HACKER Q&A
📣 ddano

Why is HN not categorizing submitted items?


It would be extremely helpful to have some basic categories: tech, economy, world news etc. on the homepage that you can filter by.


  👤 Leftium Accepted Answer ✓
Histre is a site/browser extension that adds (AI-generated) tags to HN: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/35904988

HN has a minimal tagging system based on the title:

- Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

- Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/show

- etc (some people create their own, like "Tell HN", "Thank HN")


👤 runjake
I think things are fine as they are. You can get a gist of the subject from the title (at least after dang gets to it). If I want more, the search has been super helpful.

As others have mentioned, there are alternative HN frontends that attempt to do this. I personally would not trust submitter-categorized submissions, especially as more Redditors flee to HN.


👤 CrypticShift
Some alternative sites do this (for HN content) by AI :

https://histre.com/hn/

https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack



👤 dyeje
Who does the categorizing? Sounds like unnecessary complication, Reddit already handles this niche.

👤 helph67
Absolutely agree. It would enable users to follow their `special' topics without having to churn through every other topic as well. Hopefully HN and AI will have a love child, soon?

👤 h2odragon
I do that. Many of my links come from HN. https://snafuhall.com/

👤 fsflover
There are too many submissions which happen to touch many categories at once. This is almost impossible to do.

👤 amadeuspagel
The most interesting things can't be categorized.

👤 PaulHoule
I think they'd rather have one community rather than multiple communities oriented around different subjects. (See Reddit)

I have been thinking about making a classification model for "things that might be posted to Hacker News" and was thinking about training it on

https://tildes.net/