Comment by iheartmemcache | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iheartmemcache | Hacker News Reader

I highly suggest you curate the quality of your posts, users and comments. Perhaps, even at the expense of potential users. I think reddit is a prime example of how badly quality can deteriorate. I know there's no metric for 'good' vs 'bad' comments we can appeal to but I think we can all understand that all the 'true' subreddits[1] denote the fact that once you get far enough on the adoption curve[2] quality will start to suffer as I contend occurred on slashdot, followed by digg, subsequently reddit, and now HN. It will deteriorate into Eternal September[3] -- filled with one line quips and memes. I don't want to make any value judgments on this specific community but I'd like to say I miss the edw519s.

Good examples of communities that have managed to maintain quality well are /r/askhistorians and lobste.rs. Ask Historians managed to do it by ruling with an iron fist. Lobste.rs by heavily curating which members are able to join. Another interesting example of retaining long term quality is visible in private torrent sites- many of which employ both an invite system and strict rules.

Finally, what made Hacker News so good ~4 years ago was it was originally populated by people within the industry with decades of experience. You yourself said this was for the financial industry-- trying to pick up early adopters here makes about as much sense as trying to pick up adopters for a medical industry community on an economist forum.

[1] /r/trueaskreddit, /r/truereddit/, /r/truerreddit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Metafilter is another example of a website which has maintained its character. They ask for a $5 lifetime membership fee.

Retained its character at the expense of being stuck in the mid 2000s. For a modern aggregator they have a shit layout to be honest. A site that gets as much traffic as they do and they still have flat comments?? Inexcusable.

You're writing this on HN?

Re: lobste.rs, Every time I go on there, I don't see a bustling community and interesting discussion, I just see dead silence, no comments, and a few upvotes. Take a look now: https://lobste.rs/ The links are good, but that's about it.

I think that's a problem with the invite only way: it can be too exclusive to build enough critical mass to create a community in the first place. It's easy to argue that there is no noise if there is close to no signal.

I think what made Hacker News so good ~x years ago was the intentions of the users - people were here to share and learn, now many people are here to get traffic to their blog or startup or news site.

In finance I expect this will be much more aggressively pursued because AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.

> AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.

Is there something specific about finance that makes AdSense more valuable besides traffic? And if you already have traffic, seeding it in a brand new forum doesn't seem like a good way to get a big boost. From what I understand, there is a reason why high traffic blogs like Instapundit are supported more by Amazon affiliate type programs than AdSense revenue. AdSense will make you a bit of money, but I don't really know of anyone who uses it as their primary income.

I think you bring up an excellent point. With traffic, content certainly tends to deteriorate, or at least change. Like you've noted, most things are their best at the beginning. This being said, how do you try and stay on the cutting edge of the best sites in their early stages?

I'm honestly too young to have an experience with this myself, and don't expect finding out the best new sites to be easy or quick, but what tips from your experience can you offer?

As someone who's spent most of their career in professional finance, my strong advice would be to avoid the proliferation of "contributor" sourced sites.

These sites typically allow anyone to write financial articles, trading recommendations etc. and get paid for page views. There is little to no verification of the content, let alone diligence on the credibility of the authors, and the quality of the discussion is extremely poor.

Unfortunately, given the volume of content they can produce through crowd sourcing, they are also extremely popular. Examples include Forbes, Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool.

EDIT: Assuming your question was in relation to financial news.

Agreed. Also, in the name of "understand your market" - what did early HN readers get from reading HN that they wouldn't elsewhere and how does that translate to finance? Would HN be successful if some random dude had started it instead of PG? I admittedly wasn't around in the early days, but back then I would imagine that the expectation was "wow, generally people who post on here are legit" as a direct consequence of that association.

I'm not familiar with the author - is he/she someone baller enough in the finance world to draw quality discussion? Are people going to break away from WallStreetOasis and minesweeper for this? Is there useful industry-relevant information? (My impression from friends who've gone into finance is that technical skills matter for jack shit as long as you're competent, and relationships, positioning, and sounding like you know what you're talking about rule the day. Is that something you can vaguely convince yourself you're getting better at at while wasting office time on a finance hacker news clone?)

Unrelated, I've always thought it would be fun to hem up a corpus of SeekingAlpha articles, use some rudimentary NLP to look for clear short-term bullishness or bearishness on some specific security, and see if you can either (a)find anyone who's demonstrably worth reading and following (and maybe trading based on them), or (b) more likely point out that everyone is full if s, most of them are convinced of their own s, and in the end it's all clickbait with charts and important-sounding finance words.

The problem with this approach is that given a sufficient population of contributors, a random distribution is going to give you individuals that consistently out/under perform purely by chance. This can be seen in the professional asset management industry, where:

there is strong evidence that chasing managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records is actually harmful to your portfolio health [1]

[1] http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/guest/BP-130108-Track-...

So you should short-sell managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records, then?

On the flip side, though, Seeking Alpha is extremely handy for stock alerts and earnings call transcripts.

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