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Comment by thetrumanshow | Hacker News Reader

Actually HN itself is experiencing some 'unbundling', I believe. Boot-strappers, for example, have long been carving out their own communities away from HN. I can only imagine this is also true for valley startups..

There's no way HN is still the center of this world for long. Its where you invited all your friends and co-workers to, and now its a mess. Now you have to move upmarket to find better information, and getting into those other communities is harder. They don't just let anyone in. They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality.

If you want into those communities, you better have created something, and you better be willing to contribute in a positive way. They won't tolerate many Jeremiahs.

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My favorite Internet community is Something Awful, and I'm surprised nobody's followed its curation model: put your money where your mouth is.

Accounts cost $10, and you get banned (meaning you have to spend another $10) if you do dumb things.

For starters, when most forums ban people it's because they want them to leave. Allowing trolls and assholes free rein as long they're rich kind of runs counter to the whole point.

Having to get out your credit card to swear at people on the internet seems to do a good job of getting people to stop and reconsider. Not always, but it helps.

You can still get permanently banned after a certain number of violations.

The trolls and assholes are still cleaned up after. There are people who spend a few hundred bucks trolling but they're essentially invisible unless you go looking for them.

It's still way better than the way most sites work, which is to let trolls sign up for new accounts for free.

The SA account cost and moderation work very well and do not result in a forum full of rich trolls. I've seen other forums use similar tactics (small cost of entry and strong moderation) to preserve a high signal to noise ratio.

MetaFilter has this model too, though I feel like it emphasizes stopping trolls getting in more than it does stopping banned trolls from returning. You must pay $5 to get a MetaFilter account.

I agree. SA is far from perfect, but the $10 entry fee combined with a group of active moderators improves the quality of the community.

Metafilter has followed this same model for many years.

"They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality."

What did happen to HN, exactly? Maybe the bloom just hasn't worn off for me yet, but discussion here is about a million times more high-quality and productive than, say, Slashdot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6220632

The core problem with HN seems to be the tendency for people to lambast ideas before we've given them a chance to germinate. PG gets fiery mad at this behavior. Scoffing at ideas adds nothing, in fact it reduces the value of the conversation to the point that it has less-than-zero value.

To use a (poorly constructed) analogy: if I want to laugh at nerds and their nerdy ideas, I should go join the ranks of nerd-scoffers at any local high-school, where I'd be a better fit. If you want to be part of the conversion here, you should bring a positive or constructive voice and try to improve on ideas, rather than tear them down.

I have been around HN for about 4 years now (I lurked before I created my account) -- there used to be all sorts of interesting articles on the front page (not just about programming, but genuinely interesting things like music, biology, psychology etc). Now, every third story is about NSA/Snowden, Openness, or someone's blog about how XYZ is bad and we should all do ABC instead. The front page typically has maybe one post that I care about these days.

Comments similarly started lacking in quality, or maybe the really vocal minority are just louder than everyone else. You're right that slashdot comments are way worse (jokes aren't frowned-upon as they on HN, so a lot of discussions degrade to cheap jokes), but the articles are moderated by a handful of people and are typically more interesting.

It's simply a function of a user-run moderation system that reaches a critical point, after which is it logistically impossible for the "good few" to moderate out all the bad ones because their votes count the same. We saw it in Slashdot comments, Digg and Reddit, and now we are seeing it here.

I've found that articles with a bunch of comments have inevitably devolved into trolls shrieking at each other. But historically I've gotten as much or more out of the comments as the articles.

>Comments similarly started lacking in quality, or maybe the really vocal minority are just louder than everyone else. You're right that slashdot comments are way worse (jokes aren't frowned-upon as they on HN, so a lot of discussions degrade to cheap jokes), but the articles are moderated by a handful of people and are typically more interesting.

It'd be interesting to see some statistics on who comments on what articles. (And who doesn't.)

As it stands I sort of feel like I'm crashing a party, and would serve you all best by leaving.

Could this be because the crowd is getting older and becoming more aware of this ever increasing political and social issues that affect the industry? You could have confirmation bias. I don't see too many political/social posts, maybe that's because I have confirmation bias the other way - I look for the interesting articles you talk about. Maybe the site needs to go full Lisp articles once a month to flush out the jokers (can't remember the language, haven't seen one in a while sorry)

I think it's more to do with the largest tech-based scandal since stuxnet, except with a vast litany of content of trickling leaks is going on right now. People may have topic fatigue, but it's not like some manufactured sideshow - things are really being shaken up, and it's paramount that folk in the industry follow it to know the state of play. Perhaps it's easier for non-US readers to maintain an interest and opinion on the topic, both due to being overtly targetted and being immune to the defensiveness we can all feel when our institutions are taking a hammering (even if we essentially agree in the fact they have made mistakes).

Aside from political posts, I think there is still a broad range of content on here that spans far more than myopic coding/entrepreneurial blogs etc.

The S/N ratio and discussion here is better, but I think Slashdot is very competitive in peak comment quality. In the midst of a crap Slashdot discussion there will often be one to three very good comments from knowledgeable people. And the moderation is not too bad at highlighting these, if you browse at +3 or +4.

Great comments happen here too, but I feel (possibly incorrectly, haven't done a survey or anything) that they come on a smaller range of subjects. You can count on tptacek for very good crypto comments, grellas for law, there are some old-school Lisp hackers around, and on a lot of web-related stuff you have the people who wrote the system in question around to comment. But we don't seem to have as many non-computer technologists around: pilots, nuclear engineers, chemists, etc. I think Slashdot has a userbase that averages somewhat older, somewhat less Silicon Valley, and somewhat less startuppy, which has its pros and cons.

Personally I still haven't found any comment section better than pre-2003 or so Slashdot. Lots of people who knew what they were talking about, trolls were quickly hidden, not much in the way of stupid politics, some humor without going overboard, etc.

Or maybe it's just rose-colored glasses to some extent; certainly there was the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" type stuff.

Where are the boot-strappers camped out? I'm very interested in joining that camp.

Bootstrapped.fm[1]? I'm guessing. More exclusive communities would include Dynamite Circle[2] maybe.

[1] http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

[2] http://www.tropicalmba.com/innercircle/

Indeed, a good place to start. Ian Landsman is very well connected to the community. However, keep in mind that the best kind of knowledge exchange is probably happening 1-on-1. Just like when attending conferences (Microconf, Business of Software, BaconBizConf, etc): there is a lot more value being exchanged in the hallways than in the auditoriums.

If it feels a bit like networking... thats because it is.

If you're at ground-level and just starting out, you can buy your way into a few (as jmduke pointed one out). I highly recommend joining Rob Walling's (rwalling) Micropreneur Academy and branching out from there. The cover charge is a bit pricey at ~$50 a month, but if you contribute to discussions and look for ways to help other people (this is key), you'll find your way forward into some other great communities.

Another alternative is Amy Hoy's (ahoyhere) 30x500: http://30x500.com/

Those are a couple of the public-access gates. Enter therein, and bring with you optimism, a willingness to share knowledge, and determination.

At $50 per month, it certainly seems like a good way to keep the owners employed, at least.

I don't think you're looking at this the right way. The right metric is value, not price.

If the community isn't worthwhile, then even $5 would be too much.

If the community helps your business to grow, then $50 is a trivial price.

I'm not a member, but I read Rob's book and it's was worth FAR more than the cover price.

I have revenue. Not as much as I want, but enough so that even a tiny increase in conversions is worth quite a bit, if the increase is permanent.

> join this community for only 50$ and you too can get rich quick!

Pass.

I think app sumo has something similar too: www.appsumo.com/how-to-make-your-first-dollar-outline/

It's interesting to me that discussion forums are now considered "startups." I suppose the distinction depends on whether the founders' primary goal is to stimulate discussion or to make money.

Assuming one has created something that they are attempting to bootstrap, how does one go about finding these communities? Can they be found just by searching, or is it more difficult than that?

Your question was answered, more or less, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6220479

Reply on news.ycombinator.com