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Daydreaming here... so how about a community that funnels users into buckets automatically? Think of an HN where you only discuss an article with a pool of ~500
by jere 12y ago
Daydreaming here... so how about a community that funnels users into buckets automatically? Think of an HN where you only discuss an article with a pool of ~500 people instead of 80,000. When new users join, they're distributed to the smallest groups. Nobody is overwhelmed with an influx of noobs. And you might actually be able to start remembering the names of the active people in your group. Perhaps you could see top comments from other groups, but not interact with them directly.
- jacquesm 12y agoI've had some pretty extensive conversations around that theme with a bunch of other HN'ers (some of who have moved on in the meantime), and that's pretty much the solution we hit on. Keep only the +x and -x active users in view for you at any one time. One problem we foresaw with that approach is that it becomes hard not to have duplicate discussions or missing chunks of information. In the end we did not do anything with the idea but it was certainly interesting.
- RKoutnik 12y agoThat's a rather interesting concept. My big issue is that I'd be missing the best content from other buckets. Perhaps content can 'emerge' from a bucket after garnering a certain % of support from the bucket?
- NaNaN 12y agoTo avoid the Matthew effect, the best users should be re-distributed, too. -- still nice?
- RKoutnik 12y agoIf that was the case, I'd worry about the buckets becoming like German universities - the best minds can't get together, so we all lose out.
- gwern 12y agoI don't think most HN users know anything at all about German universities, much less any bucketing they might do, so that's probably not the most helpful analogy.
- RKoutnik 12y agoI learned about that particular situation from one of pg's essays (something I figured I could assume was common knowledge around here).
- gwern 12y agoI've read most/all of pg's essays as well, but I have no recollection of anything like that, so...
- lifeformed 12y agoCan someone explain the German university thing to me? It sounds interesting.
- RKoutnik 12y ago> German and Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to ensure that all universities are roughly equal in quality. The downside is that none are especially good. http://paulgraham.com/america.html http://paulgraham.com/america.html
- api 12y agoThat's a very interesting concept! What if it were geo-local? When you post an article or text post everyone sees it but you only see comments from people within 100km of your location.
- jere 12y agoI think there are already several apps in that space, but maybe I'm thinking of things that are more localized. You definitely can't just do everyone within a given radius from you because a person on one side of you won't be able to communicate with someone on the other and that's incredibly confusing. You could split the buckets up by location, but some people would have to put up with living on the border (well, just like a country or state).
- vostrocity 12y agoSlightly tangential, but this is a problem that is being worked on in MOOCs. It is ineffective to have a forum for all 10,000 or 100,000 participants in a class. Issues may be surfaced there but it is a terrible venue for authentic discussions and building relationships with classmates. There is one startup spun out of Stanford that is doing MOOCs by emphasizing the small group. At the beginning of the course, you can either create your own group and recruit others or join a group (generally 4-8 people). Those who do neither after the first week or so of class are randomly assigned into groups with others who were also not proactive about joining a group. It is easier to do discussions and group projects when there is a permanent group of 4-6 other students, and some of the courses have components where the group will submit work together and the rest of the class can see it.
- kevb 12y agoPerhaps something that groups (or even just a weighted score) people and comments by voting habits. If I consistently vote up memes and receive votes from other meme voters, then show me more of that kind of content and give my posts more visibility to that crowd. But if I regularly downvote memes then sink those posts from me, and sink my posts from them. I imagine tuning such a system would be very difficult though, and you don't want users stuck in a bucket that they don't feel fits them.