Why Paul? Why Did You Change It?

There are things in life that baffle me. Some examples:

• How the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004
• Why the British drive on the left
• Why Rachel Stevens won't date me

And today I add a new one. Why Paul Graham changed his Y Combinator Startup News to "Hacker News." If this was football, I would pull out the "WTF" Yellow Card.

I called Y Combinator Startup News a better Digg in April. Today, they have changed focus and are now a Hacker News rating system. Paul Graham defines this as, "The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Considering that Y Combinator is all about the startup, this makes no sense. They have a couple other updates to the app as well. First, they will be looking for trolls on the comments for each post which is a good move.

Second, they have some new algorithm as Paul defined, "We're going to have a group of human editors who train the system in what counts as a good story. Each user's voting power will then be scaled based on whether they vote for good stories or bad ones. This should protect us against the arrival of users who vote up dumb stories. The worse stuff a user upvotes, the less effect their future votes will have. And vice versa: someone who consistently recommends interesting stories will be rewarded with a louder voice."

Maybe if enough of us speak up, they will leave the content area as-is. It will be interesting to watch what stories are considered "Hacker News."