4 ms·

Just want to point out that you're on a site that successfully uses crowd sourcing combined with moderation to curate a list of websites, news, and articles tha

by pharke 7y ago

Just want to point out that you're on a site that successfully uses crowd sourcing combined with moderation to curate a list of websites, news, and articles that people find interesting and valuable. Why not a new internet built around communities like this where the users actively participate in finding, ranking, and moderating the content they consume? It's not a stretch to add a decent search index and categories to a news aggregator, most do it already. If these tools could be built into the structure of the web we'd be half way there.

abathur 7y ago
Edit: I had myself convinced that comments have a different ID space from submissions, but that obviously isn't true. I've partly rewritten to correct for an over-guess on how many new submissions there are each day. I agree with your general suggestion, but just want to highlight that scale issues still make me think whatever finds traction on HN is a bit of a crapshoot. It looks like there were over 10k posts (including comments) in the last day, and the list of submissions that spent time on the front page day yesterday has 84 posts. I don't how normal the last 2 days were, but by eyeball I'd guess around a quarter of the posts are comments on the day's front-page posts. This means there are probably a few thousand submissions that didn't get much if any traction. Any time I look at the "New" page, I still end up finding several items that sound interesting enough to open. I see more than 10 that I'm tempted to click on right now. The current new page stretches back about 40 minutes, and only 10 of the 30 have more than 1 point (and only 1 has more than 10). Only 2 of the links I was tempted to click on have more than 1 point. I suspect that there's vastly more interesting stuff posted to HN than its current dynamics are capable of identifying and signal-boosting. That's not bad, per se. It'd be an even worse time-sink if it were better at this task. But it does mean there are pitfalls using it as a model at an even larger scale and in other contexts.

by pharke 7y ago

abathur 7y ago

Edit: I had myself convinced that comments have a different ID space from submissions, but that obviously isn't true. I've partly rewritten to correct for an over-guess on how many new submissions there are each day. I agree with your general suggestion, but just want to highlight that scale issues still make me think whatever finds traction on HN is a bit of a crapshoot. It looks like there were over 10k posts (including comments) in the last day, and the list of submissions that spent time on the front page day yesterday has 84 posts. I don't how normal the last 2 days were, but by eyeball I'd guess around a quarter of the posts are comments on the day's front-page posts. This means there are probably a few thousand submissions that didn't get much if any traction. Any time I look at the "New" page, I still end up finding several items that sound interesting enough to open. I see more than 10 that I'm tempted to click on right now. The current new page stretches back about 40 minutes, and only 10 of the 30 have more than 1 point (and only 1 has more than 10). Only 2 of the links I was tempted to click on have more than 1 point. I suspect that there's vastly more interesting stuff posted to HN than its current dynamics are capable of identifying and signal-boosting. That's not bad, per se. It'd be an even worse time-sink if it were better at this task. But it does mean there are pitfalls using it as a model at an even larger scale and in other contexts.