5 ms·

I think that's what the site is banking on. That initial investment of time and effort is their way of building a serious community.

kristopolous 13y ago
It's a fascinating idea. There is the Eternal September effect that can be combated by having a barrier to entry. Metafilter has $5 registration, stack-overflow has their own sauce. My friend who runs the VMS company prgmr.com requires someone to give them a public key to sign up. I generally think this is a good idea to keep the riff-raff out. (then again, I've done countless anonymous spelling, format, and grammar corrections on wikipedia - but some people say their convoluted markup is the barrier) The point here is, if I can get my eyes on the prize (the privilege to post), and if it doesn't look terribly valuable - then I have very little motive to hop on board. My core contention is that the barrier has actually been placed too high. $5, a public key, learning wiki markup, providing correct answers - these are all easy tasks of very little effort. Doing code comprehension and diving into a project - that's a fairly large commitment. Am I to be held responsible for the code? Will the people behind the project care if I continue to submit after I get the prize? I count the circle of people I listen to, respect, and care about (here, it would be the commenting accounts) as greatly outnumbering the circle I'd want to work on code with.
- krapp 13y ago
  Unfortunately, it appears to include node developers who don't have the time or patience to submit a pull request, those who do but whose requests won't be approved, and developers who code in languages other than javascript and who therefore have nothing useful enough to add, among the 'riff-raff'. Some kind of proof of work is an interesting idea for a site like this, but I wonder if it self-selects for too narrow a domain? I don't know that the correlation between "submitted code" and "provides quality content" are strong enough for this particular filter to provide results worth the effort.
  - matt2000 13y ago
    Op here: yeah, it might be the case that the community selection will be too narrow, but we figured almost any programmer knows something of HTML or CSS or JavaScript, so that seemed like a good lowest common denominator for a minimal standard of contribution.
    - pekk 13y ago
      Real contribution to a Node project requires more than passing familiarity with HTML, CSS or Javascript. If you just want a site for primarily Node developers, that's fine, just admit it straight up
      - jpatokal 13y ago
        They're not asking for a "real" contribution, just a pull request. Two people have already gotten in by tweaking the 404 page: https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/commits/master/views/404.jade https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/commits/master/views/404...
    - krapp 13y ago
      It might run counter to your goals but wouldn't it accomplish more or less the same thing to require an approved pull request for any open source project? A similar amount of overhead would still be required, but you would wind up with a much more diverse population. You could even showcase the repos being worked on.
    - leoedin 13y ago
      The problem with that assumption is that it's very domain specific. While all good developers of web apps definitely know HTML and JS, there are a lot of fantastic programmers who have never touched it. The world of software is much, much bigger than just web apps.

kristopolous 13y ago

It's a fascinating idea. There is the Eternal September effect that can be combated by having a barrier to entry. Metafilter has $5 registration, stack-overflow has their own sauce. My friend who runs the VMS company prgmr.com requires someone to give them a public key to sign up. I generally think this is a good idea to keep the riff-raff out. (then again, I've done countless anonymous spelling, format, and grammar corrections on wikipedia - but some people say their convoluted markup is the barrier) The point here is, if I can get my eyes on the prize (the privilege to post), and if it doesn't look terribly valuable - then I have very little motive to hop on board. My core contention is that the barrier has actually been placed too high. $5, a public key, learning wiki markup, providing correct answers - these are all easy tasks of very little effort. Doing code comprehension and diving into a project - that's a fairly large commitment. Am I to be held responsible for the code? Will the people behind the project care if I continue to submit after I get the prize? I count the circle of people I listen to, respect, and care about (here, it would be the commenting accounts) as greatly outnumbering the circle I'd want to work on code with.

krapp 13y ago
Unfortunately, it appears to include node developers who don't have the time or patience to submit a pull request, those who do but whose requests won't be approved, and developers who code in languages other than javascript and who therefore have nothing useful enough to add, among the 'riff-raff'. Some kind of proof of work is an interesting idea for a site like this, but I wonder if it self-selects for too narrow a domain? I don't know that the correlation between "submitted code" and "provides quality content" are strong enough for this particular filter to provide results worth the effort.
- matt2000 13y ago
  Op here: yeah, it might be the case that the community selection will be too narrow, but we figured almost any programmer knows something of HTML or CSS or JavaScript, so that seemed like a good lowest common denominator for a minimal standard of contribution.
  - pekk 13y ago
    Real contribution to a Node project requires more than passing familiarity with HTML, CSS or Javascript. If you just want a site for primarily Node developers, that's fine, just admit it straight up
    - jpatokal 13y ago
      They're not asking for a "real" contribution, just a pull request. Two people have already gotten in by tweaking the 404 page: https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/commits/master/views/404.jade https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/commits/master/views/404...
  - krapp 13y ago
    It might run counter to your goals but wouldn't it accomplish more or less the same thing to require an approved pull request for any open source project? A similar amount of overhead would still be required, but you would wind up with a much more diverse population. You could even showcase the repos being worked on.
  - leoedin 13y ago
    The problem with that assumption is that it's very domain specific. While all good developers of web apps definitely know HTML and JS, there are a lot of fantastic programmers who have never touched it. The world of software is much, much bigger than just web apps.