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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

That is what I'm thinking about right now. We said explicitly when we started news.yc that one goal was to get to know founders before they applied to us. I think I'll add messaging next. If anyone has suggestions about how it should work, or other community features we should add, just let us know in this thread.

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Now that I think of it, this is a place where we're much more likely to have involved discussions rather than quick "where you been" type comments. That implies to me that you'd kind of want the same threading / nesting as the general boards. What if a user simply has their own personal submission spot- they can post things that are meaningful to them- latest blog entry, a discussion that they want to keep off the front page for now, etc. Others could post articles, comments, and linkless topics just like in the general board- the difference being the user can outright delete the posts.

You gain the ability for a user to post more specialized information or stuff they themselves generated without spamming, you get an easy mechanism for another user to post a quick message or even start a discussion with that user, you get the ability for multiple people to join in and make intelligent comments and still have the place readable and organized, and I assume you'd be able to reuse a bunch of code.

Differences from the general board- I'm thinking maybe topics shouldn't get pushed off the bottom? Hopefully that's not a storage issue. Karma could stay the same as normal or you could make it work the same within the topics but not reflect on the users' real score, or you could let just the user who owns that board to give out karma, get rid of it altogether for the user board, or whatever.

[upd. Oh, and also, if things get interesting or there gets to be some important content you could submit a link to that discussion in the general board]

More important than being able to talk to each other is being able to see who's talking to one, I think.

a) Notification when someone replies directly to one's comment.

b) Some way to easily find new comments on a thread. Instead of marking comments read, let me click a page-level button to "reset new marks". Couple that with sorting the front-page by 'number of recent comments'. Especially in periods when the front-page changes infrequently it'll allow users to follow discussions after they've read the submission.

Let me find interesting users and filter them for potential co-founders.

c) Show me users whose submissions and comments I upmod most and who I talk to the most.

d) Provide tags for me to add on my profile: location, horizon to startup, areas of interest, etc. Allow others to set constraints and highlight for them users who match those constraints/tags.

What about providing a way for YC news to identify other users who potentially share the same interests as me? Basically, the set of links which I have upmodded provides YC news with a set of potential topics that I am interested in. Naively comparing this group of links that I have upmodded with that of another user may potentially provide a non-null intersection and show possible common interests; thus, that other user may be someone I am interested in collaborating with.

Now that I think about it, another benefit of this is that more relevant news may be surfaced to me - if person X and person Y have a largely overlapping set of upmodded links, then perhaps the set (X-Y) may also be interesting to person Y, and vice versa. Perhaps this could be a way to deal with the perceived quality of news degrading as a site gets more popular as well, as it would allow the system to break off into smaller clusters of news items/people, where each item may be highly relevant to those who belong to the cluster.

Sorry to ramble on like that - I don't expect (or necessarily want) such a complicated feature to be a part of the obviously minimal YC news site...just thought I'd bring it up for discussion.

Edit: Used in combination with jwrecker's idea of having a more personal space, this could be a great startup idea - instead of YC News determining your set of links, it could simply be the set of links you post to your personal space :D

yes, I was actually thinking of that very same idea about the time you may have posted it! (the same interests part).

I second jwecker's idea to allow a single photo avatar for each member.

It would be very beneficial to attach faces to the personalities, especially in light of the upcoming Startup School.

What sets this site apart for pg is that he can use it to guage peoples comments for when they apply for something. One thing that sets this site apart for me, though, is that I think most people here intend to meet one another in person at some point, sooner or later. That makes a big difference in the feel of the place. Using first names in posts, not acting like children in our debates, a real desire (from the first day in the feature request discussion) to see what other people look like and know what they're really up to, etc.

It might not be a good idea to place too many requests on pg's schedule. What Paul can do, instead, is integrate "MyBlogLog" widget into news.yc. That alone will solve the problems regarding messaging and avatars.

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