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The level of dismissiveness I'm seeing in the comments here is really discouraging, and I'm disappointed to be a part of this community. In a community of start
by XERQ 13y ago
The level of dismissiveness I'm seeing in the comments here is really discouraging, and I'm disappointed to be a part of this community. In a community of startup founders fostering new ideas, I haven't seen such close-mindedness. I appreciate what dcurtis is trying to do, doesn't matter if I agree with it or not.
The kudos concept is different, the fact that people are writing him emails and tweets about decrementing their counts for a meaningless number is petty.
The "Elitism" invite-only being such an issue is silly. HN and reddit started with small groups of people that weren't connected to a larger social sphere, so they slowly grew organically with the content they wanted. Google does invite-only for their projects (Gmail, G+, etc) as a way to both fix issues early with minimal user impact and to scale properly. Medium did the same thing. To say the dcurtis should've made it open for everyone at the beginning is disingenuous. Curating a small community and taking feedback from them, along with having readers connected to a larger social sphere (HN) means it can grow slowly while focusing on its core users, especially as a side project.
Appreciate what others are doing, even if you don't agree with it. Don't follow the herd. Just because Medium opened its gates doesn't mean they're the end-all be-all of blogging. I made a svbtle account because I want to see how they evolve and capture what Medium is missing.
- TylerE 13y agoI find it a welcome respite from the normal echo-chamber, personally. PS: Reddit didn't grow organically, it was heavily content and user seeded by the admins. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of...
- gone35 13y agoIt's conscientiousness, not close-mindedness. If you find petty that people complain about non-intended kudos, by the same logic you should also find petty to have introduced such a pointless anti-pattern in the first place. Besides, kudos are not that different from karma points or likes. Knowingly adulterating such a crucial signaling component of an online community is short-sighted and needlessly detrimental.
- Mz 13y agoHumans are social creatures and the dismissiveness might be in part due to Dustin Curtis having some rather negative PR on HN in his not too distant past and, being young and brash, he didn't exactly handle it with aplomb. I tangled with him at the time. It was a pretty not nice scene. I have not really followed him/his story since, but most people do a pretty poor job of recovering from such incidents, which tend to continue to haunt them. There are ways to live such things down but many people just do not know how. So perhaps the dismissiveness is primarily proof that HN is populated largely by humans, with all their usual tendencies, not 'bots nor aliens.
- benched 13y agoThat's the thing, though - I don't think that the HN "community" has been predominantly startup founders for several years. That's what used to make it so great. I think I would describe the prevailing demographic now as refugees from other tech news aggregators, who have been immersed in just enough group-think, cargo-cult science and statistics to be profoundly annoying.