit went down, where a trickle of genuinely interesting articles on politics and economics became a flood of crap.

Sigh. You've convinced me of one thing: these arguments are a pointless merry-go-round and I'm making things worse by adding to it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find some articles about Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" to post here. :)

I did not complain, I merely pointed out, in a fairly neutral tone, for other people like myself, that this article is not hacker news. That you chose to interpret it as a complaint is your problem.

So the problem is not:

- Off-topic articles are not interesting.

it is:

- Off topic articles are interesting also to off topic readers & off topic readers jeopardise the nature of the site/community.

No, the problem is people trying to enforce their vision of off-topic (stuff that is not CS/startup related) on a site whose guidelines define it as something entirely different.

I bet someone could through together a formula for the best ratio of article types to keep the site both growing and hacker focussed.

Isn't that the point of the up arrow? I'm not sure the site is meant to keep growing.

No, because both hackers and non-hackers use the up arrow. Which is fine if you don't mind content drift, but the people you are responding to do mind.