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Cheap content attracts cheap commenters. The comments and questions in AMAs rarely express novel insight -- usually, someone pipes up with a popular sentiment,
by scythe 14y ago
Cheap content attracts cheap commenters. The comments and questions in AMAs rarely express novel insight -- usually, someone pipes up with a popular sentiment, like asking President Obama to stop using drone strikes. Commenting in such threads, which are inevitably mobbed, gives you the illusion of significance ("Wow, X answered my question!") or worse yet they give you actual significance ("Wow, it's X, he did an AMA") both of which function as an invitation to horse-sized-duck trolling and celebrity obsession. Do we want the users who join because Tim Cook did an AMA here once, or people who join to discuss hacking?
As the old saying goes: small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas. HN has always been a place for great minds -- let's keep it that way.
- daniel-cussen 14y agoWhat if you required a certain amount of points or more to ask a question? HN already has good software to deal with voting rings, so we shouldn't get too much karma whoring in response. Plus, people would have to invest in karma, because once the AMA is announced for the following day, or for right then, it's too late to get 300 (say) more points. I think it's workable.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tribe 14y agoThere have been a number of posts about letting Reddit be Reddit and HN be HN, but I think that problems with the level of questions on Reddit is the reason that HN should do them; to provide a more serious place for discussions with these people. It isn't totally uncommon for important people to be on HN already to talk about something they have written, and I think the community has benefited from that. The point isn't to talk about people, its to talk about ideas with "great minds"
- chrismarlow9 14y agoI'm afraid if it happens, HN will be crowded with people that just got their first job and want to know how to build a website on godaddy and sell it to google.
- jrabone 14y agoWait, so that's not what HN's for?