3 ms·

Tell HN: Fate of a typical webapp

3 points by paraschopra 17y ago

I remember http://hnstartups.com/ was launched here and it received some 200+ votes. I genuinely think it is a good idea but when I tried visiting it today, I found it full of spam. I feel sad for people not caring about their apps. What do you do with your project where you lost interest and motivation but somebody else might be using it? Btw, thread where the app was announced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=572631

jacquesm 17y ago
Attention span is a huge problem for developers in general. Creation is more fun than maintenance, so there is plenty of drive to fire off new projects, but only a little bit of energy for maintaining stuff. I think that if something does not take off almost instantly (say within the first month of roll-out) that the attention will shift to something new for a large number of people that are capable of making these things. That site is a sample-of-one though. The funny thing is that it would be the ideal vehicle to keep track of what is happening to sites announced as 'new' here... This is roughly where it went wrong: http://hnstartups.com/newest?page=1287 http://hnstartups.com/newest?page=1287 If the spam had been removed right from day one (but hey, how to figure out with the theme of that site what is spam and what is not, that's a tricky one!) then it would be a useful resource today.
- joshsharp 17y ago
  It's the 'broken windows' metaphor: http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/so... Once you let something that is clearly wrong hang around, problems (spam) increase exponentially until it is no longer worth trying to fix.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Yep. HN seems to be doing a pretty good job of it though, hardly any spam ever makes it past the bottom of the new page without a [dead]. But for that to work you have to have an active community that values the resource more than they value the few seconds it takes to flag a bad submission. Absent such a community you have to do it yourself at least until such a community has formed. The funny thing is that the combination of 'flag', karma thresholds and community seem to be enough to let the 'submission' box sit there without any tricky stuff like captchas and so on.
erlanger 17y ago
A well-developed site blocks most spam. There are plenty of good services out there for it too, like Mollom.

3 points by paraschopra 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Attention span is a huge problem for developers in general. Creation is more fun than maintenance, so there is plenty of drive to fire off new projects, but only a little bit of energy for maintaining stuff. I think that if something does not take off almost instantly (say within the first month of roll-out) that the attention will shift to something new for a large number of people that are capable of making these things. That site is a sample-of-one though. The funny thing is that it would be the ideal vehicle to keep track of what is happening to sites announced as 'new' here... This is roughly where it went wrong: http://hnstartups.com/newest?page=1287 http://hnstartups.com/newest?page=1287 If the spam had been removed right from day one (but hey, how to figure out with the theme of that site what is spam and what is not, that's a tricky one!) then it would be a useful resource today.

joshsharp 17y ago
It's the 'broken windows' metaphor: http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/so... Once you let something that is clearly wrong hang around, problems (spam) increase exponentially until it is no longer worth trying to fix.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Yep. HN seems to be doing a pretty good job of it though, hardly any spam ever makes it past the bottom of the new page without a [dead]. But for that to work you have to have an active community that values the resource more than they value the few seconds it takes to flag a bad submission. Absent such a community you have to do it yourself at least until such a community has formed. The funny thing is that the combination of 'flag', karma thresholds and community seem to be enough to let the 'submission' box sit there without any tricky stuff like captchas and so on.

erlanger 17y ago

A well-developed site blocks most spam. There are plenty of good services out there for it too, like Mollom.