Ask PG: What are your thoughts on current YC News community? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: What are your thoughts on current YC News community?

35 pointsj2d241 comments

I am curious what you think of the quality of submissions, comments and attitudes found here as of late.

There are always a few highly ranked stories that make me think "how could anyone vote that up?" but on average they're pretty interesting. There's no other site I prefer.

I think the thing that makes me happiest is how civil and thoughtful people are here. That experiment seems to be working. I'm shocked when I see the stuff people say in comment threads on other sites.

I think one of the problems is that a vote is either up or down; there's nothing in between. A vote that means "this is a really good article" is the same as a vote that means "I laughed" or "this article is so awful its funny" or "this was mildly interesting."

But having a scale where you can vote up an article by different amounts is pointless too, since it leads most people to voting either the max or the min score in order to have the most impact possible on the overall score. One idea would be to have different types of upvotes (much like the moderation on Slashdot) that correspond to different things the reader liked about it; this information could be used to organize and sort the submissions, in addition to rating them up or down.

The way I see it, an upvote for an article simply means "notable".

On a related subject - it'd be nice if the system would look for the similarities in voting patterns between the users and use this information to intelligently boost the score (or the position) of new articles on per-user basis. The idea is rather obvious and it has been floating around social news sites for a while now. Digg even got around to implementing some form of it, and reportedly it is working quite well.

The little arrows to me mean

Up: Thanks for adding that. I appreciated it.

Down: I wish this weren't here. It doesn't add anything at all and just clutters the discussion.

If none of those two options presents, I don't touch it.

I really like the touch that as things are modded down, they fade (and sometimes really do vanish!)

I'm shocked when I see the stuff people say in comment threads on other sites.

Digg are obviously notorious, but I was stunned at some of the comments I've received on the site, or by users associating themselves with Digg off the site.

I guess I feel like Hacker news is a place for smart grownups who have figured out that having differing opinions isn't a reason not to be civil or even friends.

I'm fairly new here but I am pretty impressed by the tone.

The thing that I find interesting is the level you really notice how restrained people are. It's not more civil then a very relaxed in-person discussion. But when it's online, it seems extremely restrained.

I had almost written off online discussion if a forum over a certain size (such as comments on a blog). As an experiment, I think it's very impressive. Shows it can be done.

Personally I think we should try to expand what we do with our community. We should do more in person meetups and hackathons. There is a lot of value in networking that shouldn't just be limited to those selected for ycombinator. We're a niche community and it stands to reason that we can all help each other. How cool would it be if people could find co-founders based on relationships formed from HN?

Personally I find nearly all the mass-media submissions to be a dilution, no matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN.

I'd be tempted to add TC, Mashable and the like to that as well. Though the stories are good, how many HN readers also visit those sites anyway.

Maybe a grey-list for anything linking to those sites, and then one of the top 100 users needs to vote it up in order for the article to be white-listed? Something like that? Unfortunately, that means that the most dedicated users are burdened in cleaning things up for the rest of the community, but by definition, they are already dedicated and would probably/hopefully like the site cleaned up for everybody.

I'm curious where the 'Rate my start-ups' fit into this? Do people like them? Or do you find this to not be the best venue to view them.

I posted my start-up here and the feedback I got was amazing, but that doesn't mean the community wants that stuff here.

I still like the idea of categorizing things like startup feedback. and ask hn/yc/pg.

An "ask" or "questions" link in the nav bar could work, which would just show posts with /^Ask .+:/.

That would make those "opt-in," which would be a good thing to me.

I don't mind the "rate my start-up" questions that have a clear question about something specific that can be evaluated and responded to directly. Things like "here's what we're trying to do here and how, how effective do you think we're being at this?" as opposed to an open-ended "rate my start-up" with a url where we're supposed to do a top to bottom review to solve their business or presentation problems for them.

I really like the "Rate my start-ups" posts, assuming the HN doesn't get swamped with them. It's fun to hear the feedback of different people with different attitudes. We're all (or mostly) "start-up minded" here at HN so that's a plus too.

I've never submitted one of these, for reference, I just like to read them.

"... no matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN ..."

A lot of the times these articles have the benefit of being written where tech & the broader community collide. That's interesting. Also it's the comments that are spawned from an article that are the best HN component. If I wanted to read tech-articles alone I'd trawl delicious, friendfeed, twitter et.,al.

I'm not just looking for tech articles, there's DZone for that. Rather, what I value more from HN is the first person viewpoint, rather than the commoditized views channeled through a reporter/editor to serve a general audience, rather than one personally engaged.

That said, there are general audience articles that I think are significant because they reflect a viewpoint that's important to to entrepreneurs. But they're few enough among the submissions that I'm scanning URLs before I even click, tending to avoid NYT, businessweek, etc. since my experience is my time is better spent elsewhere. I can get the mass media viewpoints off my Wii. ;)

I like the NYT stories. If anything, at least the writing is good.

That exact sentiment is the only reason I think that some of the big printed media companies will survive. Blogs just don't have good writing. For a publication to offer consistent, good writing is expensive, and a significant number of people will always want that enough to pay for it.

I think they're so popular here mainly because smart people tend to have varied interests. You have to have a good amount of intellectual curiosity to become a hacker, and that comes before and extends to other areas beyond computer science.

I've spent enough time around them to know that if you get 50 hackers together in a social setting, they talk about a wide variety of subjects. CS often doesn't even come up. I suspect this site has a higher ratio of talk of CS than would be found in real life even among the same participants.

For a site like this to sustain the interest of brilliant people, it has to allow them to roam enough to be entertained while still retaining the core focus. It seems to succeed. If those mass media links were to US Weekly, we'd be in trouble.

I've been here just a few months and tend to be far more of a reader than a contributor, but I've noticed lately that there are more stories here that I've already read.

I'm guessing most of us have the likes of Techcrunch and El Reg in our RSS readers, yet seemingly every other post from the former and quite a lot from the latter races to the top of the rankings here. One of the things I enjoy here is seeing articles on sites I've never been to before and might be interested in reading further.

For the last month or so the quantity went up and the quality posts got harder to find. For some reason I get the feeling that the last week has been a bit better, but I can't say why for any reason.

after seeing a twitter at 11 points I'm not sure I'd agree.

Just because it's smaller? Even if it contains links?

http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/4424779/are-crowds-wise-...

yes to both, imho. Neither are 'news worthy' if the link it's too is news worthy then that link should be posted not the link to the twitter.

I come here for new and articles on running a business, technology, and to help others.

clicking through to a 1 sentence twitter from my rss readers is not a good use of my time.

I can see the place for something like twitter but I don't think that place is something like hacker news.

I come here for comments and things people find interesting and worth talking about. 'news worthy' is only a subset of that. There's lots of other places to find news online.

Short items can be worth talking about. Comments are usually shorter than the posts they comment on, and I frequently find comments that are more interesting than their parents.

I like the commentary sometimes. But I can't imagine having much to say about a 1 liner.

to each their own however.

I can't agree with this. What should be important is what one says, not where one happens to say it. If what one has to say can be expressed effectively in 140 characters, what's wrong with using Twitter publish it?

It's not that it's wrong, it's just that it clutters up the site. When you see 30 links on a page and that page is relatively static compared to other news sites, one post being 140 characters is a little bit silly.

I had a thought re: site quality -- which is that a community ends up with a focus whether it likes it or not, as the community hardens and desires a regular feedback loop -- so while Digg and Reddit opened themselves to a "lowest common denominator" and reaped what they've sown....YC started with a focus on hacking and startups. Which is good for YC content, since it means the people who are interested in it are predominantly optimistic, thoughtful, or both.

Lambda the Ultimate is another good example of this; even as it's gained popularity, it's preserved an agenda that avoids language wars and other noisy content. I would say that because of its narrow focus, its quality is even higher than news.YC!

One online community which has imposed some standard of quality from above, without topical limitations, is the Something Awful forums. The strategy there is to use fee-gating and heavy moderation with frequent and somewhat inconsistent punishment. The results are dubious - for some posters it becomes a game to see what one can get away with, and the overall quality is only increased in that a larger percentage of posters take time for spelling and grammar, and obvious trolls get banned, but clever ones do not. Basically, moderation treats only some symptoms of an underlying problem: people treating the online world as if they were sitting down at the bar with 30,000 of their best friends.

That said, the worst elements of YC in the long term will probably correlate to the worst elements of the startup world.

I discovered HN in spring and Reddit to and I have found the quality of HN going down in the last month, it could of course be the novelty wearing off but I think it is the quality. But that is unfortunately to expect as the community grows.

HN has been around a lot longer than that though but perhaps it is growing fast lately?

I also think the last month or so quality went down.

I wonder how many people who think the quality is going down try to do anything about it?

I try to downmod the offending articles. I've been failing hard so far.

Wait, it's possible to downmod articles?

Just a sarcastic way to push for the introduction of such a feature. It's long been wished for by many.

As somebody who is pretty new (a few months), I would have to say HN is THE BEST community I know of.

It actually blows my mind that the site is 100% public, most sites get trolls (or even just douche bags) no matter what, but all that is rare here!

Though its kind of a shame that it blows my mind when I find a community is civil 99.99% of the time, I wish the whole internet was like it... :)

oh, this site gets trolls all right. and spam, and ads, and all the other effluvia of a popular web site. it's just that pg and the editors are a lot more aggressive about removing them than on most sites.

I'm very happy with it, the quality is generally good and I daily scan it for interesting articles in areas I'm currently keen on such as Erlang, etc.. As a programmer it's a valuable source and often I will read entire comment threads. That's rare nowadays as the signal to noise ratios are pretty bad at most sites.

I am sure most users here are very smart and well mannered in real life, which translates in the way they behave here.

Another thing that helps is that from the start HN was seen as PG's baby. What does it have to do with it? Well, I think it helped attract like minded people. "Game recognizes Game"

For the first time in the history of entrepreneurship (at least for what I know) we had a successful person answer the "average joe"'s (like me)question 1 minute after he hits reply. I am sure everyone enjoys it when PG answers. Well, I did the few times it happened to me.

Other successful entrepreneurs quickly joined and started to interact with a community of smart, hungry, creative hackers and business guys. Do you see what I am seeing? All the banner ads and Adwords campaign in the world will not attract the same audience.

"When a few individuals were gathered in the name of Software, HN was born as democratized news and resources channel, the rest is History in the making and one better glad s/he is part of it".

EDIT: If you must have a resume or portfolio, you should most definitely add your HN username and link to it.

excellent idea

go and multiply

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