Comment by fnid2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnid2 | Hacker News Reader

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C'mon pg, this isn't that kind of forum. Posts are on the front page for a day at most, mostly a few hours or even minutes. You see a post, maybe read it, then write a comment. By the time I could get to know these companies, this thread will be long gone.

If you like, I'll come sit with you for the next YC evaluations and provide my honest and informed opinions of the companies.

There were only seven minutes for you to have read my long review of them and then compose your thoughts and reply. You put thoughts in my head without knowing me. You don't know what I know or what kinds of predictions I've made. You're doing the same thing to me that you are blasting me for doing to your selections.

This thread has gone way beyond where I wanted. I was just posting a quick comment, man. I didn't want it to blow up like this. It was just an opinion and I don't know how to underail it. Usually, at this point, people tell me to just shut up, so that's what I'll do.

One way to do your best to "underail" it would be to NOT post a startup by startup list of why you think they are unimpressive.

IMO, the three major problems I have with your opinion are:

1) You assume startups should be tackling new problems. I don't know if you noticed, but "me too" companies win more often than grand new ideas with deep technical problems on the web. Google, Facebook, Zynga, YouTube, Groupon and the iPod were me-too plays.

2) You assume startups should be (or look) technically impressive. There are plenty of great startups that aren't really deep technology problems (until they need to scale).

3) You're looking at 3-5 month old companies, for the most part. Craigslist at that age was a mailing list in SFO. You'd look smarter if you were talking about things like "total addressable market" and "scalability of customer acquisition" than how impressive the companies look right now. Startups of this age are still mostly just potential.

The amount of time you invested in this screams "Troll" to me. The fact that you have had this happen enough that you say, "Usually, at this point, people tell me to just shut up, so that's what I'll do" seems to support that assessment. PG shouldn't be feeding you and neither should I, I guess. I'm mostly disappointed that your initial comment (devoid of any actual content) was upvoted by as many people as it was.

It used to be that kind of forum.

I would say that what most people are doing in this thread (using all information available to them to make a best initial judgment), is exactly what you should have expected. This is basic human understanding - taking the available information and drawing a conclusion.

I think it's a bit unfair to poke fun at names and such, but the commenters in this thread are performing the exact same process of evaluation and understanding as yourself, except the only difference is their information is quite limited.

Yes, it's stupid and unwise to draw conclusions from incomplete information, but for the most part, that's what people do and (given the information), that's all they can do.

If you want to avoid this in the future, I would say better PR and more information would help people avoid making such silly initial judgments and help to properly manage their expectations.

Besides, if most people have low expectations for these startups, underpromising will only help in the future when they do deliver. And then you can deliver your I-told-ya-sos.

I know it's possible for a forum to do better than what you claim is all people can do, because HN itself used to do better.

There's a new batch of YC startups every 6 months. The startups were about the same quality a year ago. And yet after demo day a year ago the top comment on HN wasn't a content-free dismissal with 86 points. I know both HN and the startups very well, and what's changing here is HN, not the startups. The site has grown so much that the median user is significantly dumber and meaner than a year ago.

I've been thinking a lot over the last several months about how to deal with this. One of the solutions I'm considering is to get rid of points on comments, and that would have worked well here. Fnid2's comment, as he more or less admitted himself, was just a throwaway remark. But displaying points transformed it into a rallying cry leading a mob.

2009 Demo Day - 370 days ago (First comment with 101 points = completely dismissive and a huge rant)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522675

2008 Summer Demo Day - 587 days ago (First comment = snarky remark about the company logos... sound familiar?):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276333

2007 Demo Day - 957 days ago (Half the thread is [dead] and full of bickering similar to this one):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269

So no, HN did not ever do better. It only seems worse because instead of 2 complaints about company logos, HN is now 10x the size and you see 20 complaints. There's still a lot of great articles posted, HN "Ask/Tell" discussions, and it's still full of intelligent people. However, it takes wisdom to know when to shut one's mouth, and intelligence != wisdom.

I've been here about 3 years myself, and that's why I try to stay logged out and make my bookmark to HN = /best. It's just gotten far too noisy and I was wasting tons of time keeping up with the sheer volume of (both good and bad) comments.

Holy cow, you're right, the one a year ago was pretty bad. This problem is older than I realized. The threads before a year ago were not so bad though. (The 2007 one is just one banned troll.)

How about creating a time lag for up-voting comments? The higher the score the longer you have to wait before voting?

How about using a Sudoku captcha? ;-)

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