Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks Jacques. As usual, we agree. Sometimes I wonder why I reply to your comments at all, since we agree so much. :)

I think what bugged me was the lack of drive-by readers.

HN is pretty much the only site I submit to. I have no aspirations of blogging as a business. I blog because I want to, and I'd blog if nobody came by. So heck with the score or the front-page status. And no, it doesn't bug me that a large percentage of what I write is not home-page material. That's okay too. Hey, I got used to being a mediocre writer many years ago. It's all spray and pray now.

The problem is that as a submitter you'd at least like to get a decent second set of eyeballs on your work. The value the site provides to me as a submitter isn't making the front page -- it's getting the feedback from readers. No initial readers, no feedback (good or bad)

Sure, there is a bit of sour grapes here. I guess you'd think if you spent a long time writing something that in return you'd at least receive a reasonable review. But if the average number of initial reviewers is decreasing for everybody, it can't help but mean a decrease in the quality of material overall. So it would seem that my problem as a submitter, even a submitter of poor quality material, affects the quality of material on the site for all users.

As for the original topic of your submission, minimalistic interfaces, I'm all for it.

I predict the death of the submit button in the next 2 years.

It occurred to me over the last week or two that most all of the startup and pet project work I've been doing over the past decade has all boiled down to presenting complex and thought-provoking data to the user in the most simple way possible. Every little piece of user interface, web application, or technology that sits between the brain and a simple version of the decisions it needs to make each day is a cognitive weight we carry around.

There was another great article on the front page of HN today about cognitive slaves. It's a topic that keeps coming up again and again for me and the community, and as one other commenter asks on this thread, at some point it's not enough to simply complain, what would you do to fix it? I'm happy to actually be trying something. Wish me luck!

This is going to sound very cryptic, but I hope it comes across, you are a solution looking for a problem.

I think it's only a matter of time before you find your groove, I see it happening all over HN, people that try one thing after another and suddenly it clicks, they find their thing and from there on it's upwards.

Don't give up, the 'making complex stuff simple' thing you've got is absolutely a key in all this. The webcam thing was much the same, until we came along it was just too hard to put live video on the web, we reduced it to one click, that was all it took. Youtube did the same for clips and look where they ended up.

All you you need to do is to apply that wisdom to something that draws a crowd.

Give up hell, I haven't even gotten started yet!

It might seem to the outside observer that I start a lot of things and don't finish them, but really I'm iterating around where things hurt and where the response is, just like you note. I have been very fortunate to make enough consulting that I can take several months a year to work on my pet projects. And after all, isn't wealth really the ability to use your time as you see fit? So in that sense I am truly a wealthy man.

I have some "boring" work I am doing that is bringing some residual income as well. I've found that time is truly your friend with startups -- the longer you are out there the more success you get, no matter what you are doing. So in some ways this start/stop work has been counterproductive, but you play the cards you have, not the ones you wish you had.

I am truly excited about the long-term capabilities of functional programming and the F# language in particular. It's allowing me to build blocks of little "solutions" that can then be assembled in ways to make larger products in a way that OOP simply didn't accomplish. Very cool.

What is the difference between ww and something like justin.tv?

I am fairly addicted to ww(particularly, the pet deer).

Funding and execution I guess.

WW.com was bootstrapped out of my previous company (consultancy / software licenses).

Justin.tv is a lot slicker and it seems they are doing way better than we are in terms of traffic and user satisfaction, but we're working quite hard at the moment to turn the tide on that. WW.com to me feels as though it has a stronger community element to it.

WW is actually quite a bit older than justin.tv (we started in 1998 as 'camarades', but because the name was pretty hard to spell it got changed), we missed a few chances, had some spectacular bad luck but on the whole I'm feeling better about it today than I have felt in the last 5 years.

I don't think the Justin.tv guys have too much to worry about for the time being, but we're definitely planning a very serious effort to make a go of it.

There have been some great posts/discussions at the blog The Online Photographer in the last week about this, proximately prompted by the new Fuji digital rangefinder just announced at Photokina:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

and then less directly:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

>I predict the death of the submit button in the next 2 years.

I cringed.

Maybe for data that isn't high value, urgh.

I think as Jacques suggests, the problem is sheer number of submissions, combined with the way the new page seems to work by showing everything: stuff thus scrolls off the bottom much faster than it used to.

It’s unclear what could be done to counteract this.

Somebody here once suggested categories, and I think there might be some merit to that idea. It allows more new and more front page stories (if there are both new and front pages for each category) and allows people to skip categories that don't interest them. For instance, some people may prefer not to see metadiscussions like this one, and are only interested in what HN thinks are worthy industry news.

Maybe something like Reddit's "rising" page would help. Basically, somewhere that would catch all of the stories that only got ~4 upvotes on the front page, but would filter out the ones that didn't get any.

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