
I am addicted to YC News - dawie

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startupguy
The content has the highest signal to noise ratio of any other social content
site out there. This is likely because the audience is more focused.

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sethjohn
The fact that comments may be viewed during the YC app process probably has
something to do with creating a focussed audience. But, how much?

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BrandonM
I think the reason that I like to check it a lot is to see what intelligent
people think about the things that I say. So the first important component, in
my mind, is that the majority of the members are smart. Secondly, by allowing
people to reply to replies and assign karma points (admittedly not a novel
idea), smart people can reinforce the parts of my replies that they find smart
and ignore the parts that don't interest them.

I think the inability to vote topics down avoids some of the problems that
Reddit has encountered, where people camp out and vote submissions down in
order to make their own appear higher. I think a more mature (on average) user
base helps to accomplish that as well.

Finally, I think that most people must have heard of YC news through either
pg's site or through YCombinator itself. Anyone interested in those two things
are cool in my book, and should produce good discussions.

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Mistone
i have to agree, I find my self checking in many times throughout the day. I
never really got into Digg or Reddit because there was so much irrelevancy to
the submissions and with so many users it never felt like your posts got much
face time with readers. YCom News is focused, comments are honest and not to
long, and you get the feeling that the people on the other end are smart and
doing really cool things.

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mattculbreth
The absence of spam and drastically off topic material is a huge plus for the
site. We've pretty much stayed on topic, and I think Paul has said they have
human moderators whacking bad submissions or comments. The voting helps with
that also of course.

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dfranke
The amount of spam they've been killing has actually been substantial for the
past week. (Mostly the same couple spammers; I don't know why they haven't
banned their IPs yet). I've been keeping showdead turned on because I'm
curious about seeing how the situation evolves, but once spam reaches about
double its current volume I'm going to turn it off because it'll be too
annoying.

Edit: Maybe they've banned them now; the new queue is currently clean.

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mattculbreth
I wish the Reddits had been doing this. We ran into some bizarre impeachment
behavior a few weeks ago. I think they're proud of running an open and market-
driven site, but sometimes that can go wrong. Shirky's essay at
<http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html> sort of describes this.

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floozyspeak
its also simple

in todays el-explosion'ary 2.0 scene simple is usually left out

there are no tags, avatars, profiles, subgroups, contacts, thingamwhos and
fake promises

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wensing
I used to check YC News every time I exported a new .swf with the Flash IDE
(because it's so horrendously slow and sometimes even crashes the IDE--I
figured I'd make use of those 10-20 seconds [which unfortunately often turned
into 5-10 minutes of web browsing--AAAA!]).

Now that I've removed that step from my workflow, I check much less often. :-)

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dawie
Maybe it will get me into trouble at work. If it does, I will just start a
starup. Wait, I am starting a startup in any case

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Alex3917
What about the site makes it most addictive for you?

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dawie
I think its because its so dynamic. I am always on here seeing whats new or
what changed. It also helps that I am really interested in the content on the
site

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abossy
I hope they don't actively promote this site. The community is small,
insightful, and focused. It should stay this way.

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dawie
I agree. It already seems like more people are adding stories creating more
noise. When news.ycombinator.com started, I could read all the stories in the
list. Now its seems like there are too many.

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epall
The intellectual feeling I get here is something I really miss from Reddit's
early days. Granted, YC News doesn't cover everything I care about, but like
startupguy said, the signal to noise ratio is amazing. I just dropped Reddit
from my bookmarks bar because I only have so much time and the S/R ratio is
falling for me.

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floozyspeak
i have to agree as well, which is why i thought it was kinda like the new
digg, course i dont really read digg any more.

what i find in yc news: inspiration, fresh, new, professional development,
stuff to think about, its almost a good excuse for browsing vs say
drudgereport,

i see alot more 2.0 newness mentions as well, i usually go to emilys hub for
that

it feels more fresh, and i feel like it matters more than random dude check
this out digg like stuff

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PStamatiou
I am also loving YC News - very focused, top-notch content. Hopefully it wont
get too popular to the point where we see digg-type spam. I like it just the
way it is.

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joshwa
anyone placing bets on how long it will take for news.yc to devolve into digg
territory?

(danw, remember I asked this about justin.tv, and the answer turned out to be
about 18 hours after I asked...)

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Alex3917
I don't think it will. PG has no reason to let news.yc devolve into the
current reddit situation, so presumably if it starts to then it will be
corrected.

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dawie
Its funny how PG's bussiness is creating and selling businesses. I guess I
can't sell YC tough or can he?

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abossy
I don't believe he intends to.

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dawie
I think that vertical news is the way forward, because its focused

