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Can someone explain why I keep seeing Zoom on the frontpage? What sets it apart from the rest that it gets discussed on HN so often recently? Is it a YC company

Can someone explain why I keep seeing Zoom on the frontpage? What sets it apart from the rest that it gets discussed on HN so often recently? Is it a YC company?

ilikehurdles 7y ago
It's a small company with huge industry competitors, and it's winning.
dang 7y ago
It's a spinoff of the covid crisis. The rush to remote work has made Zoom much more prominent than it was a few weeks ago. This has attracted a flood of attention, so a lot of spotlights are trained on it right now. For the same reason, we've been hearing all about ventilators lately [1]. That's not a ventilator plot, it's article moths flocking to the spotlights. With Zoom there are compounding factors. Software, video conferencing, video conferencing software, and software businesses are all topics in HN's wheelhouse—as is anything security or privacy related. There have been security and privacy surprises (shall we say) with Zoom in the past, so people are naturally hunting for more. Also, readers are primed to pattern-match any new findings as part of the ongoing sequence. That's a strong multiplier. Familiarity reactions—cache effects, if you like—magnify how much attention a story attracts. There was a similar, though slower-motion, sequence of stories about Facebook last year. It's not a YC company. When there's a major ongoing story, such as the current crisis, floods of follow-up and copycat posts appear, since every website and media outlet wants in on the action. After the Snowden deluge of 2013, we learned to moderate these counter-cyclically, so that HN can surf the big waves without getting totally sogged with repetition. The test for a new submission on a MOT (Massive Ongoing Topic) is: does it contain SNI (Significant New Information) [2]? If no, we downweight the MOT. If yes, we try to have one thread about each SNI. I just made up those TLAs. Zoom has become a MOT in its own right. You can tell that when objections like [3..9] start cropping up. The question is: is the OP a SNI? [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=ventilat&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22749596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22749596 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22743303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22743303 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748549 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750059 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750251 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753810 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754138
- burgerzzz 7y ago
  Thank you for the detailed response, very interesting!

Can someone explain why I keep seeing Zoom on the frontpage? What sets it apart from the rest that it gets discussed on HN so often recently? Is it a YC company?

ilikehurdles 7y ago

It's a small company with huge industry competitors, and it's winning.

dang 7y ago

It's a spinoff of the covid crisis. The rush to remote work has made Zoom much more prominent than it was a few weeks ago. This has attracted a flood of attention, so a lot of spotlights are trained on it right now. For the same reason, we've been hearing all about ventilators lately [1]. That's not a ventilator plot, it's article moths flocking to the spotlights. With Zoom there are compounding factors. Software, video conferencing, video conferencing software, and software businesses are all topics in HN's wheelhouse—as is anything security or privacy related. There have been security and privacy surprises (shall we say) with Zoom in the past, so people are naturally hunting for more. Also, readers are primed to pattern-match any new findings as part of the ongoing sequence. That's a strong multiplier. Familiarity reactions—cache effects, if you like—magnify how much attention a story attracts. There was a similar, though slower-motion, sequence of stories about Facebook last year. It's not a YC company. When there's a major ongoing story, such as the current crisis, floods of follow-up and copycat posts appear, since every website and media outlet wants in on the action. After the Snowden deluge of 2013, we learned to moderate these counter-cyclically, so that HN can surf the big waves without getting totally sogged with repetition. The test for a new submission on a MOT (Massive Ongoing Topic) is: does it contain SNI (Significant New Information) [2]? If no, we downweight the MOT. If yes, we try to have one thread about each SNI. I just made up those TLAs. Zoom has become a MOT in its own right. You can tell that when objections like [3..9] start cropping up. The question is: is the OP a SNI? [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=ventilat&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22749596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22749596 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22743303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22743303 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748549 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750059 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750251 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753810 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754138

burgerzzz 7y ago
Thank you for the detailed response, very interesting!