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Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning
- run4yourlives 19y agoWe're screwed now... techcrunch isn't exactly known for its overly insightful comments. Welcome digg-like users!
- ivankirigin 19y agoThe arrival of less insightful people is inevitable. The goal should be presenting the site such that they matter less or don't bother coming.
- mixmax 19y agoMaybe there should be some kind of validation before you can start posting and taking part in the discussions. A smart way of doing this would be to let potential new users write a bit about themselves, and let existing users vote on whether or not they should be allowed to post based on their introduction of themselves. Another way would be to let new users have a quota of comments that could be raised if the initial comments were voted up.
- ArcticCelt 19y agoSlashdot implemented something in something similar long time ago (I guess they still do it) and I don't know why nobody ripped that off. To start moderating your account need pass a certain threshold of "oldness". I think the moderation is even more important because when people start modding down valid coments or modding up stupidity that's what make me want to leave. That's when I got annoyed with Digg +-2 years ago and Reddit +-1 year ago.
- mixmax 19y agoI've been wondering that too. Slashdot has gone through all of the problems that face digg, reddit, etc. And they have found some pretty good solutions through trial and error. They are even well documented here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml Generally I am amazed that moderation systems are not better than they are, especially since the stakes seem to be so high in this niche right now.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- run4yourlives 19y agoActually, instead of that, why not just assess their voting habits and allow posting at a certain threshold? Those users that continually upvote stories and comments that are considered "low quality" are held, be they new/old whatever. Get too low, and you can't vote either. The only issue is you need to be very specific in how you choose to asses what is "high" vs. what is "low" quality. Too rigid and you basically encourage group-think, too lax; anarchy. (Note: I would keep "karma" in place since it would help to distract from the "real" karma system.)
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 19y agoInsightful isn't a type of person, it's a type of idea.
- run4yourlives 19y agoWell put. It'll be interesting to see how pg and team handle something that every other site has failed miserably with. I've got high hopes.
- gcv 19y agoNot every site. The Ars Technica forums have maintained a surprisingly high level of quality discussion over the years. Ars uses human moderators who read every post and enforce the rules.
- wmeredith 19y agoThere's also Metafilter. Or more spcifically, ask Metafilter which maintains one of the highest quality, large communities I've managed to find online. http://ask.metafilter.com/ http://ask.metafilter.com/ The $5 price of admission seems to be beyond most 1337 hax0rz with funy p!cs and LOLZ.
- henning 19y agoIf there is an influx, the lack of fluff will scare them away for quite a while. It was over about a 12 month period of time that reddit went from being occasionally political to being totally dominated by Ron Paul/Obama fanatics. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.
- dfranke 19y agoIt was faster than that. There was very little fluff in April 2006, and by August 2006 it was overrun.
- thomas 19y agough, here they come... really hope place does not devolved into something like the digg/slashdot/techcrunch comment sections it was nice while it lasted ; )
- PStamatiou 19y agoah blast..
- lyime 19y agolets put some really boring stuff for the next few days so we can push digg-like users away.
- TheTarquin 19y agoPerhaps I haven't had sufficient experience with Digg, Techcrunch, etc., but it seems a touch elitist to me to denigrate someone based solely on the sites which they choose to frequent. Example: I browse youtube. A lot. I sometimes comment on videos. Now, read the comments on any substantially popular youtube video. A lot of noise, yes? So does that automatically make me an idiot or a bigot or illiterate? No, not necessarily. A similar argument can be made for TechCrunch, Digg, or any other website. The problem is the site, not the users. In a sense, this is a fallacy of division: Digg is a noisy site with little, if any meaningful discourse. Therefore none of its users are capable of meaningful discourse.
- malanalars 19y ago@TheTarqin: The problem with these sites is, that they all "were" great places to go. But as soon as the userbase grew, they went downhill... It's not so much about being elitist, than being afraid of things, we have experienced already at other places.
- TheTarquin 19y agoI suppose I can understand that, but I wonder if a better response might be of the "welcome, new users: here's how this site is different then you're used to" variety. I understand that News.YC is pretty awesome. It's a fairly small, high-signal community, and I greatly appreciate that. I just don't understand this Digg-o-phobia. Perhaps it's just that I haven't witnessed the transformation you mentioned in other sites. Hacker News is really the first such website that has grabbed my interest. Anyway, here's hoping it stays as interesting, vibrant, and high S/N ration as is now.
- dottertrotter 19y agomy thoughts exactly
- johnrob 19y agoGet ready for some LOL cats.
- moog 19y agoLet's ban everyone with < 10k karma!
- fortes 19y ago> Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting. Hopefully the TC coverage doesn't change this ...
- Prrometheus 19y agoHacker News is the Schrodinger blog. Techcrunch can’t observe it without changing its state.
- jgamman 19y agoahem i think you mean Heisenberg's blog - Shcrodinger's blog would be all blogs at the same time until you actually tried to read it - then the blog wave function (a blavtion if you will) would collapse thus revealing the true observed blog. which will almost certainly be a LOL cat. it may be alive or dead - it's mileage has varied.
- jl 19y agoNew to Hacker News? http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wumi 19y agoGreat advice. Although everybody is automatically assuming only bad-mannered ilk will come from TC, has anyone thought 'hey maybe there will be MORE insightful discussions.' Other than that, why not just led the editors do what they do best and not worry about it?
- marcus 19y agoBecause we have almost no editors, we police ourselves and if the community grows too rapidly it can lose focus, if tomorrow we'll be featured on Oprah this site will lose everything I love about it. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Or in simpler words "The unwashed masses are upon us"
- nose 19y agoNew users can't vote without karma, so it shouldn't be too bad.
- TheTarquin 19y agoFantastic and concise. Out of curiosity, is there a link to that anywhere on the News.YC website? Perhaps I'm blind, but I don't see one anywhere. I looked for a page like that when I joined and, after not finding one, just jumped into the fray. It's a great resource for newbies like myself. Perhaps it deserves more prominent billing?
- iamwil 19y agoIt's in the footer on the list pages under "guidelines". footers don't appear for comment pages, for some reason. It's even more important that they're there in comment pages, I imagine.
- hbien 19y agoOh crap, here comes eternal sept.
- kingnothing 19y agoWith as much as we complain about how much noobs will change the site, why did he go off and do a stupid thing like put this on the front page of TC?
- Readmore 19y agoSND = Slow News Day.
- garbowza 19y agoWho is "he?" Arrington runs TC. PG doesn't put anything on the frontpage of TC.
- kingnothing 19y ago"He" would be Michael Arrington, the person who put it on the front page of TC. If he's an actual community member here, then he should have realized that was a stupid thing to do, for the sake of the news and comment quality on Hacker News, and not to have done it.
- ntoshev 19y agoDo you think Arrington values the community here more than the community reading TC, his own community? Adding value for his readers should be his first priority.
- kingnothing 19y agoWhat value is he adding for his users? First off, he's referring them to a site that competes with his own, which very well may cause some users to switch over. That isn't too far of a stretch for my imagination, seeing as N.YC has much higher comment quality and community cohesion. Second, if the TC users came here and destroyed the signal to noise ratio we currently enjoy, he would have done them a disservice by recommending a web site that was so quickly destroyed after they all discovered it. Of course, few of them would likely realize that they, themselves, were the cause of the downturn. Clearly neither of those seem like they're going to happen, based on the referral numbers that Paul posted so far, but it was a more feasible option when I made my earlier post.
- Readmore 19y agoHacker News gets Techcrunch'd and Arc falls to it's knees. Start your "Arc can't scale as well as X" rants here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133489 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133489
- socratees 19y agoHacker News is one of my favorite sites - i love it for the quality of the content. Hope it doesn't go down because of the attention that it's getting now.
- Caligula 19y agoI find it amusing people are 'upset' that HN got techcrunch'd with the story being posted on TechCrunch. You should be ecstatic the TechCrunch editor frequents this site so often as you would most likely sell your first born to get featured on TechCrunch.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- jedberg 19y agoYou know, it really turns people off when you go around spamming your links all over the place (I've seem them both here and on reddit). You may have a great site, but perhaps you should let your technology speak for itself. If it is truly great, people will come through word of mouth.
- gaika 19y agoI'm sorry
- allenbrunson 19y agoyou guys, relax. pg has been thinking long and hard about the newbie influx problem for many months now. he saw what happened to reddit, and he's applying his usual sensible approach to preventing that from happening here. if anybody can do this, pg can.
- curi 19y agowhy do you figure pg is amazingly good at this? he already banned me and rms from voting. that doesn't seem to suggest great leadership skills.
- Hexstream 19y agoThat doesn't seem to suggest anything at all, period.
- curi 19y agoWhy do you say that? I think failing to get along peacefully with leaderboard users is a bad sign.
- pg 19y agoAll users are held to the same standards, whether they're on the leaderboard or not. Eventually the other users will get tired of you filling up the comment threads with your private beefs, and you'll stop.
- curi 19y agoIt's not a matter of different standards, it's a matter of: if you can't lead active yc users, why would you be able to lead an influx of new reddit (or techcrunch or whatever) users? rms for example is apologetic and offered to do what you wanted. a new user from reddit probably wouldn't do that. but despite this, you still lead in a way that alienates rms. in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior. that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to tell me.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- electric 19y agoSo does this mean that Hacker News will soon be acquired by Google?
- DarrenStuart 19y agooh well at least scoble didn't get a whiteboard out to explain how it works :p
- DarrenStuart 19y agolol, no sense of humour I guess
- mrtron 19y agoDoes HN have an issue with scalability? The site is tremendously slow from the new influx. How would you go about scaling an Arc app?
- hooande 19y agoOn one hand, I'm glad that arrington validated something I've believed for a long time: news.yc is the best social news/network/app for people who are into startups. On the other hand, I do not want to see this place get overrun by ron paul supporters and facebook fanboys. Where will all the cool people post news to then? Maybe swen.yc?
- Flemlord 19y agoI concur. I'm a top-10 reddit poster and Hacker News is my first site of the day now. Keep up the good work and don't be afraid to ban the idiots. Now if only somebody would set up a "Political News" site using the same code base...
- comatose_kid 19y agoAnyone can. pg included the sourcecode to news.ycombinator in his latest release of Arc.
- staunch 19y agoHopefully we'll get to see the traffic spike chart from all this Techcrunch traffic (PG? :D)
- nikolaj 19y agoand news.yc jumps the shark....
- ghiotion 19y agoI'm not ready to pull a chicken little. I came over here from reddit after seeing pg's post on trolls on the reddit front page. Some of the earliest comments and/or posts I saw were of the "oh man, we're screwed now" type. Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I have a hard time believing the reddit crowd did HN a disservice. HN is just too darn... smart for the majority of people. On the rare occasion when some stupid POS makes it to the front page, the comment section more than makes up for it. The community is too good to suffer fools gladly. And fools get bored easily.
- ojbyrne 19y agoSo the obvious question is... how many sock puppet accounts does Arrington already have here? He admitted to 5 at digg, I think. Sometimes I come here first thing in the morning and it's 75% techcrunch.
- eaken 19y agohey man TC isn't that bad. You have to muddle through a lot of comments from what seem to be the same trolls, but once in a while you find a gem of a comment. too bad there isn't a browser that can filter out comments from select people ... TC would then be much more insightful
- joeguilmette 19y agook, the word is out. SHHHHHHH...
- kajecounterhack 19y ago"Little known?" Or is he getting confused and really mean, "Different target audience?"
- dhimes 19y agoHN is one of the very best sites on the web. In fact, it's probably one of the best sites the web has ever had, at least for the tech/startup group. I have confidence that the right people will find it and the others will be bored and go away. It's actually kind of boring for flame wars. But great for news and ideas.
- njetx 19y agoGee, I registered only yesterday. I'm glad I made it before it became mainstream!