An idea for breaking through Silicon Valley's social network. It can be viewed as a generalization of Hacker News. | Hacker News Reader

An idea for breaking through Silicon Valley's social network. It can be viewed as a generalization of Hacker News.

4 pointsamichail17 comments

This is actually a more general idea for contacting anyone well known who would probably just ignore your email because you are not near him/her in his/her social network.

You can think of Hacker News as an example of this idea since it allows unknowns to contact PG -- particularly if their submission is voted up to the front page.

More generally, what about using a social news site specifically built for this purpose (and not just for contacting the people who created the site)?

The idea is that if many people agree that you have something interesting to say to someone famous, then he/she would probably be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Moreover, a famous person is more likely to respond to a question if he/she feels the response would be of interest to many people.

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So what do you want to address to these famous people? Anything of a personal nature between yourself and a famous person I don't think would get voted up. Like - You, "I have a great idea and want to show it to you Sergey." The crowd does not care about what you want, unless you are the crowd or you and your friends are! But, if you asked, "How big are your #()! Pamela Anderson," or "Do you feel guilty at night OJ?" then the crowd would be more likely to get involved. Not a bad idea if you take the sensationalism route, but if are interested in trying to contact a famous person for your own good, then I think the site would be challenged in reaching it's goal.

This is a good point. However, what if you make your idea public and it is an idea that would benefit many people?

You'd have to have quite an ego in order to expect people to use such a thing in order to get in touch with you. I don't think there are very many people in SV who get so much personal (read: not a funding proposal) email that they can't keep up with it. Unknowns don't need news.yc in order to talk to PG, and anyone who sees that as the site's primary application is abusing it. My IMAP server contains a pile of email exchanges with him from long before the site existed.

Famous people would have no say in the matter -- it doesn't matter if they register with the service. It's the unknowns who would use the service to get their attention.

At that point, a famous person can decide whether to reply or not, and if so, whether to do so in private or public on the site/in some other forum.

How would a famous person know someone is trying to contact him/her? If this service becomes well known, then either the person would see it directly or someone close to him/her in his/her social network would probably tell him/her.

Also the idea can be applied beyond Silicon Valley to contact famous film directors, politicians, etc.

How is this different from making a post on any other random forum, and how is it better than simply sending an email?

Because you need lots of people voting your submission up for it to make the front page. So they agree you have something worthwhile to say to a famous person.

It's better than sending email because a famous person will likely not respond to some random email of unknown quality.

It's not of unknown quality once you've read it. Even the biggest stars generally have time to sort through all their fan mail, even if they don't respond to most of it. If you have something insightful to say, getting it noticed by a famous person really isn't that hard. Maybe this doesn't quite extend to heads of state, but it isn't far off. You're solving a non-problem.

Even if it only solves the problem with heads of state, that would make it valuable.

Also, if something like this becomes well known, then I would predict many more unknowns would attempt to contact famous people -- way more than famous people would be able to handle in terms of email.

I think he's saying it's like an organically-derived algorithm that meets halfway between "I don't know you so I'm skeptical of your value" and "I may be skeptical but if this many people think it's worthwile, perhaps I'll take a look."

I don't know what famous people you're talking about ... I'm assuming we're leaving out "celebrities" and concentrating on "useful" famous people in business/academia? If so, you'd be surprised at how much correspondence they can have.

Not to mention I'm not sure if you realize how many of the "emails" on things like VC pages are bogus on purpose. Like when they say, "mail your business plans attention "Business Plan Manager" ... that's usually code for "just toss this in the paper shredder.

Here: test this out. Think of 5 famous people and email them something you think surely would catch their attention. See if you can find their real emails and if they bother reading it. Use one of those "verification of opened email" services.

It just doesn't happen that often. If anything it gets sent to an assistant who sends it to another assistant who sends it to the intern who gives it to his little sister who gives it to the cat.

I think this would be a good "idea" if not necessarily one that translates into a business.

I won't pick out five new ones, but in the past few months I've corresponded with PG, ESR, Bruce Schneier, Randall Munroe, and JD Frazer.

Um ... I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect what the poster had in mind was a little bit different. I'm thinking perhaps he meant like if you wanted to get in touch with Bill Gates or Larry Page or Steve Jobs or something like that. That's a tad bit different.

Well, Bill Gates is just about equal to a head-of-state. The other two I'm pretty sure I could pull some strings and get in touch with (off the top of my head, they're each a friend of a friend of a friend), but I'm not about to waste their time for the sake of a social experiment.

Right. Case in point. Even though you can get to them through personal connections, you're reluctant to "waste their time." So what about people who can't get to them through 2 degrees of contact. What if they wanted to contact them with an affirmation of the value of their proposals? As in, "I don't know you and I don't want to waste your time, but 83,000 people in this industry think what I have to tell you is important enough for you to drop everything and read."

That in itself is something. Now compare that to the next guy who may be able to say, "That guy's idea is good. But my idea is sooooo good, 210,000 people in the industry think you should read and consider what I have to say."

As someone with limited time, which one, all other things equal, would you open first and which second?

And if the third next idea only had 300 votes and you were pressed for time, you'd skip it most likely, right?

My point is that there are very few people on this planet whom I couldn't get in touch with if I had something useful to say to them. The five people I initially listed are people who travel many of the same circles that I do, so it's common that I have comments that are worth their attention (Schneier less so than the others; that was basically just a fan letter that got answered). Somebody like Larry Page is further outside my circle, and correspondingly it would be both harder to get hold of him and less likely that I would have any good reason to. In the most extreme case, it's both seriously doubtful that I'd be able to get in touch with George Bush, and seriously doubtful that I could say anything to him that he wouldn't consider a waste of his time upon hearing it. These are all examples of how the filters that form through organic social interaction are already very efficient. Trying to create some kind of voting mechanism to supersede them is like trying to beat a market economy with a planned one.

> Trying to create some kind of voting mechanism to supersede them is like trying to beat a market economy with a planned one.

HUH??? I'm not sure what this has to do with planned economies and such, but if you put it that way, I see it as exactly the opposite. People who he talks about are hard to get to by design - mostly by the design of their administrative assistants. On the other hand, tons of people voting your idea up is by definition the very essence of a market-based decision-making system.

In the spirit of your reply, I'll give it a go now: "Disagreeing with me is like trying to replace the Constitution with the manual for your DVD player."

Yes but how do you know it's worth your time to open and read in the first place? He's suggesting like a "digg" or "reddit" on behalf of those people, ie, "the public" reads your suggested email and vote up those they think is worth it for you as the "famous" person to read.

Did you check out Venture Hacks by Naval Ravikant and Nivi - http://www.venturehacks.com

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