Is Michael Arrington building a Digg killer? | Hacker News Reader

Is Michael Arrington building a Digg killer?

businessinsider.com

11 pointsfromedome19 comments

Some day, I'm going to start a news aggregator that creates honest headlines. Here's how it will work: for every degree of separation between the original story and the submission, subtract about 80% of the hyperbole.

"I have a weird entry in my referrer logs" -> "Maybe Arrington is building an aggregator, like last time" -> "Maybe Arrington is going to destroy Hacker News! Like last time he made a tech news aggregator."

Edit: though this HN story appears to have been submitted by the story's original author.

No sarcasm at all, either. ;-)

The next title would be:

> OMG! Arrington is marrying Paul Graham!

I love how the original article is rhetorically asking if he's building a Digg killer, but it's been changed to Hacker News for the purpose of posting it here.

Yeah, and it's not even remotely the same sort of problem. A "Digg killer" or "reddit killer" just needs traffic. A Hacker News killer needs to have a good community.

"HN killer" begs the question:

Is PG moving over to TechCrunch?

I'm surprised at how many "experts" STILL equate technology with community...just tells me how many still don't "get it".

Please: it 'raises' the question.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538942

Maybe just in this one lonely forum we can recover and preserve the meaning of the phrase. To beg the question is to make an argument that has a circular dependency.

Thanks, I didn't know that!

Back to the main point: any "killer" of a community has nothing to do with the underlying technology, but the people behind the community. The only way HN would be killed by TC is if PG were to be the motivating force behind whatever it is that is going on at TC, and at the same time kill HN himself (unlikely).

I would sure as hell welcome whatever TC has to offer as a competitor to HN as this fosters diversity in thinking...and at the same time offer a second place to exercise the proper use of language.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447529

I'm surprised at how many "experts" STILL equate technology with community...just tells me how many still don't "get it".

Spot on. The value here is in the members, the ycomb founders, the community, the discussion, and the moderation of new people to enforce culture.

Just comparing this place to techcrunch comments yields dramatic differences.

No.

It would be nice if all the TechCrunch trolls could go back to TechCrunch.

There's an update on the site: Astute commenter Daniel Pritchett might have the answer: An app called "Spy" that tracks social media conversations. TechCrunch would presumably use this to come up with story ideas or track conversations about its stories on the Web.

What I love is the "astute" part. It's completely random speculation. But then so is the original article.

I'll give you my own astute guess - Arrington was enamored with digg spy - a real time, ajaxy display of activity on digg (retired a few months back). And today Friendfeed's new beta interface looks just like digg spy used to, but obviously with activity over many sites. I betcha he's going to do something like that.

But when I say it, by "astute" I mean totally random wild ass guess.

How do you compete with a site which doesn't aspire to be anything other than what it already is... which is precisely why it's growing.

As soon as you try, you've already failed. :)

A Valleywag killer, yes.

Step 1: clone pg?

PG is a well respected persona, MA is not.

The day I see PG mudslinging is the day I declare HN dead.

PG's all the more respected because he's very rarely active online. He only says something when he's got something interesting to say. Arrington writes 24/7.

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