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Show HN: The List

thelist.io

I see a few problems with this:

* The website doesn't have critical mass or any special hooks (like pg's essays and pg himself, for instance) to help build it

* I'm not "applying" to post on a website

* Costing people karma is going to drive everything towards a hive mind as soon as possible; if you're going to lose karma by posting you're going to try to make sure that you'll earn that karma back. People are also not going to burn karma making civil responses, everything will become a political performance.

I'm with you, and would be happy to post a bet (proceeds to Watsi!) that none of these invite-only HN clones are going to succeed long term.

What was it Grouch Marx said? "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept people like me as a member"?

Edit: Updated caps is from telegram, apparently.

Edit 2: Undid caps--sorry everyone. can't take it.

So, what you're saying is that HN should ban your account?

All snark aside, I hope you can see the irony of your comment.

I am not seeing the irony. HN isn't an invite-only site; it's not a club at all. That's the point.

HN has all the properties of a club, it's just very cheap to get in. It's certainly possible to be kicked out of the club (just ask LoseThos/SparrowOS); so, since HN continues to accept angersock as a member, why is he still here?

Terry Davis is schizophrenic and his HN accounts feed random noise into threads; at times, the noise is more than just disruptive. He hasn't been "kicked off" of HN. If he created an account tomorrow and used it to post coherently, or even just in a markedly different way than he uses the site today, that account would not get banned.

The point 'angersock and I are both making is that it's not that HN is a different kind of club or a better club. It's the fact that it's not a club that makes it relevant. Overtly clubby alternative sites (with invite-only participation) are destined to fail, for reasons both obvious and subtle.

You say HN has all the properties of a club. But it doesn't:

* There's no shared purpose or interest, unless you count typing words into text boxes as that.

* There's no membership.

* There's no bar to entry.

* Half the site's participants are anonymous; for all I know, you and "angersock" are the same person.

I disagree with most of your statements here, but I don't think this is an argument worth having. angersock & I already circled back to the main point elsethread and settled it.

Personally, I stay for the drinks and ambiance. :)

More seriously: tptacek hit it on the head. This isn't an invite-only club where I was required to apply. This is a community where you may be banned for bad behavior (as I am acutely aware), but otherwise you are somewhat free to exist as an independent vendor in the marketplace of ideas.

An online community which is exclusive enough that I need apply is probably not going to line up nicely with my preferences or with (I suggest) the idea of offering free debate and discussion.

This is especially true given their karma model, which as others here have pointed out somewhat encourages hivemind attenuation especially since it is annoying to get into and join.

> This isn't an invite-only club where I was required to apply.

"Club" does not imply those things though. It only implies membership, and everyone with a working account on HN is a member. I realize I'm being pedantic, but it's to make a point about your earlier comment.

> An online community which is exclusive enough that I need apply is probably not going to line up nicely with my preferences or with (I suggest) the idea of offering free debate and discussion.

OK, so this at least is a point worth making. All you're saying is that you don't like the analogy of living in a gated community. Cool, I can accept that. But that's a personal preference; it doesn't make gated communities inherently bad, and there are still lots of people that prefer to live in them.

(For the record, I dislike actual gated communities.)

> This is especially true given their karma model, which as others here have pointed out somewhat encourages hivemind attenuation especially since it is annoying to get into and join.

I don't think "hivemind" is a smart criticism (see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5136265), and I think that we won't know whether or not their karma model will work until it's been tried.

Remember Slashdot's moderation model?

I think Slashdot has a pretty fun model, if you are referring to the point system. My favorite moderation model so far is SA's, because it actually adds value instead of merely deterring vandalism. That's also why seeing pg post here is nice.

It is very much my preference, but I do think that ultimately we'll be able to show and justify that gated marketplaces of ideas are objectively bad (as exemplified by community-created filter bubbles, etc.).

Edit: No idea why people are downvoting you. You raised a few good points for discussion. C'mon HN. :(

> The website doesn't have critical mass or any special hooks (like pg's essays and pg himself, for instance) to help build it

I think this is the only real problem with the site, really. It's going to need some kind of attractor to make people want to be there. (And honestly, I'm hoping it finds one.)

> I'm not "applying" to post on a website

Why not?

> Costing people karma is going to drive everything towards a hive mind as soon as possible...

"Hive mind" is a label that people seem to be applying to, "opinions I don't like". I can't think of a reason why this system would penalize different opinions, so long as they were thoughtful presented well. It would however penalize stupid ones, which would be just fine.

I hope it draws enough traffic to become a useful experiment. I think it's got some good ideas.

Your stupid opinion is seen as thoughtful by me or the other way around. Different is often seen as stupid by those invested in the difference.

lol

Is it just me or have people stopped testing how the font renders on anything other than a Mac? Don't people believe in cross-platform readability anymore?

The font being used looks terrible on a Windows machine (Win 7 with Chrome at 100% zoom).

http://i.imgur.com/OmWJiyn.png

Oh this looks really like living crap. But I'have to admit with everything non-commercial I develop I give a shit on Windows compatibility (it's so hard to test Windows' browsers, either you need some VM running or netbook).

Testing basic stuff like that is easy, just use one of those "website screenshot" services.

is there any free one around?

http://browsershots.org/

I recommend Adobe BrowserLab.

We decided to go with .woff on the font cause it's the trendy, cross-browser thing to do. We now know Windows won't anti-alias .woff files. In the next commit I'll add fallback to .ttf or .otf for Windows machines.

Oh! Oh! This is something I actually know something about! So, if you're willing to use something like FontSquirrel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator) to convert a single font file into four different formats, and if you're willing to store all four formats on your site, then you can fix your font problem by loading the .eot version of it first in your stylesheet, followed by a "?". Like so:

    @font-face {
    	font-family: 'Crimson Text';
    	src: url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.eot?') format('embedded-opentype'), 
    	     url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.woff') format('woff'), 
    	     url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.ttf')  format('truetype'),
    	     url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.svg#svgFontName') format('svg');
    }

The browsers I've tested on so far will only load the file they're interested in, so it doesn't add much overhead in requests.

There's a breakdown of the hows & whys of this method at http://www.fontspring.com/blog/the-new-bulletproof-font-face...; I think that's the most current method in use. It seems to work well.

Looks fine for me on the latest FF in XP. Also looks good on Chrome 25 in Ubuntu--which I also bet it wasn't tested on.

I'm looking at it in Firefox on Windows 7, and while the headline looks OK, the body text is still atrocious. The tops of the capital letters are all fug beyond belief.

Same here.

The problem with this system is it actively penalizes use. I see the point of wanting users to have skin in the game, but if I had to give up 2% of my HN "karma" to post this comment, I probably wouldn't do so. If you extrapolate that across all users, you may gain more quality content, but using the site would feel like being punished. And with a social news site, your biggest problem is gaining critical mass. The last thing you should do is discourage use in any way.

Instead of penalizing those things, you should be using them as a metric for measuring site use. Pinterest, for example, would use "repins" as a way to see how much the users are enjoying their experience. Reddit and HN might use upvotes or comments. What you want is as much content as possible and a good sorting method to weed out the best stuff, which is what HN has.

But I could be wrong; we'll have to wait and see.

And the fact that it's 2% rather than some fixed amount means that it costs established users more to post, and new users less. Which seems somewhat backwards.

But with more initial karma points, the high-karma user's post would appear before the new user's, giving it a visibility bonus in exchange for the extra karma cost. Seems like a worthwhile trade for high-karma users, though it would skew the most visible content towards that of high-karma users and raise the barrier to entry for new users, for better or worse.

The 2% reminds me a little of the ELO system of chess. The stronger you are the higher is your risk (i.e. when playing against a much weaker opponent) which is good. Only because you are sitting on 10K of Karma won't hinder to post crap and opinionated stuff on HN right now. It could keep threads more in balance and bringing refreshing views on old subjects

I suspect this policy would lead to a Keynesian recession in karma due to a constriction in the circulation of points.

> ...but if I had to give up 2% of my HN "karma" to post this comment, I probably wouldn't do so.

But, is that necessarily undesirable? I don't think that a social network should be looking to encourage idle chatter; look at what a cesspool Reddit has become. I'm having trouble seeing a downside to encouraging people to only post when they really have something important or useful or substantial to add.

You don't always know how valuable your comment is when you post it. That's why being validated through voting is so great.

Being penalized for posting an opinion that you don't even know will be popular is not going to end well. In this case, people will only post things that will give them high karma.

Commenting on The List costs nothing. The List encourages discussion between members. Posting does cost karma, however, to force people to put 'skin in the game' when posting. They should be able to feel confident that they can recollect their karma that they used to post with upvotes.

The problem with these high barrier to entry discussion sites is that they lack productive people. The people who have the time and inclination to put up with rules like this spend far too much time posting on internet discussion boards, are far too little time building awesome things (i know this from first-hand experience). The best part of HN is the first-time commenters who have made something awesome and come here to reply in the thread about it. If you put up walls to keep casual users out, you drive all the best posters away.

That's a very good point.

The font used on that site is literally broken and unreadable in Chrome, on Windows. It cuts out parts of the letters. For an example of what I'm seeing, here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/e6SVAsY.png

I'm on Windows, when I have text zoomed at 100% in chrome, I can't read it, at all. 110% makes it readable. Firefox looks ok, but the looks a little strange. Some parts of letters look bolder than others.

The problem with any sort of online gamification is you have winners, losers and cheaters. You also have dangerous unexpected consequences.

I used to be part of a MUD (yes, go ahead, laugh) back in the 80s and 90s. It just so happened that quite a few of us in town were part of the same game. So we game'd the game. There was about 20 of us and we effectively created our own league. When you are dealing with a game with maybe 100 active people a league representing 20% of the total population was huge. Not only that but we were able to synchronize our events and became the most hated group in the entire system. They wound up banning all the ISPs in our city (but then they opened them back up when their game turned into a ghost town).

Karma, badges, points, notoriety are all the same. Phbb and VBulletin (and muds for that matter) have been doing this kind of thing for twenty years. None of it really works all that great. The biggest killer tends to be when people organize (SRS). What happens when enough people organize on this system?

A successful community is small, focused and diligent.

The next -big- system that will replace reddit/et/al isn't going to be rehashing the karma system or increasing the complexity. Rather it will be smart enough to know who you like and who you dislike. It will deliver you the content and people that you want to engage in, not provide a battle to the bottom where only the most watered down high-school level content is going to pass through the masses.

Very nice game mechanics since on HN the 'old boys' have some advantages when submitting and commenting.

But I would like to know more about you guys and why or how you want to get traction on this before I put myself on the waiting list.

Besides: I love the .io TLD, it looks nice and it's typed fast but won't bring you less search traffic since Google haven't ranked it as a generic TLD yet (like .co, .biz, .org, .com, etc.)

Another side point: HN lost traffic over time when looking on Alexa, I don't know if this relates to the real traffic though.

EDIT: a small note: .io brings you then less search traffic when you try to target more than 1 country/language. If you just target let's say en-us you can set (one) target audience in Webmaster Tools which then would be us-en despite being on .io but if you target more than 1 language then you have a problem since you cannot address multiple targets and you should go with a gTLD or gccTLD. However, if you want to get some decent search traffic choose ALWAYS .com (or at least .net or .org but nothing else, you need much more efforts with other TLDs to rank similar to a .com)

The commenting advantage is obvious, but what's the submission advantage? I'm pretty much used to all my submissions falling off the site with 2-4 points.

Come someone link to (or explain in detail) some info about Google and how it ranks generic vs. non-generic TLDs? Where did the list of .co, .biz, .org, & .com come from?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Thanks :)

Unrelated question....is .me ranked by Google as a generic TLD?

Wikipedia says yes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.me ) but to go for sure go to the Google Webmaster Tools and somewhere deep in the menus you can check which TLD are classified as generic

EDIT: here is Google's list of gTLDs and gccTLDs (generic TLDs with country code), fresh from Webmaster Tools, so .me is included but as said .io is still not included

.aero .biz .cat .com .coop .edu .gov .info .int .jobs .net .mil .mobi .museum .name .net .org .pro .tel .travel

.as .bz .cc .cd .co .dj .fm .la .me .ms .nu .sc .sr .tv .tk .ws

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Thanks....

sorry for hijacking the thread :)

A couple of things to note: - The applicants list features every person's email in plain text (in the 'send x an invite' href). - The list is orderly illogically. As the idea behind this site is that you would sort the best from the worst, having the longest waiting people at the top of the queue until they get picked makes no sense. - As mentioned previously, the applicant link takes you to a non-existent site.

Please don't claim to be something you are not. This is by no means a better Hacker News.

Applied to get in? They're listing you publicly: http://thelist.io/applicants

One of the great things about the site...get rid of the riff raff

Holy smokes, Mark Zuckerberg's listed as not even being able to score an invite. This shit is exclusive!

Looks like a WASP sausagefest.

You should really do something about the way comments are displayed.There is too much wasted space.

I love the idea of putting some skin in the game when posting/voting/etc.

Agreed. The guidelines (http://thelist.io/guidelines) are nice too:

The List is not for:

Social media news

Traditional news

Funny images

Angry rants

Advice animals

Linkbait

The apply link is to thelist.dev/apply

-> http://thelist.io/apply

And yet, front page has the story of Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie. :)

down-vote it then....

I also see many problems with the karma system and the rules. Like many others have pointed out, if you punish people for postings, people are way less likely to post and a forum without posts are useless. Also the rules for what to posts are way too strict. It is like not allowing students in the class to ask 'stupid' questions;overtime, students will be too afraid to ask any questions.

I've been thinking that costs for upvotes or comments are probably worth a discussion on HN. The problem with online karma versus offline karma is that for buddhists, offline karma has a real cost in some respects. Yet online karma is just a positive score. If you really had to stake your reputation on a link, would you really post that lolcat?

UPDATE ON TWO ISSUES:

When you sign up there's now a checkbox to hide yourself from the applicants list.

Font smoothing now works on Windows machines so looking at The List should be much nicer for Redmond devotees. (might have to clear cache)

Signup link on the docs page links to the right place now.

One feature that would make me apply right away: no down-voting a comment without commenting on why you down-voted it. In other words, everyone should be required to give a reason when they down-vote a comment.

Looks like my user name throws an exception, might want to create some rules and validation on usernames: http://thelist.io/user/chris.truman

Thanks for pointing that out. This is on our Issues List https://github.com/JacksonGariety/The-List/issues/48

It makes me a bit sad that this is just as unusable on mobile as HN.

Pushed an update that should fix that.

WARNING

If you submit a request and allow it to be public, your email address becomes available for all to see and harvest! Nice idea overall but this is a horrible, horrible flaw.

How do you fight spam if you essentially gave out your algorithm?

Security via obscurity will not help much.

A better HN would be an HN where some bugs are fixed, and (some) people are a bit more civil. That's it. But nobody is perfect.

Question: Why did you choose a single thread comment system over nested comments?

Why does it cost more for experienced high karma users to post?

When you post, you invest your karma. If you have a lot of karma, your post starts out with more, so the likelihood of front-paging is higher for users who have a track record of quality posts.

If I have a lot of money, It does not mean that I am willing to invest a lot of money.

Any background info on the people/person running this?

We're two high schoolers in Portland who like to build all kinds of things.

https://github.com/JacksonGariety https://github.com/ColbyAley

Wow, nice work guys. For what it's worth, I think you've got some interesting ideas on tackling online forums; I hope you get enough activity to see how they work out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com