zlacker

>>vincen+(OP)
>readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...] stories that were placed there randomly

>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page

If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station, that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to listen to random songs.

>>vadfa+B
So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.

>>bborud+t3
Playing 00's music on an 80's radio station isn't challenging someone's fondness of 80's music, it's just annoying.

>>have_f+94
I was disagreeing with the premise that Hacker News is, or should be, very narrow in scope. Though I'll grant you that there are certainly degrees to this. There are regularly posts that make me wonder why they were posted to HN when I first see them here - and yet, these often manage to enrich my day.

There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.

>>bborud+M5
What I was talking about in the quoted bits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024069 didn't have to do with topic scope. It had to do with article quality, which is orthogonal to that. I agree with you completely that HN should be broad rather than narrow in scope—that's highly desirable and we spend a lot of time trying to nudge and nurture things in that direction.

Just for clarity, when I was talking about how users are emotional about the front page and react intensely when they see something they don't think belongs there, it was in the context of an experiment we'd run to randomly place stories from /newest on the front page. Users reacted disastrously, not so much because of scope but because the median article's quality is just really low. That's true about in-scope topics like programming as well as other topics. I hope that makes sense.

As for 'who gets to be a member' - we don't restrict that nor want to restrict that. Everyone with intellectual curiosity, i.e. everyone, is welcome. The only requirement is actually using the site in that spirit. This is not so easy, of course, especially when the more activating topics show up.