FAQ of Hacker Monthly | Hacker News Reader

FAQ of Hacker Monthly

hackermonthly.posterous.com

Is this a de-evolution experiment?

What makes HN valuable is the community. Smart, relevant and immediate conversations. I dare to say this idea exploits, over-extends and misappropriates what value is present here.

The intention to contact all commenter's of 80+ vote stories is ... let's say typing is easier than doing (see: google buzz debacle).

I parsed the FAQ as saying he is choosing only comments with 80+ points, which would take a lot of comments out of context. There are only 12 comments in the past week with 80+ points--enough to populate a faux-"letters-to-the-editor" column but not quite enough to capture the community.

You are right about the community, but many articles submitted to HN and many comments are also valuable in and of itself... it all depends on how he will execute the editorial part.

What I am surprised about is when he says that he obtained permission for at least 50% of articles to be reprinted in his Monthly (if I understand it correctly). So some professional journalist or blogger toils for days to produce some article, and then just allow someone to reprint it without compensation? Moreover, if the article was printed in some commercial media like NYT, shouldn't also NYT grant the permission?

Most folks blog to raise awareness for their business or themselves. A couple $20 conversions > AdWords for the majority of HN.

At such a time delay, and in a format that's hard to share and link to, why not let someone reprint your article?

Good luck with your initiative, it's the first time I hear about the idea to create printed monthly from HN content.

What I think would be also useful is to not only reprint articles with some karma point threshold, but to produce complete editorial layer on top of HN forum... like handpick, curate and comment on the best submissions, or map how HN is evolving as a whole, etc... lot's of possibilities when I think about it now.

Sending through express permission for you to use my comments. Honestly, I'm not sure if that's even necessary, and I'd hate to see this ambitious project fall over because 1) Comments are valuable, and 2) Gaining individual permission to reproduce those becomes too difficult.

Mine too. (I'm posting this because until recently there was no contact information in my profile.)

Out of curiosity, what's the expected latency (i.e. time from where you pick the articles to date you ship the hard copies) of this? I stopped reading news magazines and papers because the latency in the information was too slow, but I still read magazines that have a longer shelf life. The FAQ says you will filter out time sensitive stories, but everything has some limit....

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