9 ms·

This is a great idea, but a lot of thought needs to be put into how it could be abused. Some potential problems that come to mind immediately are: self-promoti

by pault 15y ago

This is a great idea, but a lot of thought needs to be put into how it could be abused. Some potential problems that come to mind immediately are: self-promotion, low quality posts, SEO shenanigans, and wikipedia style edit wars. What keeps HN relevant and high-quality is the flagging and voting system, and I don't know how that translates to a git-based architecture. EDIT: I misunderstood how github's pull requests work. Sounds like a perfect tool to maintain community standards.

tikhonj 15y ago
I think this is where using pull requests to submit articles really shines. The community would vet articles and potentially help with editing and clarity. This would help contributors make sure their articles are well-written and well thought-out, while giving readers consistently high-quality content. Of course, this requires an at least moderately engaged community of contributors, but I think that's completely reasonable. We would also have to be careful not to scare away insightful people who aren't great writers, but I think it would be manageable.
- pault 15y ago
  I agree. Who gets push access to master?
  - Kaizyn 15y ago
    That depends on how closely affiliated with HN the blog is going to be and if our ycombinator benefactors are interested in endorsing such a project. If so, it should be one of them or someone they designate from the community. If it is not associated to HN, then this is not an easily solved problem.
    - pault 15y ago
      I love the idea of a community blog for HN readers, but I doubt anyone wants to make it official. Maybe we just see who's interested and hand the reins over to whoever has the highest karma?
      - tikhonj 15y ago
        I think that just having anybody with enough time to manage would do. As long as there's a focus on community, and everything gets discussed, any power issues should be remediable at the very beginning. Basically, we should just have a community where the person managing the github account and whatnot is more like a sysadmin than a CEO. The main goal should be to find somebody willing to do a little extra work to get everything working.
        pault 15y ago
        Agreed; electing a button-pusher-in-chief shouldn't be an issue until someone actually contributes something, and at this point the OP is MIA. I think you should do it.
  - tikhonj 15y ago
    If not too many people want to post at the start, it can always just be a volunteer or two from the initial pool of interested people. Perhaps, at the very beginning, the submitter could just take care of all the administration (hopefully it's not too much work) and everybody could work out a system for discussing and approving posts as a group.
    - alexis-d 15y ago
      By the way the "big thing" isn't the hardest part of this. The most important thing is probably the review of issue/pull request, and everybody who want to help can do that ;)

by pault 15y ago

tikhonj 15y ago

I think this is where using pull requests to submit articles really shines. The community would vet articles and potentially help with editing and clarity. This would help contributors make sure their articles are well-written and well thought-out, while giving readers consistently high-quality content. Of course, this requires an at least moderately engaged community of contributors, but I think that's completely reasonable. We would also have to be careful not to scare away insightful people who aren't great writers, but I think it would be manageable.

pault 15y ago
I agree. Who gets push access to master?
- Kaizyn 15y ago
  That depends on how closely affiliated with HN the blog is going to be and if our ycombinator benefactors are interested in endorsing such a project. If so, it should be one of them or someone they designate from the community. If it is not associated to HN, then this is not an easily solved problem.
  - pault 15y ago
    I love the idea of a community blog for HN readers, but I doubt anyone wants to make it official. Maybe we just see who's interested and hand the reins over to whoever has the highest karma?
    - tikhonj 15y ago
      I think that just having anybody with enough time to manage would do. As long as there's a focus on community, and everything gets discussed, any power issues should be remediable at the very beginning. Basically, we should just have a community where the person managing the github account and whatnot is more like a sysadmin than a CEO. The main goal should be to find somebody willing to do a little extra work to get everything working.
      - pault 15y ago
        Agreed; electing a button-pusher-in-chief shouldn't be an issue until someone actually contributes something, and at this point the OP is MIA. I think you should do it.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  If not too many people want to post at the start, it can always just be a volunteer or two from the initial pool of interested people. Perhaps, at the very beginning, the submitter could just take care of all the administration (hopefully it's not too much work) and everybody could work out a system for discussing and approving posts as a group.
  - alexis-d 15y ago
    By the way the "big thing" isn't the hardest part of this. The most important thing is probably the review of issue/pull request, and everybody who want to help can do that ;)