This is copypasta from my other post, because it applies here as well.

This is NOT engadget, and this is NOT gizmodo.
stop posting this non-hackery

hack-a-day means one hack per day, and has for the longest time been only hacks.

Seriously, If we wanted this sort of crap wed go over to slashdot or engadget.

copypasta: yum

I have been lurking this site for a number of years, and this is the first time that I have been disappointed in the content presented to me on this site.

I know that some naysayers will tell me that, “you don’t have to read articles of this type if you don’t want to, and nobody is forcing you to read them.”

I will respond preemptively by stating that when any media group or blog, etc changes to a more popular article type or tv show type, etc, viewers may go up, but the original, founding group feels betrayed and abandoned.

A recent example of this would be when the Discovery channel began to broadcast shows such as “Cash Cab” and “The Deadliest Catch”. The shows, though interesting to some, were more reminiscent of mainstream reality tv shows of little educational merit. This directly contradicted the name of “Discovery” which may lead a viewer to believe that they broadcast an educational palette of shows.

I am also reminded of TLC, who in recent years has gone from “The Learning Channel” to the “Testosterone Lowering Channel.” TLC’s downfall all
began with a show that I rather liked: Junkyard Wars. It was a good show, a show that I feel many here would have enjoyed, but it deviated from the standard TLC fare. Thus, it opened the way for the crap which now perpetually graces the screen of TLC.

I hope that hackaday will stay away from future articles of this sort, and instead stay true to its roots. I love this site, and I dread the day when it goes the way of TLC. Please editors, beware of this type of article in the future.

Posted at 7:20 pm on Jun 10th, 2008 by Anonymous

@hackaday

I tend to agree with most these comments. though the majority are of much too much a whiny nature. just make a /hacks/ feed and be done with it. have the other stuff on the front page etc.

personally, I want hacks, only. but i cant blame you for wanting to grow.

Posted at 8:04 pm on Jun 10th, 2008 by Spoofy

I’d just like to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Anonymous’ post above.
Perhaps you guys will consider running a sister site dedicated to new and interesting “soft news” and leave the low-level hardware type hacks for this one.

Posted at 8:09 pm on Jun 10th, 2008 by fuzion

A sister site sounds awesome. I am generally interested in the extra stuff coming in and the original newsposts, but I miss going on to the homepage and just seeing an array of ponderously technical methods and fiendishly clever reinventions that I can work through with a soldering iron.

If this is just the new folks making their contribution to HAD, then perhaps they could author some clever how-to to better fit with traditional articles. Being the first site to link an obscured hack is fantastic, but it’s even better to self-publish.

Posted at 9:11 pm on Jun 10th, 2008 by Solenoidclock

DownloadSquad.com /is/ a sister site.

Posted at 9:40 pm on Jun 10th, 2008 by D

@anonymous:

I agree with some of what you say, for example this article doesn’t really seem to belong on hack-a-day, but I’ve got to disagree with this one:

‘hack-a-day means one hack per day’

I like having several hacks available daily. Used to be several days would go by with hacks that I’m probably not interested in before a gem would stand out. Granted, there’s a lot more fluff recently, but I find something I’m interested in every day.

Posted at 9:50 pm on Jun 10th, 2008 by Dave

@dave

i don’t see a major issue with having multiple hacks per day, in fact i rather like having many high-quality hacks every day, but that should not be used as an excuse to post this crap.

Posted at 11:08 pm on Jun 10th, 2008 by Anonymous

Don’t forget Eclipse with Aptana (and any other plugins you need)

I use Eclipse with Aptana (+RadRails, +php), Pydev, SVNClipse
about 6 days a week.

And… they work on Windows and Mac too, so you can get a feel for the tools before you make the jump.

Posted at 6:07 am on Jun 11th, 2008 by Anthony Batchelor

What really sucks, as far as I know, is that so many people have bitched about shit like this for days now and there has yet to be any sort of reply. The comments on almost every non-hack post like this have a very similar theme: “this kind of post is not what we want”. Usually I would say that it’s more likely that pissed off people would reply, but with blog-like comments you get all types of opinions.

We want to know what to expect. Address our cries of useless posts or just stop doing it and we’ll be satisfied. Read the constructive posts that suggest ways to satisfy your desire to grow* and our desire to just read good hacks and let us know where you intend to take this site.

*Grow in this context is a polite description for “trying to become like every other technical news outlet on the internet”. Congratulations for conforming and removing the reasons we all came here to begin with.

Posted at 11:50 am on Jun 11th, 2008 by Toe

Bluefis, quantra, dream weaver?
What a load of bloat.
Its just as easy to hand type the code and produces cleaner faster no bloated code.
Best editor in the humble text editor.

Posted at 4:33 pm on Jun 11th, 2008 by AJB2K3

I agree with the other posters in this story as well as all the other context-irrelevant stories

Expansion is important, but whats more important is to not alienate your core userbase that has been there from the start. Changing the site to be another Engadget/HackedGadgets/etc duplicate may attract many new users. Some of these new users will stick around, but chances are most of them will not stay, since there are many other similar websites with essentially the same content.

What *will* happen, however, is that you will lose your long-time users, and this is the absolute worst-case scenario for a site like this.

What you should do is take a long hard look at the content and quality of your stories over time. Open a suggestion box or poll, and listen to your users. Make a more community-driven approach to finding quality hacks. *INNOVATE*, don’t just copy other sites’ content, mission, and context. Don’t dilute your story quality in order to appeal to a wider audience, because you will lose the whole aspect of hackaday that attracted the loyal initial userbase: 1 quality hack every day. If you expand, don’t do so by modifying your mission.

I’ve been reading hackaday for years now, so I won’t stop reading it until the quality content completely disappears. However, every irrelevant, non-hack story I see will just lower my opinion of the site. At some point I will just stop posting to the site, and I will be much less willing to go out of my way to support this site in the future.

I think Slashdot put it best in their recent ‘History Of’ series:

“Our growth will never match the population of the net because we are a small group that isn’t growing: we were here first.”

“Similarly, new websites and technologies arise regularly. From Kuro5hin to Digg to Reddit, there have been dozens of websites that do similar things to Slashdot with varying degrees of success. Some have surpassed us, while most have faded into obscurity.”

“From AJAX interfaces to alternate methodologies of content selection, they all have ideas, some good, so bad… some right for Slashdot, and some wrong. Distinguishing one from the other is tricky: you guys all deserve a modern web application, but at the end of the day, our story selection and discussions are what make this site unique.”

“Drastic changes would alienate our long-term user base, so we need to tread cautiously.”

Posted at 10:42 pm on Jun 11th, 2008 by alex