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Thank you for the feedback. As a respected community-member here at HN (you), this is exactly the type of feedback and open discussion that I aim to have with the community, which PH does not offer.

1) I understand that the issues compared are different, but I posed a hypothetical scenario of how the issues at PH can go beyond just having a tightly-controlled growth engine for companies PH likes. PH has no ethics-policy (that we know of) and nothing stops A16Z from telling the mods that any product related to A16Z-funded-firms should get top spot at PH.

2) Fair point, but that does not mean we should not try something new :) Afterall, HN is/was an experiment to address the issue of community-decline due to growth. Also, the decline in "Show HN" (almost like second-class-citizen-status) and the fact that PH exists, indicates to some measure that a "launch platform for startups" is relevant.

3) I have added some more details about myself as well as a disclaimer of affiliations (none).

4) I intend to build this alternative with community feedback and as a Proof-of-Concept. I will not dictate "how things go", which is why I value community-feedback so much.

Ah, while I was writing my response you said the same thing a lot better. I think any alternative to ProductHunt still needs an editorial team of some sort. But the fix could be as simple as changing PH to include 'staff/influencer picks' and 'community picks', while requiring staff/influencers to disclose their relationship to the product.

Obviously, any link aggregator would need full-time moderators, which is another consideration for this mysterious PH competitor.

The notion that human curation is intrinsically better than algorithmic ranking is a Silicon Valley trend I don't feel is accurate, but that's a topic for another rant thread. (In general, I think the new semimanual approach Hacker News has been doing is an interesting idea)

semimanual

It's not semi. That's the core reason why Lamer News had no chance of success, even if their broken software had worked.

It's odd that it's a controversial idea. The best Reddit communities are those that are heavily moderated.

To admit this is to admit that some people have better taste than others. Maybe that's the controversial bit. But it's the cornerstone of any new successful community. You see it pervasively everywhere you look, from SO to Reddit to HN.

To clarify, I'm referring to the "second chance" mechanics implemented a few months ago, where an article which got few upvotes may hours later get a spot on the front page and maybe get some upvotes, or when you get an email asking for an invitation to repost. Both processes require a human to determine what is "good" and what is "not good."

Ah. Are you sure it's semimanual? It seems plausible that it could be a mechanical turk.

The only automatic part seems to be the shape of a post's falloff curve. But the falloff shape is probably selected from a list of shapes by a person.

What we've been doing is sort of a software sandwich with a human filling. Software does a first pass through all the stories to guess which ones might be good candidates (otherwise there are too many for humans to review). Then humans pick some candidates. Those go into a pool from which software randomly picks one every so often and randomly places it low on the front page. After that it's up to the community which ones are interesting. The ones that aren't fall off the front page relatively quickly. I've been meaning to write some code to collect data on how much frontpage time they get.

That's the current state. We do still send repost invites occasionally, but mostly not, because users made it clear they don't like the duplicates.

I don't think the human phase can be automated. Instead, our plan is to open it to the community, so it isn't just us and selected users picking stories. The challenge is to design a mechanism for that which doesn't just reduce to an upvoting system (since as the knight in Monty Python says about the grail, we've already got one it's very nice).

We'll also probably publish the list of stories selected in this way, whether or not they end up getting traction, because if nothing else it's alternate reading material.

HN submission moderation isn't transparent though? Threads can be disappeared on a moderator's whim.

As someone who has had some small disagreements with dang and I don't always see eye to eye with him;

* the moderators, I believe, really do what they think is best for the community,

* they work hard at a pretty thankless job

* they are pretty transparent and manage their potential conflicts of interest well, which is saying a lot, since action in virtually any thread could presimably be related.

So sure, threads can be disappered by moderators, it is what they are supposed to do. Keep the discussion in a few centralized threads and not 20 blogspam articles. Also, we should be thankful for what we don't see.

So while I thinm you have a relavent point, and they can't be perfect all the time, on balance their pretty sharp people and am thankful for their contribution,

I'm sure the moderators think they're doing their best. But there is no transparency ( e.g. there's nothing like lobste.rs' moderator actions log ), and as a result I'm not at all sure that they are managing conflicts of interest well. The only discussion I was lucky enough to spot in the process of being disappeared was http://readwrite.com/2012/12/03/lets-all-shed-tears-for-the-... which, while not exactly the kindest writing I've ever seen, contained some real insight and was generating a productive discussion - and the conflict of interest is pretty clear. And neither of us have any idea how many other discussions get killed like that.

> both Reddit and Hacker News are transparent in terms of submission moderation

I disagree vehemently. Reddit has tools like AutoModerator which censor content secretly. No user knows what's going on. Subreddit moderators only have some insight and it is on their discretion if they want to share it. Reddit is highly intransparent.

Agree strongly with #2. The challenge is not in building the tech or having an unbiased ranking system -- it's all in building the community.