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Comment by HoLyVieR | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the Q&A format is a very bad to ask for list of things. A "wiki" would be a much better format to have list of things that everyone can contribute to. Q&A is also a very bad format for discussion. Traditional forum, Reddit or Quora are much better choice for discussion. It's a simple mater of using the best tools for the best job.

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It occurs to me--I don't think there's any real "social site" focused on making lists. The closest things we have are social bookmarking tools--but those have a ranking algorithm that highly weights novelty, causing the front page to resemble a stream of ephemeral content mixed with periodic reposts of evergreen content.

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How could we improve on this?

[Anyone who wants to do the following is welcome to; I've too many startups on the go already.]

Imagine something like Reddit--with each list being a "subreddit"--but:

A. there's no time-weighting in the front-page algorithm (though there is a "new" page); and

B. there are robust mechanisms in place for preventing duplicate entries from being created, and merging duplicates (along with their votes and comments) into the canonical versions.

Additionally, since the lists created will be far more static, you might want to give people greater influence over the ranking system--using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting_systems, for example.

Letter grades from A - F would be a good idea. Their meaning and use has been ingrained since childhood.

> Letter grades from A - F would be a good idea. Their meaning and use has been ingrained since childhood.

In many countries A - F grading system is not commonly used. For example in the country where I was born they use 1 - 5 grading system and A - F means nothing. I think rating with stars is much more widespread and would be wiser choice for any project with global ambitions.

That's an interesting idea. One of the things we are building is a "reddit like system"[1], and so I could see building a feature like that. Our current focus is on enterprise usage, though, not building something for the public web. But the code is all Open Source, ALv2 licensed and it's done in Groovy and Grails. If anyone is interested on hacking on something like that with us, just shout.

[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

I love this idea. Currently my search for, say, a new IRC client is likely to end up on Wikipedia of all places because they're the only people that have a comprehensive list of what's available. There has got to be a better way to do this.

It seems like it would be hard to find additional content after the easier targets are taken up. Once people have put up lists of what they find useful, new lists or useful additions to the list wouldn't appear every day. It might be a good curated reference, but I have a hard time seeing an active community based around it. Maybe you need to expand the scope of the site idea?

Yeah, but really that was kind of the idea in the beginning. It was to be this Wikipedia-like destination but it was all these subtle micro-management decisions that pushed it away from this.

On some level it is silly to put such constraints.

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