re this: http://tortillasinbed.tumblr.com/post/24175048206/i-up-vote-everything

please note the absence of an "and you should too." telling people how they should use social media is like telling them what personality they should have.

I filter this stuff out because I don't care. I'm not here to support you and I'm not here to drag you down either. with a few exceptions, I don't care what you do.

I noticed long ago that you have to pick and choose to get any useful information out of HN. at first I was a dick about it and decided you were all idiots. then I got slightly nicer and distinguished stupidity from foolishness. and then I realized that 9 times out of 10 it's not a matter of stupidity or foolishness. it's just because different people are here looking for different types of information. it doesn't have to mean anything other than "write a filter which extracts the info you want."

one of the types of information I'm not looking for is meta-information about the HN community. I don't care if your projects are succeeding or failing; I care if there's something I can LEARN from that success or failure. "show HN" is not enough for me; if there's show but no tell, then I just don't give a shit. I have things to do, every day.

another thing I don't care about: what features you think Hacker News should have, or what you think other people should do with their upvotes. I don't care because I already reached very firm conclusions about what I think Hacker News should be.

they're here:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html

and here:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html

and I'm done with the freaking topic. which means my automatic filter shitcans "tell hn" posts also.

I also very firmly believe that going on a site about entrepreneurship to talk about how the community should act is completely fucking back-ass-wards. we're here to make cool stuff, make money, and learn about it. the entrepreneurial mindset is not to obtain consensus on what the community should do. you build a solution, and if it doesn't work, you build another solution.

so what I did instead is I created a mashup which reformats Hacker News the way I want to read it. I am not alone in this; a staggering number of similar projects also exist:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/11/hacker-news-mashups.html

my own project is here:

http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/

and here:

https://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper

You could very, very easily go to GitHub, fork my filter site, and re-write it so that it ONLY shows "Show HN" or "Tell HN" posts. The thing is a freaking cron job. It's within your capacity to adapt it to your own purposes.

If you do this, I absolutely wish you the best. But telling me what I should or shouldn't upvote represents an almost delusional failure to consider that what I came here looking for might just be something else that what you came here looking for. It's a big site and it can accomodate a lot of use cases.