How to kill your community | Hacker News Reader

How to kill your community

ma.tt

18 pointszen5310 comments

"Design Like NASCAR. The more buttons, widgets, stickers, and visual clutter the better. I want to see every possible login system including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Google Friend Connect, and that Myspace thing. Because of their respective crappy terms of service, use the giant buttons they insist on. Also include a megabyte of “share this” icons for every obscure service in every language. People love options! Complexity is for closers." - check

The 'bonus' section is a rant against the popularization of systems like IntenseDebate or Disqus.

Is really WP so afraid of these?

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with intense debate, considering Automattic(the company behind WordPress owns IntenseDebate). However, disqus would probably be a prime target.

I think the issue is that if the services like Disqus goes away, you don't have the comments anymore either(I believe). With things like IntenseDebate and Backtype you still own the comments, as they are saved in your database with appropriate plugins. Also some talk about appropriate SEO, etc. but I haven't researched that.

7. Use blog software like WordPress, which will get hacked in a second if anyone cares enough to attack your site.

What about all the large, successful, serious content and community sites running Wordpress?

And what's the realistic alternative? Many of those sites used to run custom CMS software coded from scratch years ago by some random development agency who farmed the work out to a freelancer who has long since disappeared. Seems doubtful that that's better in any respect.

Edit: Removed my sarcastic tone :)

I'd honestly say that Drupal is better than Wordpress. Seriously, the extreme number of automated attacks and security holes in wordpress have made it a very dangerous game to play. They do fix problems quickly (a couple of days), but that's still enough time to get hacked.

Running an online system is a responsibility, one which includes keeping up with vendor updates.

Is it possible to run WordPress securely? Absolutely, we do it for 8 million blogs, including some of the most high-target blogs in the world like CNN's.

In the case of WP we consciously take a perception hit versus some of our competitors by not batching security updates every few months but putting fixes out there immediately, even when there's no public disclosure.

I think this worth it though it can be painful in cases like this comment where people have permanently internalized their negative perception of the platform.

Hey, Matt,

re: your point about requiring a login to comment. Isn't that good for community building? If MetaFilter let just anyone leave a comment, that would kill it off pretty quickly. Having some barrier to entry can add value, you just need to find the appropriate one for your community.

It does build community, as long as anonymous comments go into a moderatation queue. Otherwise it builds noise. The point of logging in (and having karma) should be skipping the queue.

It depends on the context people are interacting with the site.

A blog is "owned" by the author, and comments are from guests who aren't invested enough in the site to register, but who still make up the core of the community.

On a forum, or Metafilter, or Hacker News, the content is produced and owned by every participant who will likely interact over and over and in the process build up their localized reputation and profile on the site as part of their ownership. I think that any of these could be done effectively without registration, but it's not as common.

(I think partly because there are business reasons for registration -- it makes it easier to opt-in people. Even people without the business reasons follow the convention.)

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