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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Can someone give us (or at least me) the gist of what he's saying?

Systematic factors inherent to social news sites degrade their quality over time. Voting is broken because of the nature of the people who vote the most and thus have the most influence on the front page: They are people with too much time on their hands. That is, anyone with a worthwhile opinion is off doing other things more important than commenting or voting on a news site.

This isn't to say I agree, I'm just trying to summarize the relevant bits as best as I can.

Simplifying the key observation: free votes put more power in the hands of users who vote more. Users who vote more are, in his estimation, users who waste their own time. So social news sites based on free voting tend to promote articles that are a waste of time.

Restricting the content seems to solve that problem. As long as you don't allow the kind of articles these people like, they won't frequent your site.

I haven't noticed significant degradation in quality since we started News.YC. In fact, it's gotten better, because when we started it was called "Startup News" and there were a lot of crappy gung-ho articles about "entrepreneurship."

Yes, this is the gist of it.

The other aspect is that he thinks there is only 1 type of source that's ok for information consumption, which is the type that spews out brilliance. All the other sources are worthless, including the people that never say anything meaningful and the people that say something brilliant once in a lifetime.

I don't think that's what he was saying. He was just complaining that he needs better filtering mechanisms, so he can find the 1 in 100 posts by e.g. Cory Doctorow that he would enjoy, without having to read the other 99.

And he wants other people to find them for him, but not the people who have the time to do so. :)

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