Hacker News
ycombinator.com
ycombinator.com
I've submitted a share of "interesting" things, but they're usually drowned out by "easy reading" Hopefully, the human editor factor will allow the proposed indirect control of the swarm.
I've had some interesting discussions over at octonews--but it's a different niche--hardware/sci/tech/health. I'd love it if yc.news is able to turn itself into hacker news. I had missed the mid 2006 reddit, and hearing great insight is often more valuable than the actual article itself. Not that how to fill out a term sheet, analysis on facebook, or top ten things to get started on your startup isn't interesting, but one can only take so much of that in the last 3 months.
I cheer the new direction
Well, at least the new direction will give you one of those three things.
Considering that, I would personally like to see this site make a conscious effort to remain "grass roots" rather than focus on growth. I love this forum because of the relatively high concentration of smart people who post here. I doest look like PG has any monetary objectives with this site (hence no ads), so I think simple word of mouth between hackers rather than deliberate promotion will keep content quality higher going forward.
The proposed rating system is brilliant.. I give props to whoever thought of that one!
Edit: I just realized that the new weighted voting system could have an unintended chilling effect on voting.. If smart users worry that placing a vote might adversely affect their "vote weight" on a post deemed by the admins as a dumb story, they might just refrain from doing so all together.
The whole notion of having an ivory tower that tries to shut itself off from other people because they degrade conversation is like security through obscurity. What this and reddit needs are a proper recommendation system, which could be based on tagging. Reddit says they are going to do this, but even then I don't imagine it will be an overly complicated tagging regime (even though they are taking long enough to roll it out). Once you get into basic tagging (eg just a number of strings) you really have a subset of an ontology, so the next logical step is to build it into a big proper one like freebase is doing, which has proper datatypes for each tag value, which can then be other objects in a database. In this way articles can have a set of tags, like a category, a rating of intellectualness, etc. These tags should be modifiable and addable. People should be able to have different values that reflect what they think of them. The tags that are most relevant should be displayed. An article could have a quality value that some could rate highly, and some poorly. Then the system, based on your own past tagging, can predict what default value yours should have. It's much like the netflix challenge (which is 80% solved), only its not just for one value of one tag, and the values are more complicated.
Anyway, I've thought this through too much because I am half way to solving it myself (hopefully!). We'll see if it works when I start pulling people away from here :p
If you're halfway through the task, that's significant work, assuming that "half" inclues the AI. Does your tagging system work off a dictionary?
While I'm interested in all things hackerly, I first started visiting this site for tips and stories specifically about startups. My point being: while most people here are all for changing the focus to anything hacker-related, I'm sure there are many newcomers who are looking specifically for startup-related info. Perhaps we can retain a sub-site, startup tag or filter that will show only startup news for those people?
programming.reddit is occasionally pretty good, but sometimes there's just something interesting which isn't strictly programming per se. This fills that gap perfectly.
also: "Most forums degrade over time, but we don't think that's inevitable."
it isn't, it just requires eternal vigilance on the part of moderators/editors. the SomethingAwful forums are in the 10s of thousands and they're still quality because of Lowtax's willingness to ban people.
Quality doesn't just vanish. It's eroded away like the hair cells in your ear. When you realize it's gone it's not going to come back without clever engineering.
So it's not just as simple as changing the name of a forum, declaring a shift in the theme, that would move the forum in one direction or another. Unless you have superusers and/or admins. The analogy is to slashdot, or to reddit. Keeping the reddit-style system means increasing popularity leads, without a doubt, scattered focus. Keeping the focus implies a shift in the current moderation system (unless there are invisible superusers lurking around).
The flaw of forums is not in the rules, not the theme, not the users, but in the system design. Change it, or compromise. Either way, whatever is written so confidently on hackernews.html will not be as simple as "I decide it so."
The exception to my argument is if growth of userbase isn't a goal. I'm not sure if that's the case here though.
Also, the choice of the word "hacker" is horrible. Yes, I know the difference between cracker and hacker but you ask anyone out there what a hacker is and they'll tell you it's someone who "hacks websites and steals credit cards." To change that perception is a next to impossible task. So, I'm sure we'll enjoy a bunch of newbies coming here and asking how to "haxor" their friend's email account.
I don't like this change one bit. Are you trying to increase the amount of traffic on this site?
As for the word "hacker," there is no uncertainty about what it means among hackers themselves. And our sense of the word is spreading, not contracting. I saw a headline in the NYT a couple weeks ago that used "hack" in the good sense.
The whole appeal of this site was that you could spend 10 min reading top few stories and you'd get a pretty good idea what's going on in the YC, VC, angel, investment community. Now we'll have to spend tens of minutes weeding through all kinds of topic that just waste your time.
Why not start a new website with this new theme? Since YC i a seed stage investment firm, what exactly does "Hacker News" have to do with YC focus and mantra focus?! It is a subdomain of an investment firm so the focus and direction of n.yc really makes very little sense.
news.yc and reddit are both young, even in internet time. New members are important, and any forum must adapt to stay relevant.
However, doesn't this go away from the ideas of the social network, user-driven, "wisdom of crowds"? Do you have the problem now of the group not choosing which stories are good vs. which are agreeable to the human editors?
In general, my point is that on social news sites, the comments are often just as interesting as the stories themselves. This is why (at least I think) Slashdot is so great. More software and techniques to organize and enhance comment browsing would be really cool.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE change it back. If you want to launch another site for hacker news, I'll be the first to subscribe, but PLEASE give us back startup news!
Something about the idea of oracles makes me recoil. The obvious problem is that this approach may reinforce groupthink, both algorithmically and socially. And groupthink is already a considerable problem in these sort of systems. But then... this solution almost represents an acceptance of the inevitability of groupthink, kind of an attempt to steer the groupthink. Hmm. Perhaps this method would work best by working specifically with edge-cases - the best and worst posts, gently massaging out the toxic before it gets a chance to grow roots. It may not even be necessary to include good posts, since the actual problem to be solved is keeping out the crap.
But I am excited to see this kind of community flourish again, whatever shape it takes!
At that time people put the best of their bookmarks on reddit. Later there wasn't much good content left in the stash. IMO link submissions are unlikely to change. No matter what you do.
I think one way we can have interesting dialog on the site is by asking really good starting questions. Most questions so far have been about asking for feedback. Which are interesting for the people asking for feedback and the people giving feedback, but not that great for the rest.
One concern is that the trolls will upmod all stories that are already upmodded (for instance, automatically upmodding all comments and links posted by PG) in order to increase their vote's worth. One observes similar things on reddit already. It is much easier psychologically to jump on a trend than to do something truly interesting, but the truly interesting and innovative is rarely awarded immediately with recognition.
However, one problem that continues to present itself is the cumulative nature of karma accretion. Only if there is a completely separate scaling mechanism which determines vote weight independent of karma could be this avoided.
Otherwise even if an upmodder gets less for voting up PG (or Nostra) stories, they still get something.
Besides, I bet the vote weight curve isn't linear.. It's probably logarithmic, so you'll see diminishing returns.
The real question to ask is, "Why would people want a large vote weight?" The only malicious reason is to get something meaningless to the frontpage really quickly. But that will still render them powerless immediately if it's flagged as nonsense.
Besides, at least one other person will still have to agree with you to get it to the front page. This sort of guard is to prevent your votes from getting things to the front page if you upvote nonsense.
A knowledge based system - I am eagerly awaiting the new voting system.
Also the rest of the menu did not disappear before. And you've already closed the hole so I can't fix it.
It was more like ...
slashdot + perlmonks + use.perl.org => joel on software =>pg.com => reddit => prog.reddit => news.yc =>hack-news.yc + blog.pmarca = > ???
We're small, and we're going to stay small for awhile (hopefully), so this really isn't worth worrying about.
I especially love the innovative karma policy.
Would the new news.yc ban richardkulisz or pica (assuming they both stayed on topic)?
"Although criminals harm society, and slaves are seeking freedom, from the point of the criminal or slave (who is a criminal, de jure, for running away), the outcome is the same: very negative feedback.
You mention "the value pyramid". I don't see that: if you get caught and "massa" cuts your big toes off, you are back where you started, plus a whipping and minus your big toes.
You'll be gimping around for a long time after that.
The only good thing is that at that point, you can't be sold off to work in the rice. But that's about it; you are pretty screwed.
The only way it works is if you've got a chance of getting away. Then it could be worth it. As most slaves had no chance of getting away, they were nuts to do it."
There's a racist crack, and a very unpopular viewpoint, but as far as I know she's actually debating ideas, not just baiting people.
Is this kind of thing acceptable?