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Hacker News as a case study to test the wisdom of the crowd theory

140 points by snake_case 11y ago

IIAOPSW 11y ago
I think this article will do poorly.
- Maken 11y ago
  I think this comment will do well.
  - mhurron 11y ago
    I think you shouldn't care so much about it.
FreakyT 11y ago
I'm glad to see that this article mentioned my all-time favorite HN naysayer thread -- the one for Dropbox. Namely because it contains this gem: > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. Yes, completely trivial. Every user will definitely have no trouble doing that. (Also, accessing your files with an FTP client? Really?)
- thomasahle 11y ago
  > then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. I didn't know Dropbox had versioning control?
  - pricechild 11y ago
    https://www.dropbox.com/help/11 https://www.dropbox.com/help/11
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Robadob 11y ago
    I actually went to try and revert a file in Google Drive this morning and was shocked to find it didn't have this option after using Dropbox for years.
    - RogerL 11y ago
      You can do it explicitly, file by file, in Google Drive but Dropbox is vastly superior in doing it automatically for all files.
    - mkobit 11y ago
      I think you can do this, at least on some of the Drive services. For Sheets, go to File -> See Revision History and you should be able to view changes/revert to a previous revision.
      - Robadob 11y ago
        This was a .tex document that I had been editing in a text editor, not a Google doc. I tried context menus on the file in both Windows and the Google drive website to no avail, could spot any other relevant buttons in the rest of the Google drive websites interface either. ---------- Just tried it again now, and found the option on the website as 'manage versions' under the context menu of a file (no idea how I missed it the first time). Still had to download the old version and replace the file manually rather than an explicit revert button.
    - thomasahle 11y ago
      Ah, I thought you needed to by that Packrat thing. I guess that's only if you want unlimited history.
    - Robadob 11y ago
      Appears G Drive does store previous versions, I was just blind yesterday. Parent post is too old to edit/delete.
- mentos 11y ago
  haha that is a perfect example I think articles like op's are good in conditioning the HN crowd to be more aware of their own biases. Update your model of the world and continue on.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- josephpmay 11y ago
  Fun story: Someone I know got really stoned one night, FTP'd into a shared Dropbox folder, accidentally uploaded a file, tried to delete that file, and ended up deleting the entire contents of the Dropbox on everyone's computer at the company. We were never able to recover the files, but at least there was nothing too important.
Vendan 11y ago
Utter crap on mobile. There's a side "share" panel that covers the left side of the article with no apparent way to remove it.
- noarchy 11y ago
  Not sure if this is meant to be a sarcastic reply that imitates the usual negativity of HN, due to the subject of the article, or a legit reply.
  - Vendan 11y ago
    Quite legit really. I was unable to read the article on mobile, despite the fact that it had a "responsive design", because of a sidebar covering the left side of the article. I hate how the new standard for "mobile friendly" is to start permanently using portions of the screen for pointless shit.
copperx 11y ago
Brace yourselves for the onslaught of negative comments. I can't wait for the statistical analysis to be trashed.
- oneJob 11y ago
  Even if statistical analysis checks out, the premise seems to be all wrong. Speaking generally now. I rarely read HN comments as having predictive intentions, but rather constructive (or not) criticism on things as they stand. Listening to criticism (i.e. negative feedback) about your product can be the difference between an amazing product and a mediocre products with a slow, drawn out fading into mediocre land.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Well, they started out by picking successes. A more valid approach would be to list all startup ideas mentioned on HN and see how they turned out. That includes every acquishutdown mentioned. But that's vulnerable in the other direction. If 90% of startups fail, it's very easy to predict failure. An interesting non-statistical inquiry would be to look at the problems people are complaining about and seeing whether they're still present in the successful projects (e.g. dropbox privacy).
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    Homejoy is in the article but is no longer in business.[1] So I'm not sure if the point is that there weren't enough negative comments on their launch. [1] http://blog.homejoy.com/homejoy-says-goodbye/ http://blog.homejoy.com/homejoy-says-goodbye/
allencoin 11y ago
>Certain companies have succeeded despite a sceptical specialized audience. Why is that? The first and most obvious reason is because there is simply not enough diversity in the audience for the wisdom of the crowd theory to hold true. Right, this almost seems like common sense. I see the Hacker News community as mostly entrepreneurially minded devs who are very invested in the Silicon Valley startup ideal. Obviously there's nothing wrong with that, and there are a lot of really smart people here. But geniuses in a particular field are often inept in others. Hacker News readers don't represent the average consumer, for instance, so I wouldn't put too much stock in their opinions about a primarily average-consumer-facing product like Airbnb. I would, however, put a lot of stock in their opinion about my new dev-facing app like Heroku.
pkorzeniewski 11y ago
What irritates me most with HN crowd is that there're several "sacred" topics that you either agree with, or you better shut up because you're clearly wrong and you'll be downvoted to hell. I understand that the voting system can represent your agreement or disagreement with someone, but downvoting valuable opinions just because they're controversial is immature.
- danso 11y ago
  Like?
  - CPLX 11y ago
    My favorite one is self-driving cars. If you say something factual and obvious, like for example that self-driving cars don't in fact exist yet and zero people are able to use one today, legions of flying monkeys will swoop in to call you a backward thinking luddite. There are others.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - krakensden 11y ago
      Unless you own a Tesla Model S.
      - CPLX 11y ago
        Hey look there's one in the wild.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      Since self-driving cars do in fact exist and people are in fact using them today, your example is not terribly useful unless you were actually trying to demonstrate the opposite of your ostensible point.
      - 11y ago
bananaoomarang 11y ago
The relentless cynicism of the Hackernews community is a large part of the fun. There is usually a lot more thought put into the comments here than other cough Reddit cough places on the ol' internets. A lot of the comments which are criticised here for being later proven wrong are valid concerns. The degree of 'magic' in Meteor, for instance, is something still discussed a lot, despite it's obvious benefits and success.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  Call me cynical by your example is bad, from experience a lot of us know that excessive magic like meteor is a recipe for great pain later on. (Boom, boom)
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    That's pretty definitively cynicism. I don't get the objection.
- toxican 11y ago
  >There is usually a lot more thought put into the comments here than other cough Reddit cough places on the ol' internets I find this place kind of intimidating and as a result I find myself putting a lot more time/effort into my comments than I do elsewhere. I think that's a good thing.
- galfarragem 11y ago
  I remember people even being pissed because Meteor raised more money than other projects. Doesn't matter that their marketing strategy and roadmap are near to perfect allowing them to maximize their market share while other (possible) better projects can't. A typical case of confirmation bias.
- dublinben 11y ago
  In contrast, I find the unrestrained positivity and uncritical acceptance of new 'products' on a site like ProductHunt quite bizarre.
speg 11y ago
Is it telling that I come to the comments first on a story about comments?
- mccracken 11y ago
  I even did it on this thread, then realised the irony immediately
carlosrg 11y ago
>But Hacker News was wrong about Airbnb Well, about these concerns about security, they weren't totally wrong.[1] [1]: http://www.thelocal.es/20150821/airbnb-to-beef-up-security-after-madrid-assault http://www.thelocal.es/20150821/airbnb-to-beef-up-security-a...
Rambunctious 11y ago
Is there any data file to show what comment has been marked as positive or negative? For example, if you look at the Quora thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197146 ), a comment could say something good about the site and also provide some feedback (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197230). Is this comment marked positive or negative? If feedback is somehow clubbed with negative comments, I would doubt the accuracy of the analysis.
- josefresco 11y ago
  I had this same thought - as many times I comment and then realize that it could be "taken" several ways. It also amuses me to no end that someone is collecting and analyzing data from HN based (in part) on my sometimes idiotic comments and silly debates with Internet strangers.
danso 11y ago
Not sure if I agree with the conclusion: > Such a specialized community is a great place to get feedback on the technical details of your product, but not to validate your ideas. The responses from people in these communities tend towards scepticism to negativity, even for products they use. Or with the methodology. Take for example the Dropbox thread [1] which the OP's sentiment algorithm classifies as having a "negative top comment". This is what the purportedly negative comment says: > The only problem is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same as USB drive. Most corporate laptops are locked and you can't install anything on them. That's gonna be the problem. Also, another point where your USB comparison fails is that USB works in places where you don't have internet access. > My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision. > Kudos for launching it!!! Launching/shipping is extremely hard and you pulled it off! Super! In what universe, besides the one of a sentiment-analysis-algorithm, would that be considered a "negative" comment? Moreover, even if that last, congratulatory line didn't exist, the rest of that comment is very well-worth listening to. It might have been wrong (has Dropbox penetrated corporate IT as well as USB keys? USB keys have definitely taken a beating in reputation and in convenience...but has Dropbox been an easy transition in corporate IT? At Stanford, we have Box)...but it definitely wasn't non-constructive criticism. If a submission gets a lot of upvotes, to me that's a positive-enough sign of validation. Is it really helpful to the submitter to see a dozen/hundred comments that are merely, "Awesome! I like it!"? I often like reading the comments before I check out the submission, because I don't want to have to parse Press-Releasese to understand what the product does, or who it may compete against, or what its flaws might be...Even if the comments were completely devoid of constructive and insightful criticism -- I'm sure after a big launch, it's helpful, yet annoying when people immediately nitpick grammar and typos -- if you're a founder of a great product, the hemming and hawing of HN is probably the least of your obstacles on the way to success. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- zamalek 11y ago
  > In what universe, besides the one of a sentiment-analysis-algorithm, would that be considered a "negative" comment? The algorithm likely has issues identifying if criticism is constructive. If you look at the negative/positive score of each word in isolation (e.g. fail, problem, drop, can't, hard) the comment is overwhelmingly negative. You actually have to parse and understand the comment to prove that it's very positive. They could have ditched the algorithm, but then they would lose a quantifiable positivity score and instead would have had to rely on human intuition - which has it's problems, e.g. spend the whole day looking at negative comments and neutral comments might start looking positive. The study may have had fundamental issues at the outset.
rebootthesystem 11y ago
This, in a strange way, echo's some of what I said on the thread about Amazon's product review star system: In a crowd the people with the most motivation to participate are those with negative views. This is a problem with voting/rating/forum systems going back decades, HN is no exception.
- jmnicolas 11y ago
  "In a crowd the people with the most motivation to participate are those with negative views." I'd had the ones that are paid to say good things about a product they probably never used. If we're lucky they compensate each other ;-)
jasode 11y ago
Interesting article. I've thought a lot about the slashdot/HN mispredictions of future successes and my random thoughts: 1) A flawed Theory of Mind applied to the general public: I think it's fairly safe to say that the technical crowd (which includes commentators of slashdot/HN) will lean towards the Asperger/autism spectrum. It's easy for geeks/nerds/experts (especially vocal ones) to misjudge how products could be accepted by the masses (who are not geeks/nerds/experts). The famous examples being the slashdot dismissal of the iPod in 2001 and the iPad in 2009. (And Sara McGuire's article that this thread is about has more examples from HN.) 2) Skepticism/negativity is easier to itemize and write, and as a strange bonus, it is perceived as smarter and more insightful analysis. Looking at all the things that are "wrong" with a product might be described as a type of "closed-ended" thinking. On the other hand, imagining the different ways a product could succeed involves more "open-ended" analysis. The problem of writing open-ended thoughts is that it looks like naive futurism, or unsophisticated cheerleading. (E.g. haha, Back to the Future's Bob Gale thought we'd have hoverboards in 2015! Dean Kamen thought Segways would sell millions of units and would revolutionize the world! etc). Because of the combinations caused by faulty Theory of Mind and biases towards the shortcomings of products, the commentary on new business ideas will almost always end up being negative.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  > It's easy for geeks/nerds/experts (especially vocal ones) to misjudge how products could be accepted by the masses (who are not geeks/nerds/experts). That's a pretty bad conclusion. Is it any easier for non-"geek/nerds/experts" to judge the iphone on its mass market appeal? I don't think so. In fact that's pretty much what you figured in the BTTF "predictions" failing. The thing is a lot of people here on HN, and in the tech community, like to judge products based on how easy or hard they are to build, and that has zero relation to how good the product is or how successful it will be. For a non-techie, it's in the realm of the impossible either way, so that stuff doesn't matter at all.
  - jasode 11y ago
    >The thing is a lot of people here on HN, and in the tech community, like to judge products based on how easy or hard they are to build, and that has zero relation to how good the product is or how successful it will be. This is also true but that wasn't my point. I'm saying that the armchair quarterbacking from nerds is often predicting the business success (the mass acceptance) of a product. There is a huge disconnect between how expert tech communities think and how everyone else thinks. Steve Jobs was one of the few that seemed to bridge this disconnect. But Mike Lazaridis of RIM Blackberry could not. Jobs was more consumer-minded rather than technical. Lazaridis was more engineer-minded rather than consumer (e.g. consumers want a physical keyboard more than a touch screen.)
mfoy_ 11y ago
There's an XKCD for this, actually: https://xkcd.com/1497/ https://xkcd.com/1497/
- vatotemking 11y ago
  HN and reddit in a nutshell
netcan 11y ago
I've never read "The Wisdom of Crowds" so maybe I'm missing some stuff, but from the general statement I think it would be a terrible mistake to take it as meaning "commenters are right" or "consensus is right." It's much more subtle than that. Crowds, in certain structures that yield a useful dynamic, produce wisdom. People transacting in a market allocate resources effectively. Gamblers and bookmakers betting on football matches make good odds. Wiki-editors nitpicking away in wiki-world produce an incredible encyclopedia. Open source, etc. There are also lot of examples of crowds being stupid, and structures that yield a stupid dynamic.
lighthawk 11y ago
tl;dr: HN presents a variety of opinion. Also: misspelled neutral in one of the graphs. Nice post, though. Keep it up.
rayiner 11y ago
What's the saying? They ridiculed Einstein? But they also ridiculed Bozo the Clown?
- TillE 11y ago
  Indeed. From Carl Sagan's wonderful The Demon-Haunted World: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
dmalvarado 11y ago
That "wisdom of the crowd" thing only works when the crowd isn't influencing each other. Otherwise - groupthink.
danso 11y ago
Obligatory rebuttal of statistical claim: does this analysis suffer from survivor's bias? OK, so these are the few startups and projects that have had reasonable-to-great amount of success...what about all of the startups that we can't think of off the top of our heads [1], because they died? If the number of those is much greater compared to the group OP selected, and they also faced a majority-negative bunch of comments...why shouldn't we conclude that those founders should have obsessed over HN skepticism? [1] I'll start: Fab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444387
- acqq 11y ago
  Moreover, it's easy to argue that counting the number of positive and negative comments on any subject on any "social" platform can't be treated as more than immensely biased sample of the sentiment of the users of the platform momentarily interested in commenting the specific topic.
ss6754 11y ago
This is an interesting article but very one sided. To really assess "the wisdom of HN community" the author should have assessed all four cells: Successful companies with positive comments, Successful companies with negative comments (which the author did), Unsuccessful companies with positive comments and Unsuccessful companies with negative comments. This would provide a broader and more objective picture of HN community
smikhanov 11y ago
The article says that HN failed to predict the success of AirBnb. While factually correct, this says nothing about HN (or anyone in general). Nobody was able to predict the success of AirBnb, even the savviest of investors. AirBnb wasn't the only company of its kind, it wasn't run by the smartest people out there, it wasn't launched at some particularly good time, or anything similar. They have just survived and succeeded. Why? Who knows. But obsessing about HN comments is truly not worth it.
codingdave 11y ago
Cherry picking posts about the successful companies from the glut of "Show HN" posts that have come through over the years is practically the definition of survivor bias. Not that I am arguing with their larger point - if you believe in what you are doing, do not let comments on HN stop you from pursuing your vision.
- cwilkes 11y ago
  Exactly. While an interesting read in showing how people can be wrong about later hits, this study is meaningless unless the failures are included. It is like looking at all the winners of the superb owl, finding some negative comments about them, and then saying "see, you shouldn't listen to anyone". What about all the teams that didn't win and had good comments? Or bad?
junto 11y ago
I would have thought this was relatively obvious. Many new ideas and applications are marketed on HN quite validly under Show HN. However, the first pass at marketing an application may not reflect its form further down the line. For example, we often see poor landing pages, or simply landing pages that don't convey the problem succinctly enough to quickly satisfy our short attention spans. A few months or years down the line and these development teams have homed their product, ironed out the bugs and built landing pages that are easy for anyone to understand quickly. Interesting none the less. Hence, what is launched on HN != its final form and cannot determine future success.
dandare 11y ago
Isn't the sample size too small? I invoke the law of small numbers.
im3w1l 11y ago
A positive comment is not a prediction that something will succeed, and a negative comment is not a prediction that something will fail.
mbell 11y ago
> Three companies, three different responses on Hacker News, and three ultimate outcomes. [speaking of Codecademy, Meteor and Homejoy] The only one on this list with an 'ultimate outcome' is Homejoy. Codecademy has no business model that I know of, and Meteor isn't even close to profitable. Quora is also used as a 'success' case and they also don't have a business model. I find this post does a pretty poor job providing any sort of supporting evidence for it's claims.
Spooky23 11y ago
There's definitely heavy cynicism here. But, many of these points are real and are risks that these startups need to factor in. The AirBnB thread is a great example of this. The risks associated with having strangers in your home is something that AirBnB has to market around and have protections from. (ie. the stories about crazy parties that trash apartments)
ebbv 11y ago
I agree with the premise of this post, but it extends beyond HN; don't listen to the internet in general. We commenters don't know as much about whatever you're doing as you do. Maybe you might get some good insight from a random commenter on the web, but usually you won't. However, their specific example is sort of wrong. AirBnB has indeed blown up, but this has been due to two major factors: - Traditional landlords, rental properties and yes Bed and Breakfasts moving onto Air BnB, embracing a new, popular platform. - Extremely high real estate markets in some areas making it attractive and almost necessary to rent out room(s). It's not like AirBnB has created a change where most or even a significant portion of Americans as a whole rent out their rooms. The reality is that the objections the commenters brought up are real, and most people aren't interested in the hassle the comes with renting out a room, and most people's rooms aren't necessarily attractive to rent. In the end the original idea people had of how AirBnB would have to be successful; convincing most people to rent out rooms, an convincing travelers to rent rooms in random people's houses, is what was wrong. They only needed that to happen in certain markets, and for landlords in general to realize the advantages they had by renting out their properties on AirBnB.
cuchoi 11y ago
I agree with the general analysis but the AirBnb example is not accurate. Aside from survivor bias, people were just showing their concern with security. And Airbnb success depends mainly on proving a feeling of security for its users (that why they have ID and facebook verification, for example).
minimaxir 11y ago
Relevant: if you're looking for a way to scrape all Hacker News submissions and comments, I have a GitHub repository containing Python scripts showing how to do just that: https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions... With respect to the article, I've done data analysis on Hacker News myself (e.g. http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ ) and I'm a little skeptical. I was not a fan of using NTLK to classify positive/negative because the models used for training sentiment are based on reviews, not internet site comments, and when I had used NTLK, the results were skewed significantly. I used an alternate model mentioned in the linked post which IMO worked better. The examples used in the article seem more like correlation-implying-causation and cherry-picking. There are many, many counterexamples of startups people loved on HN which died a painful death.
giarc 11y ago
I would love to see what they considered a "negative" comment. Did they clump negative and neutral? Something seems off with the zenefits assessment. Read the Zenefits post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5242681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5242681). I don't see a single negative comment as implied by the second graph on the venngage.com page (looks like 7 positive, 6 negative). Unless the negative comments have been removed between venngage pulling the data and today.
eevilspock 11y ago
Wisdom of the crowd? The HN post that this article cites first had 14 comments. Not a crowd. It categorizes the first comment on DropBox[1] as negative. What? That comment points out a legitimate potential hurdle to user adoption, gives some marketing advice, and then praises them for launching. While the article's instinct may be correct, I don't see that it has shown data that supports it. - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863.
teaneedz 11y ago
A lot of thought about measuring an audience that for the most part lives in a bubble. In view of the fact that it's often the same audience which continuously produces bug ridden UX conundrums and ad tech supported mentalities locked in a tech bubble focus, I think that HN might be the wrong place for this study. I love HN, but one still needs to remember that the audience, although influential, is quite different then a truly diverse mainstream crowd.
gwern 11y ago
> The HN crowd, or any expert community, don’t have any greater a chance of predicting the success of a startup than a more general crowd. And what 'more general crowd' are you so confidently comparing to, exactly?
xixi77 11y ago
I don't see how analyzing comments on ex-post known successful businesses can tell us anything about anything -- it (at least) needs to be compared to how comments on average startup proposals do, to see if there is any predictive power. If, for example, successful startups had 20% positive comments vs. 10% positive on average, and the difference was significant, that would suggest that HN shows awesome crowd wisdom -- even if 80% of people here hate everything :) Accounting for confounding variables would be nice too (for example, if field X is generally more liked by HN than field Y, equally positive feedback on a startup doing X would tell us more than that on a startup doing Y). Still an interesting idea, I just think that people should not forget that "data science" is a subset of statistics, and any kind of data analysis is not really useful without at least some familiarity with it.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
you're all idiots
yeukhon 11y ago
* Most startup will fail. * Most of the successful startups will be acquired and merged with other more successful startups or established companies. * Most ideas are repeated and competed aggressively. * Most of the successful startups primary winning demographic / target audience turns out to be younger crowd, especially with college students, and the young crowd tend to be better at advertising startup ideas. * Many successful startups you can name right away simply reinvent the existing platform by applying media attraction and sharing among crowds. * Only way win is make noise. A lot of noise. Yeah. Back to pg's top recommendation, selling your product to users. * Unless you have billions to burn on your own, don't try to be SpaceX or Telsa. You will never be them (or the same guy who founded both entities). My own unscientific conclusions.
hartator 11y ago
If you believe that 99% of a success of a startup is about execution and 1% is about the idea, sharp guesses about the ideas shouldn't matter that much to gauge one's wisdom.
tlb 11y ago
Here's a mechanism by which initial HN sentiment can be negatively correlated with eventual success: - Great founders describe the MVP accurately, even self-deprecatingly: "Sleep under my kitchen table." They mention the flaws, because they want the most useful feedback. - Less-confident founders describe the gold-plated, fully-featured potential future version of the product and don't mention the flaws. At least on a superficial read, the great founder's description seems less promising, but they usually end up with a better product. I certainly see this dynamic at work in pitches I've been given.
Mz 11y ago
The HN crowd, or any expert community, don’t have any greater a chance of predicting the success of a startup than a more general crowd. For the most part, the purpose of posting something to HN is not to take a vote of that sort. Thus trying to view it through that lens is kind of silly.
venomsnake 11y ago
Survivor bias at its best. You must include all companies that have announced themselves on HN.

140 points by snake_case 11y ago

IIAOPSW 11y ago

I think this article will do poorly.

Maken 11y ago
I think this comment will do well.
- mhurron 11y ago
  I think you shouldn't care so much about it.

FreakyT 11y ago

I'm glad to see that this article mentioned my all-time favorite HN naysayer thread -- the one for Dropbox. Namely because it contains this gem: > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. Yes, completely trivial. Every user will definitely have no trouble doing that. (Also, accessing your files with an FTP client? Really?)

thomasahle 11y ago
> then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. I didn't know Dropbox had versioning control?
- pricechild 11y ago
  https://www.dropbox.com/help/11 https://www.dropbox.com/help/11
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Robadob 11y ago
  I actually went to try and revert a file in Google Drive this morning and was shocked to find it didn't have this option after using Dropbox for years.
  - RogerL 11y ago
    You can do it explicitly, file by file, in Google Drive but Dropbox is vastly superior in doing it automatically for all files.
  - mkobit 11y ago
    I think you can do this, at least on some of the Drive services. For Sheets, go to File -> See Revision History and you should be able to view changes/revert to a previous revision.
    - Robadob 11y ago
      This was a .tex document that I had been editing in a text editor, not a Google doc. I tried context menus on the file in both Windows and the Google drive website to no avail, could spot any other relevant buttons in the rest of the Google drive websites interface either. ---------- Just tried it again now, and found the option on the website as 'manage versions' under the context menu of a file (no idea how I missed it the first time). Still had to download the old version and replace the file manually rather than an explicit revert button.
  - thomasahle 11y ago
    Ah, I thought you needed to by that Packrat thing. I guess that's only if you want unlimited history.
  - Robadob 11y ago
    Appears G Drive does store previous versions, I was just blind yesterday. Parent post is too old to edit/delete.
mentos 11y ago
haha that is a perfect example I think articles like op's are good in conditioning the HN crowd to be more aware of their own biases. Update your model of the world and continue on.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
josephpmay 11y ago
Fun story: Someone I know got really stoned one night, FTP'd into a shared Dropbox folder, accidentally uploaded a file, tried to delete that file, and ended up deleting the entire contents of the Dropbox on everyone's computer at the company. We were never able to recover the files, but at least there was nothing too important.

Vendan 11y ago

Utter crap on mobile. There's a side "share" panel that covers the left side of the article with no apparent way to remove it.

noarchy 11y ago
Not sure if this is meant to be a sarcastic reply that imitates the usual negativity of HN, due to the subject of the article, or a legit reply.
- Vendan 11y ago
  Quite legit really. I was unable to read the article on mobile, despite the fact that it had a "responsive design", because of a sidebar covering the left side of the article. I hate how the new standard for "mobile friendly" is to start permanently using portions of the screen for pointless shit.

copperx 11y ago

Brace yourselves for the onslaught of negative comments. I can't wait for the statistical analysis to be trashed.

oneJob 11y ago
Even if statistical analysis checks out, the premise seems to be all wrong. Speaking generally now. I rarely read HN comments as having predictive intentions, but rather constructive (or not) criticism on things as they stand. Listening to criticism (i.e. negative feedback) about your product can be the difference between an amazing product and a mediocre products with a slow, drawn out fading into mediocre land.
pjc50 11y ago
Well, they started out by picking successes. A more valid approach would be to list all startup ideas mentioned on HN and see how they turned out. That includes every acquishutdown mentioned. But that's vulnerable in the other direction. If 90% of startups fail, it's very easy to predict failure. An interesting non-statistical inquiry would be to look at the problems people are complaining about and seeing whether they're still present in the successful projects (e.g. dropbox privacy).
- bachmeier 11y ago
  Homejoy is in the article but is no longer in business.[1] So I'm not sure if the point is that there weren't enough negative comments on their launch. [1] http://blog.homejoy.com/homejoy-says-goodbye/ http://blog.homejoy.com/homejoy-says-goodbye/

allencoin 11y ago

>Certain companies have succeeded despite a sceptical specialized audience. Why is that? The first and most obvious reason is because there is simply not enough diversity in the audience for the wisdom of the crowd theory to hold true. Right, this almost seems like common sense. I see the Hacker News community as mostly entrepreneurially minded devs who are very invested in the Silicon Valley startup ideal. Obviously there's nothing wrong with that, and there are a lot of really smart people here. But geniuses in a particular field are often inept in others. Hacker News readers don't represent the average consumer, for instance, so I wouldn't put too much stock in their opinions about a primarily average-consumer-facing product like Airbnb. I would, however, put a lot of stock in their opinion about my new dev-facing app like Heroku.

pkorzeniewski 11y ago

What irritates me most with HN crowd is that there're several "sacred" topics that you either agree with, or you better shut up because you're clearly wrong and you'll be downvoted to hell. I understand that the voting system can represent your agreement or disagreement with someone, but downvoting valuable opinions just because they're controversial is immature.

danso 11y ago
Like?
- CPLX 11y ago
  My favorite one is self-driving cars. If you say something factual and obvious, like for example that self-driving cars don't in fact exist yet and zero people are able to use one today, legions of flying monkeys will swoop in to call you a backward thinking luddite. There are others.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - krakensden 11y ago
    Unless you own a Tesla Model S.
    - CPLX 11y ago
      Hey look there's one in the wild.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Since self-driving cars do in fact exist and people are in fact using them today, your example is not terribly useful unless you were actually trying to demonstrate the opposite of your ostensible point.
    - 11y ago

bananaoomarang 11y ago

The relentless cynicism of the Hackernews community is a large part of the fun. There is usually a lot more thought put into the comments here than other cough Reddit cough places on the ol' internets. A lot of the comments which are criticised here for being later proven wrong are valid concerns. The degree of 'magic' in Meteor, for instance, is something still discussed a lot, despite it's obvious benefits and success.

mattmanser 11y ago
Call me cynical by your example is bad, from experience a lot of us know that excessive magic like meteor is a recipe for great pain later on. (Boom, boom)
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  That's pretty definitively cynicism. I don't get the objection.
toxican 11y ago
>There is usually a lot more thought put into the comments here than other cough Reddit cough places on the ol' internets I find this place kind of intimidating and as a result I find myself putting a lot more time/effort into my comments than I do elsewhere. I think that's a good thing.
galfarragem 11y ago
I remember people even being pissed because Meteor raised more money than other projects. Doesn't matter that their marketing strategy and roadmap are near to perfect allowing them to maximize their market share while other (possible) better projects can't. A typical case of confirmation bias.
dublinben 11y ago
In contrast, I find the unrestrained positivity and uncritical acceptance of new 'products' on a site like ProductHunt quite bizarre.

speg 11y ago

Is it telling that I come to the comments first on a story about comments?

mccracken 11y ago
I even did it on this thread, then realised the irony immediately

carlosrg 11y ago

>But Hacker News was wrong about Airbnb Well, about these concerns about security, they weren't totally wrong.[1] [1]: http://www.thelocal.es/20150821/airbnb-to-beef-up-security-after-madrid-assault http://www.thelocal.es/20150821/airbnb-to-beef-up-security-a...

Rambunctious 11y ago

Is there any data file to show what comment has been marked as positive or negative? For example, if you look at the Quora thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197146 ), a comment could say something good about the site and also provide some feedback (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197230). Is this comment marked positive or negative? If feedback is somehow clubbed with negative comments, I would doubt the accuracy of the analysis.

josefresco 11y ago
I had this same thought - as many times I comment and then realize that it could be "taken" several ways. It also amuses me to no end that someone is collecting and analyzing data from HN based (in part) on my sometimes idiotic comments and silly debates with Internet strangers.

danso 11y ago

Not sure if I agree with the conclusion: > Such a specialized community is a great place to get feedback on the technical details of your product, but not to validate your ideas. The responses from people in these communities tend towards scepticism to negativity, even for products they use. Or with the methodology. Take for example the Dropbox thread [1] which the OP's sentiment algorithm classifies as having a "negative top comment". This is what the purportedly negative comment says: > The only problem is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same as USB drive. Most corporate laptops are locked and you can't install anything on them. That's gonna be the problem. Also, another point where your USB comparison fails is that USB works in places where you don't have internet access. > My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision. > Kudos for launching it!!! Launching/shipping is extremely hard and you pulled it off! Super! In what universe, besides the one of a sentiment-analysis-algorithm, would that be considered a "negative" comment? Moreover, even if that last, congratulatory line didn't exist, the rest of that comment is very well-worth listening to. It might have been wrong (has Dropbox penetrated corporate IT as well as USB keys? USB keys have definitely taken a beating in reputation and in convenience...but has Dropbox been an easy transition in corporate IT? At Stanford, we have Box)...but it definitely wasn't non-constructive criticism. If a submission gets a lot of upvotes, to me that's a positive-enough sign of validation. Is it really helpful to the submitter to see a dozen/hundred comments that are merely, "Awesome! I like it!"? I often like reading the comments before I check out the submission, because I don't want to have to parse Press-Releasese to understand what the product does, or who it may compete against, or what its flaws might be...Even if the comments were completely devoid of constructive and insightful criticism -- I'm sure after a big launch, it's helpful, yet annoying when people immediately nitpick grammar and typos -- if you're a founder of a great product, the hemming and hawing of HN is probably the least of your obstacles on the way to success. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

zamalek 11y ago
> In what universe, besides the one of a sentiment-analysis-algorithm, would that be considered a "negative" comment? The algorithm likely has issues identifying if criticism is constructive. If you look at the negative/positive score of each word in isolation (e.g. fail, problem, drop, can't, hard) the comment is overwhelmingly negative. You actually have to parse and understand the comment to prove that it's very positive. They could have ditched the algorithm, but then they would lose a quantifiable positivity score and instead would have had to rely on human intuition - which has it's problems, e.g. spend the whole day looking at negative comments and neutral comments might start looking positive. The study may have had fundamental issues at the outset.

rebootthesystem 11y ago

This, in a strange way, echo's some of what I said on the thread about Amazon's product review star system: In a crowd the people with the most motivation to participate are those with negative views. This is a problem with voting/rating/forum systems going back decades, HN is no exception.

jmnicolas 11y ago
"In a crowd the people with the most motivation to participate are those with negative views." I'd had the ones that are paid to say good things about a product they probably never used. If we're lucky they compensate each other ;-)

jasode 11y ago

Interesting article. I've thought a lot about the slashdot/HN mispredictions of future successes and my random thoughts: 1) A flawed Theory of Mind applied to the general public: I think it's fairly safe to say that the technical crowd (which includes commentators of slashdot/HN) will lean towards the Asperger/autism spectrum. It's easy for geeks/nerds/experts (especially vocal ones) to misjudge how products could be accepted by the masses (who are not geeks/nerds/experts). The famous examples being the slashdot dismissal of the iPod in 2001 and the iPad in 2009. (And Sara McGuire's article that this thread is about has more examples from HN.) 2) Skepticism/negativity is easier to itemize and write, and as a strange bonus, it is perceived as smarter and more insightful analysis. Looking at all the things that are "wrong" with a product might be described as a type of "closed-ended" thinking. On the other hand, imagining the different ways a product could succeed involves more "open-ended" analysis. The problem of writing open-ended thoughts is that it looks like naive futurism, or unsophisticated cheerleading. (E.g. haha, Back to the Future's Bob Gale thought we'd have hoverboards in 2015! Dean Kamen thought Segways would sell millions of units and would revolutionize the world! etc). Because of the combinations caused by faulty Theory of Mind and biases towards the shortcomings of products, the commentary on new business ideas will almost always end up being negative.

scrollaway 11y ago
> It's easy for geeks/nerds/experts (especially vocal ones) to misjudge how products could be accepted by the masses (who are not geeks/nerds/experts). That's a pretty bad conclusion. Is it any easier for non-"geek/nerds/experts" to judge the iphone on its mass market appeal? I don't think so. In fact that's pretty much what you figured in the BTTF "predictions" failing. The thing is a lot of people here on HN, and in the tech community, like to judge products based on how easy or hard they are to build, and that has zero relation to how good the product is or how successful it will be. For a non-techie, it's in the realm of the impossible either way, so that stuff doesn't matter at all.
- jasode 11y ago
  >The thing is a lot of people here on HN, and in the tech community, like to judge products based on how easy or hard they are to build, and that has zero relation to how good the product is or how successful it will be. This is also true but that wasn't my point. I'm saying that the armchair quarterbacking from nerds is often predicting the business success (the mass acceptance) of a product. There is a huge disconnect between how expert tech communities think and how everyone else thinks. Steve Jobs was one of the few that seemed to bridge this disconnect. But Mike Lazaridis of RIM Blackberry could not. Jobs was more consumer-minded rather than technical. Lazaridis was more engineer-minded rather than consumer (e.g. consumers want a physical keyboard more than a touch screen.)

mfoy_ 11y ago

There's an XKCD for this, actually: https://xkcd.com/1497/ https://xkcd.com/1497/

vatotemking 11y ago
HN and reddit in a nutshell

netcan 11y ago

I've never read "The Wisdom of Crowds" so maybe I'm missing some stuff, but from the general statement I think it would be a terrible mistake to take it as meaning "commenters are right" or "consensus is right." It's much more subtle than that. Crowds, in certain structures that yield a useful dynamic, produce wisdom. People transacting in a market allocate resources effectively. Gamblers and bookmakers betting on football matches make good odds. Wiki-editors nitpicking away in wiki-world produce an incredible encyclopedia. Open source, etc. There are also lot of examples of crowds being stupid, and structures that yield a stupid dynamic.

lighthawk 11y ago

tl;dr: HN presents a variety of opinion. Also: misspelled neutral in one of the graphs. Nice post, though. Keep it up.

rayiner 11y ago

What's the saying? They ridiculed Einstein? But they also ridiculed Bozo the Clown?

TillE 11y ago
Indeed. From Carl Sagan's wonderful The Demon-Haunted World: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

dmalvarado 11y ago

That "wisdom of the crowd" thing only works when the crowd isn't influencing each other. Otherwise - groupthink.

danso 11y ago

Obligatory rebuttal of statistical claim: does this analysis suffer from survivor's bias? OK, so these are the few startups and projects that have had reasonable-to-great amount of success...what about all of the startups that we can't think of off the top of our heads [1], because they died? If the number of those is much greater compared to the group OP selected, and they also faced a majority-negative bunch of comments...why shouldn't we conclude that those founders should have obsessed over HN skepticism? [1] I'll start: Fab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444387

acqq 11y ago
Moreover, it's easy to argue that counting the number of positive and negative comments on any subject on any "social" platform can't be treated as more than immensely biased sample of the sentiment of the users of the platform momentarily interested in commenting the specific topic.

ss6754 11y ago

This is an interesting article but very one sided. To really assess "the wisdom of HN community" the author should have assessed all four cells: Successful companies with positive comments, Successful companies with negative comments (which the author did), Unsuccessful companies with positive comments and Unsuccessful companies with negative comments. This would provide a broader and more objective picture of HN community

smikhanov 11y ago

The article says that HN failed to predict the success of AirBnb. While factually correct, this says nothing about HN (or anyone in general). Nobody was able to predict the success of AirBnb, even the savviest of investors. AirBnb wasn't the only company of its kind, it wasn't run by the smartest people out there, it wasn't launched at some particularly good time, or anything similar. They have just survived and succeeded. Why? Who knows. But obsessing about HN comments is truly not worth it.

codingdave 11y ago

Cherry picking posts about the successful companies from the glut of "Show HN" posts that have come through over the years is practically the definition of survivor bias. Not that I am arguing with their larger point - if you believe in what you are doing, do not let comments on HN stop you from pursuing your vision.

cwilkes 11y ago
Exactly. While an interesting read in showing how people can be wrong about later hits, this study is meaningless unless the failures are included. It is like looking at all the winners of the superb owl, finding some negative comments about them, and then saying "see, you shouldn't listen to anyone". What about all the teams that didn't win and had good comments? Or bad?

junto 11y ago

I would have thought this was relatively obvious. Many new ideas and applications are marketed on HN quite validly under Show HN. However, the first pass at marketing an application may not reflect its form further down the line. For example, we often see poor landing pages, or simply landing pages that don't convey the problem succinctly enough to quickly satisfy our short attention spans. A few months or years down the line and these development teams have homed their product, ironed out the bugs and built landing pages that are easy for anyone to understand quickly. Interesting none the less. Hence, what is launched on HN != its final form and cannot determine future success.

dandare 11y ago

Isn't the sample size too small? I invoke the law of small numbers.

im3w1l 11y ago

A positive comment is not a prediction that something will succeed, and a negative comment is not a prediction that something will fail.

mbell 11y ago

> Three companies, three different responses on Hacker News, and three ultimate outcomes. [speaking of Codecademy, Meteor and Homejoy] The only one on this list with an 'ultimate outcome' is Homejoy. Codecademy has no business model that I know of, and Meteor isn't even close to profitable. Quora is also used as a 'success' case and they also don't have a business model. I find this post does a pretty poor job providing any sort of supporting evidence for it's claims.

Spooky23 11y ago

There's definitely heavy cynicism here. But, many of these points are real and are risks that these startups need to factor in. The AirBnB thread is a great example of this. The risks associated with having strangers in your home is something that AirBnB has to market around and have protections from. (ie. the stories about crazy parties that trash apartments)

ebbv 11y ago

I agree with the premise of this post, but it extends beyond HN; don't listen to the internet in general. We commenters don't know as much about whatever you're doing as you do. Maybe you might get some good insight from a random commenter on the web, but usually you won't. However, their specific example is sort of wrong. AirBnB has indeed blown up, but this has been due to two major factors: - Traditional landlords, rental properties and yes Bed and Breakfasts moving onto Air BnB, embracing a new, popular platform. - Extremely high real estate markets in some areas making it attractive and almost necessary to rent out room(s). It's not like AirBnB has created a change where most or even a significant portion of Americans as a whole rent out their rooms. The reality is that the objections the commenters brought up are real, and most people aren't interested in the hassle the comes with renting out a room, and most people's rooms aren't necessarily attractive to rent. In the end the original idea people had of how AirBnB would have to be successful; convincing most people to rent out rooms, an convincing travelers to rent rooms in random people's houses, is what was wrong. They only needed that to happen in certain markets, and for landlords in general to realize the advantages they had by renting out their properties on AirBnB.

cuchoi 11y ago

I agree with the general analysis but the AirBnb example is not accurate. Aside from survivor bias, people were just showing their concern with security. And Airbnb success depends mainly on proving a feeling of security for its users (that why they have ID and facebook verification, for example).

minimaxir 11y ago

Relevant: if you're looking for a way to scrape all Hacker News submissions and comments, I have a GitHub repository containing Python scripts showing how to do just that: https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions... With respect to the article, I've done data analysis on Hacker News myself (e.g. http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ ) and I'm a little skeptical. I was not a fan of using NTLK to classify positive/negative because the models used for training sentiment are based on reviews, not internet site comments, and when I had used NTLK, the results were skewed significantly. I used an alternate model mentioned in the linked post which IMO worked better. The examples used in the article seem more like correlation-implying-causation and cherry-picking. There are many, many counterexamples of startups people loved on HN which died a painful death.

giarc 11y ago

I would love to see what they considered a "negative" comment. Did they clump negative and neutral? Something seems off with the zenefits assessment. Read the Zenefits post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5242681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5242681). I don't see a single negative comment as implied by the second graph on the venngage.com page (looks like 7 positive, 6 negative). Unless the negative comments have been removed between venngage pulling the data and today.

eevilspock 11y ago

Wisdom of the crowd? The HN post that this article cites first had 14 comments. Not a crowd. It categorizes the first comment on DropBox[1] as negative. What? That comment points out a legitimate potential hurdle to user adoption, gives some marketing advice, and then praises them for launching. While the article's instinct may be correct, I don't see that it has shown data that supports it. - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863.

teaneedz 11y ago

A lot of thought about measuring an audience that for the most part lives in a bubble. In view of the fact that it's often the same audience which continuously produces bug ridden UX conundrums and ad tech supported mentalities locked in a tech bubble focus, I think that HN might be the wrong place for this study. I love HN, but one still needs to remember that the audience, although influential, is quite different then a truly diverse mainstream crowd.

gwern 11y ago

> The HN crowd, or any expert community, don’t have any greater a chance of predicting the success of a startup than a more general crowd. And what 'more general crowd' are you so confidently comparing to, exactly?

xixi77 11y ago

I don't see how analyzing comments on ex-post known successful businesses can tell us anything about anything -- it (at least) needs to be compared to how comments on average startup proposals do, to see if there is any predictive power. If, for example, successful startups had 20% positive comments vs. 10% positive on average, and the difference was significant, that would suggest that HN shows awesome crowd wisdom -- even if 80% of people here hate everything :) Accounting for confounding variables would be nice too (for example, if field X is generally more liked by HN than field Y, equally positive feedback on a startup doing X would tell us more than that on a startup doing Y). Still an interesting idea, I just think that people should not forget that "data science" is a subset of statistics, and any kind of data analysis is not really useful without at least some familiarity with it.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

you're all idiots

yeukhon 11y ago

* Most startup will fail. * Most of the successful startups will be acquired and merged with other more successful startups or established companies. * Most ideas are repeated and competed aggressively. * Most of the successful startups primary winning demographic / target audience turns out to be younger crowd, especially with college students, and the young crowd tend to be better at advertising startup ideas. * Many successful startups you can name right away simply reinvent the existing platform by applying media attraction and sharing among crowds. * Only way win is make noise. A lot of noise. Yeah. Back to pg's top recommendation, selling your product to users. * Unless you have billions to burn on your own, don't try to be SpaceX or Telsa. You will never be them (or the same guy who founded both entities). My own unscientific conclusions.

hartator 11y ago

If you believe that 99% of a success of a startup is about execution and 1% is about the idea, sharp guesses about the ideas shouldn't matter that much to gauge one's wisdom.

tlb 11y ago

Here's a mechanism by which initial HN sentiment can be negatively correlated with eventual success: - Great founders describe the MVP accurately, even self-deprecatingly: "Sleep under my kitchen table." They mention the flaws, because they want the most useful feedback. - Less-confident founders describe the gold-plated, fully-featured potential future version of the product and don't mention the flaws. At least on a superficial read, the great founder's description seems less promising, but they usually end up with a better product. I certainly see this dynamic at work in pitches I've been given.

Mz 11y ago

The HN crowd, or any expert community, don’t have any greater a chance of predicting the success of a startup than a more general crowd. For the most part, the purpose of posting something to HN is not to take a vote of that sort. Thus trying to view it through that lens is kind of silly.

venomsnake 11y ago

Survivor bias at its best. You must include all companies that have announced themselves on HN.