HACKER Q&A
📣 blutoot

Is discoverability not important to Hacker News?


I'll start with an anecdote that rubbed me the wrong way.

I just came across something called clawdbot (sure - sounds deceptively like claudebot but who cares). I searched for clawdbot on HN and none of these entries had any comments or upvotes. On the other hand, in the Reddit world and on X, https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot has an insane following. And I learned about it from a recent episode in Jessica/Sam Lessin's podcast (More or Less Podcast).

Why the lack of love for this tool? Deliberate mass-downvoting by the AI-powers-that-be? Are these category of "wrapper toolsets considered too pedestrian for the high-minded CS fundamentalists? Or were all the submissions made at inopportune times and they each got buried under the ocean of me-too entries.

In general, this is not the first time I have seen such a wide gap in what the HN audience values and what the rest of the tech-friendly world gravitates towards.

It is depressing that so many awesome / interesting submissions don't see the light of the day in HN and yet so many of us are so hooked onto HN because we have formed this collective sentiment that HN represents last true gating from the tech elite about what merits a discussion (or adoption) and what doesn't.

I agree many of us come to HN and go straight for the discussions because more often than not these are intellectually much richer than the story / demo itself.

I am really hoping YC has plans to improve the discoverability aspect without sacrificing gating quality.


  👤 wmf Accepted Answer ✓
The HN submission/curation system stopped working years ago and nothing has been done or will be done about it. It's just a lottery now.

👤 rolph
we love discoverability, and have socially established methods. within the halls of HN, we walk a different path.