4 ms·

Ask HN: Why can't we have our own AMAs, like Reddit?

12 points by vijayr 11y ago

Tech focused, startup focused AMAs.

kzisme 11y ago
I personally think that it would be nice but the deeper discussion normally removes the need for AMA's imo.
brudgers 11y ago
Because 1. The publicizing of AMA's requires a lot of meta discussion and threads and one of the things that makes HN HN is frowning upon the promotion of meta discussion. 2. HN tries to be somewhat meritocratic, and AMA's are intrinsically tied to celebrity. 3. AMA's happen spontaneously from time to time on diverse topics, e.g. some project hits the front page and the author shows up in the discussion thread or a company hits the news and the founders show up to answer questions. 4. HN would turn into Reddit, which incidentally is the only acceptable meme on HN. 5. HN has a specific business purposes for YC. General internet interest does not appear to be among them. 6. Without coordination, the Ask HN page would be flooded with AMA's. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250690
- nostrademons 11y ago
  On point 2: AMAs initially started out as a way for people to share what mundane thing about them makes them unique. It was much more community-oriented than celebrity oriented. The problem is that once this scaled beyond a niche community, people didn't want to read about other folks that were just like them, they wanted to read about celebrities who were willing to mingle with the common people. r/casualiama is much more like what r/iama started out as, and is IMNSHO more interesting.
kluck 11y ago
What is an AMA?
- oniony 11y ago
  There is a subreddit called /r/iama where people can say "I Am A <noun>, Ask Me Anything" and then answer (or not) the myriad questions asked of them. It is, perhaps, not too much of a stretch to say that it is this particular subreddit that transformed the site from a venue for engineering types to the mass market beast it is today. For better or worse.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    It's a bit of a stretch. :-) The techie overshadowing was already underway nearly from the beginning. r/politics had displaced r/science and r/programming as the most popular subreddit by 2007 [1]. r/nsfw was the most popular subreddit in 2006. Indeed, one of the major impetuses for the creation of subreddits was to get all the damn political content and soft-core porn off the front page so that the science & techie types could have their own community. r/IAMA was itself a spin-off of r/AskReddit, which was filled with frivolous questions at the time. It wasn't created until 2009. I'd argue that the creation of Hacker News in 2007 was really what transformed Reddit from a venue for engineering types to a mass-market beast. Before then, the programming types would hang out on r/programming, but afterwards, a good portion of Reddit's programmer userbase migrated to Hacker News. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit
S4M 11y ago
sama (Sam Altman, president of YC) did an AMA here couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238839
dang 11y ago
HN tends to want to distinguish itself from Reddit, as befits a younger sibling. But we'd be interested in hearing from you all about what a more HN-native AMA-like thingy might be. I feel like this is an area where we could do something interesting. One thing I mean by "more HN-native" is placing the emphasis more on substance than celebrity. An idea we've tossed around is to invite people on to discuss specific work they've done, or even to commission them to write a new post about work they did, and then come here to discuss it. "Work they did" might be a paper or an open-source project or anything the community finds interesting. We would invite them, not to answer anything, but rather to explain and answer questions about this specific work. The minute you say "ask me anything", the focus becomes the individual, and diluted that far, the topic becomes unsubstantive (though it can still be fun as entertainment). But focus on the work—that seems like the HN way to go about it, and potentially exciting.
- thenomad 11y ago
  That sounds extremely interesting. Are you considering invite-only for these, or simply running them in the same way as Show HN?
  - dang 11y ago
    Don't know. This is really just thinking out loud.
    - thenomad 11y ago
      Could always start out open and move to invite if the quality's too low or the quantity's too high. FYI, I'd certainly be interested in doing one if my projects / areas of expertise would be of interest. (tech-driven hacker-mentality filmmaking).
- enduser 11y ago
  Since there is demand for a Founders at Work sequel, how about a way to submit questions to HN users and see their answers. e.g. /answers?id=dang would show your answers ranked by upvote. Going to /answers without a parameter could show users who have answered questions ranked by the sum of their answer upvotes. Then HN would be the sequel to FoW.

12 points by vijayr 11y ago

Tech focused, startup focused AMAs.

kzisme 11y ago

I personally think that it would be nice but the deeper discussion normally removes the need for AMA's imo.

brudgers 11y ago

Because 1. The publicizing of AMA's requires a lot of meta discussion and threads and one of the things that makes HN HN is frowning upon the promotion of meta discussion. 2. HN tries to be somewhat meritocratic, and AMA's are intrinsically tied to celebrity. 3. AMA's happen spontaneously from time to time on diverse topics, e.g. some project hits the front page and the author shows up in the discussion thread or a company hits the news and the founders show up to answer questions. 4. HN would turn into Reddit, which incidentally is the only acceptable meme on HN. 5. HN has a specific business purposes for YC. General internet interest does not appear to be among them. 6. Without coordination, the Ask HN page would be flooded with AMA's. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250690

nostrademons 11y ago
On point 2: AMAs initially started out as a way for people to share what mundane thing about them makes them unique. It was much more community-oriented than celebrity oriented. The problem is that once this scaled beyond a niche community, people didn't want to read about other folks that were just like them, they wanted to read about celebrities who were willing to mingle with the common people. r/casualiama is much more like what r/iama started out as, and is IMNSHO more interesting.

kluck 11y ago

What is an AMA?

oniony 11y ago
There is a subreddit called /r/iama where people can say "I Am A <noun>, Ask Me Anything" and then answer (or not) the myriad questions asked of them. It is, perhaps, not too much of a stretch to say that it is this particular subreddit that transformed the site from a venue for engineering types to the mass market beast it is today. For better or worse.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  It's a bit of a stretch. :-) The techie overshadowing was already underway nearly from the beginning. r/politics had displaced r/science and r/programming as the most popular subreddit by 2007 [1]. r/nsfw was the most popular subreddit in 2006. Indeed, one of the major impetuses for the creation of subreddits was to get all the damn political content and soft-core porn off the front page so that the science & techie types could have their own community. r/IAMA was itself a spin-off of r/AskReddit, which was filled with frivolous questions at the time. It wasn't created until 2009. I'd argue that the creation of Hacker News in 2007 was really what transformed Reddit from a venue for engineering types to a mass-market beast. Before then, the programming types would hang out on r/programming, but afterwards, a good portion of Reddit's programmer userbase migrated to Hacker News. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit

S4M 11y ago

sama (Sam Altman, president of YC) did an AMA here couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238839

dang 11y ago

HN tends to want to distinguish itself from Reddit, as befits a younger sibling. But we'd be interested in hearing from you all about what a more HN-native AMA-like thingy might be. I feel like this is an area where we could do something interesting. One thing I mean by "more HN-native" is placing the emphasis more on substance than celebrity. An idea we've tossed around is to invite people on to discuss specific work they've done, or even to commission them to write a new post about work they did, and then come here to discuss it. "Work they did" might be a paper or an open-source project or anything the community finds interesting. We would invite them, not to answer anything, but rather to explain and answer questions about this specific work. The minute you say "ask me anything", the focus becomes the individual, and diluted that far, the topic becomes unsubstantive (though it can still be fun as entertainment). But focus on the work—that seems like the HN way to go about it, and potentially exciting.

thenomad 11y ago
That sounds extremely interesting. Are you considering invite-only for these, or simply running them in the same way as Show HN?
- dang 11y ago
  Don't know. This is really just thinking out loud.
  - thenomad 11y ago
    Could always start out open and move to invite if the quality's too low or the quantity's too high. FYI, I'd certainly be interested in doing one if my projects / areas of expertise would be of interest. (tech-driven hacker-mentality filmmaking).
enduser 11y ago
Since there is demand for a Founders at Work sequel, how about a way to submit questions to HN users and see their answers. e.g. /answers?id=dang would show your answers ranked by upvote. Going to /answers without a parameter could show users who have answered questions ranked by the sum of their answer upvotes. Then HN would be the sequel to FoW.