

An idea for breaking through Silicon Valley's social network.  It can be viewed as a generalization of Hacker News. - amichail

This is actually a more general idea for contacting anyone well known who would probably just ignore your email because you are not near him/her in his/her social network.<p>You can think of Hacker News as an example of this idea since it allows unknowns to contact PG -- particularly if their submission is voted up to the front page.<p>More generally, what about using a social news site specifically built for this purpose (and not just for contacting the people who created the site)?<p>The idea is that if many people agree that you have something interesting to say to someone famous, then he/she would probably be interested in hearing what you have to say.<p>Moreover, a famous person is more likely to respond to a question if he/she feels the response would be of interest to many people.
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paul9290
So what do you want to address to these famous people? Anything of a personal
nature between yourself and a famous person I don't think would get voted up.
Like - You, "I have a great idea and want to show it to you Sergey." The crowd
does not care about what you want, unless you are the crowd or you and your
friends are! But, if you asked, "How big are your #()! Pamela Anderson," or
"Do you feel guilty at night OJ?" then the crowd would be more likely to get
involved. Not a bad idea if you take the sensationalism route, but if are
interested in trying to contact a famous person for your own good, then I
think the site would be challenged in reaching it's goal.

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amichail
This is a good point. However, what if you make your idea public and it is an
idea that would benefit many people?

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dfranke
You'd have to have quite an ego in order to expect people to use such a thing
in order to get in touch with you. I don't think there are very many people in
SV who get so much personal (read: not a funding proposal) email that they
can't keep up with it. Unknowns don't need news.yc in order to talk to PG, and
anyone who sees that as the site's primary application is abusing it. My IMAP
server contains a pile of email exchanges with him from long before the site
existed.

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amichail
Famous people would have no say in the matter -- it doesn't matter if they
register with the service. It's the unknowns who would use the service to get
their attention.

At that point, a famous person can decide whether to reply or not, and if so,
whether to do so in private or public on the site/in some other forum.

How would a famous person know someone is trying to contact him/her? If this
service becomes well known, then either the person would see it directly or
someone close to him/her in his/her social network would probably tell
him/her.

Also the idea can be applied beyond Silicon Valley to contact famous film
directors, politicians, etc.

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dfranke
How is this different from making a post on any other random forum, and how is
it better than simply sending an email?

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amichail
Because you need lots of people voting your submission up for it to make the
front page. So they agree you have something worthwhile to say to a famous
person.

It's better than sending email because a famous person will likely not respond
to some random email of unknown quality.

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dfranke
It's not of unknown quality once you've read it. Even the biggest stars
generally have time to sort through all their fan mail, even if they don't
respond to most of it. If you have something insightful to say, getting it
noticed by a famous person really isn't that hard. Maybe this doesn't quite
extend to heads of state, but it isn't far off. You're solving a non-problem.

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amichail
Even if it only solves the problem with heads of state, that would make it
valuable.

Also, if something like this becomes well known, then I would predict many
more unknowns would attempt to contact famous people -- way more than famous
people would be able to handle in terms of email.

