Hacker News Reader

Comment by eoghan | Hacker News Reader

You can only follow "the right people", but they'll still talk about things you're uninterested in. In addition, you'll also have people following you who have different interests, who will start irrelevant conversations with you.

Why does Hacker News exist? And other special interest web forums, Facebook groups, mailing lists? Who do interest groups hold meetups? People with shared interests get MASSIVE value from highly focused gatherings and conversations. And Twitter right now is anything but focused.

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What's going to prevent people using app.net from talking about things you don't care about? There is nothing that forces you to only talk about tech and related, as far as I can tell. The reason this doesn't happen on HN is because the topics are agreed on and moderated.

In general there are 3 solutions involving 'moderation':

1) self moderation: Google Plus has circles which you can theoretically use to share specific topics only with circles that you know to be passionate about them. Requires manual work to setup the right circles and people rarely do it.

2) manual moderation: Hacker News uses pg's time and some admin/moderator supervision to trim unwanted topics. Requires manual work which expands proportionally with the community's size if no automation is used.

3) automatic moderation: HN's flag system and community moderation (voting, Slashdot karma) seem to work relatively well, but they've been used until now predominantly to "rank" good comments to the top as opposed to "clustering" online communities into "sub-reddits" with focused interest groups.

"share specific topics only with circles that you know to be passionate about them"

Sounds wrong, doesn't it? The circles sharing model is backwards-- why should I have to make guesses about what other people are interested about?

I've written about this on a previous App.net HN thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304061, core excerpt = "I want to subscribe to that person on a "coding" stream, and leave the "personal" stream alone. People are multi-dimensional beings with many orthogonal interests; Consider giving them multiple stdouts.") and App.net PM said it was duly noted. I.e. it will be ignored, and the site is destined to be a noisy mess just like everything else that currently exists, except it will also cost money.

I share the same complaint, and I've thought many times to create a service like that but people just don't seem to care that much. Even my G+ stream has started in the last few months to get littered with all the usual personal bullshit photos; the reason I left Facebook & Twitter in the first place.

I don't need multiple stdouts, necessarily. I do need 2&>1 for the social web.

> destined to be a noisy mess just like everything else that currently exists

Subjot (http://subjot.com/) would allow you to subscribe to people based on topic, but they shut down recently.

Okay, this is a great point. However, it doesn't sound like what App.net is building.

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