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I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.
by markkat 16y ago
I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.
- ericmsimons 16y agoI agree 100%
- iuguy 16y agoI agree, but it's important that what qualifies as investment matters. Perhaps a function of comments, votes, submissions and time the account has been around. As an aside, how would we distinguish between RMS posts and regular posts? Would the spammers simply revert to normal posts? I think if this is the case then perhaps we should reconsider the goal. If the goal is to stop spam masquerading as RMS, then it seems to me that accounts should require more longevity or community contribution to post an RMS post than a regular post. As long as we define etiquette for posting an RMS post, then it should be feasible to use a combination of following that etiquette, and flagging posts that don't follow said etiquette. If the issue is stopping spam, then perhaps that's separate to RMS posts and should be considered as a wider whole.
- tptacek 16y agoYou have almost 1000 karma. Do you have a startup you want to ask about? Try posting it; he's not going to kill it. Otherwise: what's the problem?
- iuguy 16y agoI don't care about my karma a great deal (although I've written about a personal karma-related goal before for me to gauge how engaged I am in this community, it's a guide for me rather than a score per se). I care about other people's startups, but not spam.
- vessenes 16y agoI'm reminded of the first time I saw PG speak, it was on bayespam at MIT -- he noted that if SPAM can come up with interesting and engaging email, he'll happily read it. I imagine that as soon as someone is posting interesting content, RMS or not, PG and others won't think of them as 'spammers' anymore, rather contributors.
- mvalle 16y agoIf SPAM is interesting and engaging, is is SPAM?
- boredguy8 16y ago"Mission fucking accomplished" http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/
- iuguy 16y agoYou sir, win this thread.
- dbingham 16y agoMine was pretty interesting to the 10 people who's commented and the 23 who'd voted it up. It was still closed.
- jayliew 16y agoAs a side effect, if you're legit, not a spammer but are new to HN (0 karma), then maybe one of the paths to getting an RMS is to be able to convince at least 1 non-new HN member with enough karma to stake their reputation and post an RMS on your behalf. Therefore the RMS is already vetted by someone real that's been around HN for a bit. Crowdsourcing RMS spam control sounds like it could work well. Like how investors stake their reputation by inviting other co-investors, established HN'ers would have something to lose if they posted RMS spam.
- yesimahuman 16y agoCue the PPARMSFM (please post a Rate My Startup for me) posts :)
- swolchok 16y agoThis is actually a case where "Cue", not "Queue," is correct.
- petervandijck 16y agoFascinating!
- yesimahuman 16y agoThanks...I guess queue is such an integral part of my career I forgot about alternatives!
- Cushman 16y agoUnless there are several of those posts, and they have to wait in line.
- subbu 16y agoAgree. I commented on a recently killed "Rate My Startup" submission asking the reasons behind killing it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861551. Now I know.
- gwil 16y agoThat was my RMS - honestly have just been a reader and less of a participator. It was highly suggested that I seek HN for feedback on my newly launched site, thought little of posting it from my newly created account. Tons of great feedback in the time it was alive though. (Thanks everyone.) Lesson learned.
- bwooceli 16y agoI'm about 2 months away from having something to rate, so I started commenting/writing/posting just so that when the time came I wouldn't be "that guy"...
- yesimahuman 16y agoWhat about just requiring a certain number of active days being signed up? Is there data that shows spam is ever posted by long running users?
- nowarninglabel 16y agoPoor for stopping spam. It's pretty easy to write a little bot that just logs in to ycombinator on an active basis. Data would be good though.
- yesimahuman 16y agoSorry, I meant days since signup, not time since last login. I haven't see any data that suggests spammers are using old accounts, but I'm not sure.
- seancron 16y agoEven if spammers aren't using old accounts, if something like that was implemented, spammers would just add sleep( n * 86400 ) to their bots. Once those n days were up, there would be yet another wave of spam.
- matwood 16y agoI think this could work. If you make it something like 60 days that's not too harsh on new users, but will slow spammers down. If a spammer does wait 60 days and post an obvious spam link then gets banned they are stuck waiting again. The only problem here is a spammer that creates a ton of accounts and then uses them all at once after the 60 day threshold.
- iamjpg 16y agoI completely agree. I am a HN newbie and wouldn't expect people to care about any of my projects until I spent time offering analytical and positive contributions here first.
- nickfromseattle 16y agoAs a non-technical, first time entrepreneur I am finding it difficult to add value to HN. I have been lurking for ~6 months, a member for 1 month and I made my first post yesterday. With that said, I have learned a ton here and HN is easily the best resource I have ever found on any subject. edit: Potential solution: require participation in other user's RMS before you can post your own RMS. Even though I am non technical and don't have much entrepreneurial experience, I can still give an opinion from the view of a customer.
- qeorge 16y agoIf one makes a habit of participating in RMS threads and giving thoughtful feedback, I'm sure the karma threshold would take care of itself. Good idea.
- dkokelley 16y agoSurely you have a background in something unique or interesting, that others here don't have. At the very least, you have your perspective. I don't think it's difficult to provide insightful, valuable content to HN, in both submissions and comments. I've noticed that the topics here tend to rotate over time (meaning one week is all hard core programming, and the next week is boot strapping). Also, check out the new section, where the submissions tend to be more varied (in my experience). Find a topic or two that you have something to contribute to and comment on it.
- natep 16y ago(not grandparent, but similar situation) I've been here for a while, and I think it is difficult to participate at a level that gets lots of karma. I limit by intake of HN with the "Hacker News 100" feed, so that you all can filter my content for me (I'm going to miss good articles anyways, so I might as well not miss the popular ones). This also means that most things have already been said, or the conversation is dead, and even if I asked a great question, I wouldn't get a response. This hasn't really bothered me, until the average karma/post started getting shown, which showed me that I get upvotes on less than half the things I say. Now that pg is also pointing out the correlation between new accounts and undesirables, I'm worried about...something (not sure what).
- maresca 16y agoInvesting time does not equal karma. I have posted about 10 comments so far and only have 2 karma. Most of the threads I post in never make it past 20 total posts. Requiring people to have a certain amount of karma will make them only post more comments to achieve said karma. And the more unnecessary posts there are, the lower the quality is of those posts.