Metahaba is evil

    Metahubs are general-purpose hubs that you don’t need to subscribe to (if you are trying to filter the Habr at all), because in the best case there will be two or three posts for one post in your area of ​​interest for you at all.

    Metahaba is a pure evil, because theoretically interesting posts for me do not reach me, as the authors put them only in metahaba, or occupy a place among the three hubs (in which you can put a post) with one or two metahaba, and on thematic, but slightly less relevant hubs do not have enough space.

    I wrote about this problem exactly a year ago , I wrote in support, but to no avail. I hope to draw attention to this issue with this post. (In fairness, for a year at least the stunningly meaningless hub of the Translations was removed, but this is not enough.)

    For example, I’ll analyze the metahaba from the Programming section:
    • Programming
    • Web development
    • Game Development - here they put both about the mobile and the harsh C ++, the news of engines and the quick release of indie developers. Can be divided into Mobile game development, Game design and more.
    • Algorithms - divided into Computer Science and Graphics Algorithms. In addition to these two topics, now Algorithms often put posts on some completely random topics, exaggerated "Algorithm for finding the nearest free toilet in the city." Well, the algorithm is the same.
    • Development. Instead, you can add something in the spirit of Methodology or DevOps. Plus there is already Project Management.
    • Mobile development
    • High performance. Can be divided into Highly loaded website development and Low-level optimization.
    • Abnormal programming
    • Debugging
    • Industrial programming
    • Perfect code
    • Codebred, in addition, there is no difference with Abnormal programming.


    In addition to metahubs, here are the hubs that should be clarified and removed from them posts that do not meet the specified topic:
    • Open source. Everything would have been fine if posts had not been put here on the topic of the release or update of absolutely any open source software. In terms of meaning, taking into account the real interests of readers (how I feel), you need to rename Open source to “Licensing and the movement for free software”, and Copyright - to “Copyright for works of art”. Naming is important because it prevents the misuse of hubs.
    • Client → Browser Optimization
    • Concurrent programming
    • Functional programming → Functional programming paradigm
    • Design and refactoring
    • Data compression
    • System Programming


    In order not to get up twice, I’ll also mention the problem of “purely nested hubs,” for example
    • TDD ⊂ Testing
    • Git, Mercurial ⊂ Version Control Systems
    • Creative Commons ⊂ Licensing and Free Software Movement ∪ Artwork Copyright
    • Agile ⊂ Methodologies
    • etc.

    The problem with purely nested hubs is that if the author forgets (or because of the restriction of three hubs per post) forgets to put the post in a hub subset or hub subset, the subscribers of this hub fly by.

    This problem cannot be solved only by splitting, merging, and renaming hubs. You can mark up purely nested hubs programmatically and do something special if the author wants to put a post in one of them, for example:
    • If the author wants to add a nadhab post, invite him to add a post to one or more subhubs
    • If the author wants to add a subhub post, oblige him to add a post to one or more subhubs

    however, the restriction of “three hubs per post” should not apply in these cases.

    Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

    What do you think of the metahabs?

    • 37.1% It would be nice to delete or split them 118
    • 9.4% We must leave everything as is 30
    • 53.4% No matter, because I read the whole entire Habr 170

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