Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes, this experiment has jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you all not to post more of them.

Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that we don't kill as duplicates. (That's to prevent race conditions.) Should we make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it. I think the answer is no.

Experiments are worth trying, but this one has gone on for a month now and I don't think it has cleared the bar [1]. Having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. The threads seem to have gotten less interesting as they've become more regular.

I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who disagree. But our job is to optimize HN for curiosity and I don't think the quality is high enough here. Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938

I agree about the frustration of having multiple threads posted by different people. These threads should be killed.

A once per month thread would be useful to me. Would it be possible to accommodate that?

I'm not adamantly opposed to it, but it seems rote to me. As I've tried to explain, if there isn't a clear 'yes' then the default answer should be 'no'.

I wonder if there's a different path to getting the valuable part of it? It seems to me that instead of rushing to embalm experiments as regular features, we should just do more experiments.

It seems to me that the ability to merge threads (either automatically or through moderator action) would benefit this, and the problem of multiple posts on the same subject in general.

Although I don't agree with seeing popular, user generated content as a negative, but it's not my sandbox. I think it's at least better than yet another Techcrunch post or ceaseless bickering about class warfare and internecine SV politics.

Also, perhaps these threads should automatically expire weekly.

I'd like to see it once a month. Half-baked (and better) ideas getting submitted piecemeal just don't get traction alone.

Perhaps you can just have self-posts with "Idea Sunday" in the title not contribute any karma to the submitter?

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