Ask NickB: How do you do it, dude?
You're all over the place. Your current karma is over 8000. How much time do you spend submitting links, etc...? Any tips or tricks?
By the way, thanks for the hard work in making the site better.
By the way, thanks for the hard work in making the site better.
Engaging in a debate, OTOH, is another issue. Doesn't matter who's right, what you've done, or what you know. If someone else disagrees with you and doesn't feel like saying why, they just click the down arrow. "Anonymous Coward Downmodders".
I could earn 50 points by posting the cure for cancer in one post and lose it all by saying I hate <Ruby, Facebook, Lisp, whatever> everywhere else.
So, to be safe, keep submitting, don't insult anyone, and never say anything controversial. But what fun would that be?
(Geez, I hope nobody disagrees with this.)
A word about myself so you can see where I'm coming from... I'm currently part of a startup. We're working feverishly on a product that I feel might get some heavy competition in 6-12 months. I've seen one or two products that sort of come close to the area we're approaching but they haven't really hit the bulls-eye. The pace at which we're working is not for the faint of heart and I work about 12-13 hrs every day. The team has about 4 people so far (+2 part time) and I'm the lead. This is my third startup (1st time as a lead) so I've seen things from many different angles. I've experienced a startup that skyrocketed and one that failed and also one that's doing moderately well. So yes, I've seen what works and what doesn't. We're completely self funded at this point (myself and my co-founder put some cash into the company) but we might go out and raise some money 6 months from now or so. We have never applied for YC... we're probably too late and too big for YC.
Now, after reading that description, you will understand what my interests are and why I like this site so much. I'm primarily concerned with methods, ways, advice of how to work using agile methods and how to develop webapps fast. We use RoR, some Java, some Python, some Flash and a lot of JavaScript. Personally, I'm a huge fan of functional languages (Lisp & Erlang) so you will see a lot of submissions from me on those topics as well. I am also _extremely_ interested in various distribution methods (viral, word of mouth, SEO/SEM) so you will see me submit a lot of links like that.
Now, how exactly do I track news. Well, I use an RSS reader (NetNewsWire, grab it, it's free now) to gather my news and the only news website that I actually open inside a browser is Hacker News. I check RSS feeds about 3-4 times a day (usually during breaks and when I need to clear my head) and I use a YCN bookmarklet to submit (http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html). It literally takes a second to submit using that handy little piece of JS code. I track about 150 feeds. Majority of them are about programming and technology. But I also track a lot of marketing, business and startup-related legal blogs. I dislike heavy volume blogs since they post a lot of fluff and a lot of it is boring to me at this point. So, whenever I find something that's interesting to me, I post it here. Over the past six months, I found a lot of interesting blogs linked here so I doubt you're missing much if you just track HN's "new" section.
Submissions that are not strictly news are usually best links on the topic that I was researching. For example, after I did some research on recommendation systems, I posted a few links that were helpful to myself. I also use HN as a crude delicious.
I also enjoy commenting on HN because people who frequent this site tend to be smarter than people on other sites and they tend to be in the same situation as myself: fighting time and working on something and looking for ways to make their product successful and better. Signal to noise ratio (SNR) on HN is also quite high. I was afraid that it would fall after pg rebranded and expanded the focus of the site but that has not happened yet (lucky for us!)
I like to read a lot and I read very quickly so you'd be surprised how little time I actually spend reading stuff on the web. I try to read a book a week as well.
Quick tip... check out the "new" section and give a mod point to articles you like. Most of the articles get "hot" after they reach the front page but a lot of quality articles never reach it. When you've identified people who have similar interests as yourself, keep track of their submissions. I keep track of submissions of 3 people here and I upmod their stories quite often since they interest me. For example, this is my submission queue: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb
And finally, reward people who post to your threads by moding them up :). Has this made any difference to my rep? Probably not but I like spreading karma.
PS: My HN specific email's in my profile. Feel free to ask personal questions offline.
I'm pretty sure PG runs this site because he likes it, not because he hopes to make the next Digg, so I'd expect that if the noise grew he'd work on keeping it down, even if that meant keeping the audience small.
That's just my impression. What say you PG?
All three are best satisfied by a medium-size site with good quality links and comments, so I am definitely not hoping News.YC becomes the next Digg.
Two tips I'd like to chip in myself:
1) Rewrite the headline to make it clearer
2) Don't post a submission or comment unless you believe it creates value for others. Consider the signal/noise ratio.
And a third for those who only want karma:
3) Mention a keyword such as PG, YC or Lisp in the headline. "Justin.tv Video interview with Paul Graham on writing openID support for news.yc in lisp" would be a high karma headline
But, this still applies to some more of the posts here. I notice that, for the most part, people are harking against news.yc being flooded with crappy submissions and turning into digg/reddit. Then you have threads like this where a portion of the focus of these comments are geared towards giving tips on how to have high karma retrieving posts.
In my opinion, karma is nice and all, but the main purpose of news.yc is to submit quality articles, articles that interest you and may interest others, without karma valuation playing a role in submitting something. That is part of the reason why digg has devolved into what it is now. People began to put a great deal of emphasis and importance on accumulating diggs, or karma here, which in turn decreased value of posts, and so on, blah blah.
In any case, vote me up!
So, even people only want to acquire karma points they would have to submit interesting links, otherwise no one will upmod but downmod them.
Are there any non-karma approaches to news sites that work well?
The two that I know of are:
1) Charge for membership
2) Keep the community smallI'm putting the burden on the users to evaluate their motives and to make sure that what they are submitting will really contribute to the community, not for the sole purpose of fueling their karma fetish.
I agree with so much of what you've said about HN; I feel like I've found a 2nd home here.
Keep up the good work and drop us a personal line every once in a while.
(I'd put you on a pedestal, but you're already there.)
I recently got into the leader board which gave me a good feeling, although I know I shouldn't be feeling that. But even with my low score, I feel like I am Karma Slutting sometimes (I prefer that to the term Karma Whoring).
(just kidding)
Interestingly, in the same 5 days, nickb has submitted 37 stories -- an average of score of just over 5 points each -- which places ranks him highly not only in volume of submissions but also in quality.
And yes, just like with a lot of other things, it's about quality and not quantity of submissions. The interest of users of this site is pretty clear so if you submit links that are meaningful to them, there's a good chance you'll get upmoded. But as I said, I don't really care about karma... I get nothing for it anyway :).
I view submitting stuff here as a thanks to others that do the same. I can't even begin to express the thanks to others that have introduced me to so many different concepts that have cut down our development time by months.
etc.
I'm on the "leaders" link, but I know perfectly well that plenty of my comments would have had me banned from any real world settings...and that includes comments that got upmodded.
I upmodded it because I can see that, while grammatically a question, its real purpose is to thank Nickb, and I think he deserves it.
There are plenty of situations where being an outlier is not a bad sign, and reputation in a (nonlame) community is one of them.
nickb isn't far from a link spammer - he might very well be detected as one by a poor algorithm on a lesser site. Instead he's an incredibly important contributor.
On the other hand, I too have suspected that he was just a really well trained bot - which would still be impressive.
I don't see any problem with submitting lots of stories as long as they're of a reasonable quality. Unfortunately the fact that stories can't be voted down means that there's no penalty (at least as far as karma is concerned) for flooding the site with submissions.
While I don't think nickb falls into this category, there are certainly other people who are making (IMHO) excessive numbers of submissions without significant merit.
Ironically, a few hours ago I posted a suggestion for dealing with this problem (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99846): Make submitting a story cost a few points of karma, so that submissions only result in a net gain in karma if the submissions get voted up.
Interesting approach.
My own experience tells me that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how well a submission will do. Sometimes I submit something I find especially profound and helpful, and no one else ever votes or comments. Other times, I see something of passing interest, and it goes wild. Of course, there is always the "Old Faithful List": Facebook, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, pg, Google, or anything professing a like/dislike of a language.
So, when I see someone with high karma, I know they epitomize the ideals of the largest*most active group in a society.