Are we ready for an off-topic site yet?

nytimes.com

8 points·rms··8 comments

PG, you've got the code ready, let's get a general link discussion site going. Do you have any ideas for the domain? Maybe the community here can help you think of one.

I saw this article and though it would be great for the kind of sociology discussion this community seems to like, when it ventures off-topic.

reddit.com?

If I have something that I actually want to share with reddit, I submit it three or four times with different titles and URLS so it has a chance of actually rising above the noise. Too often something gets modded to zero points and no one sees it again.

The idea is that reddit was much better in its first year, when the community was smaller. A social news site seeded by Paul Graham and Paul Graham loyalists (like reddit in its first year) should have better than average discussions. If the site accidentally gets too big and the discussion degrades, there's no problem, PG gets to sell the site and the core community moves to a new clone site. Or maybe by then someone will come up with an elegant solution for making the community of a big social news site not suck.

free idea: after seeding a community site for a little while, make it invite-only, where the number of invites is allocated based on karma.

No more "eternal september" effect.

I also wonder if there are any lessons to be learned from metafilter, which uses a $5 USD joining fee, plus rate limiting (one post per day to main site, one question per week to ask).

Demo Day's in two days. I'm a bit busy at the moment. Maybe in a couple weeks when things settle down.