

HN: 33K visitors = 32,500 random tire kickers. But it also = 500 new hackers - raganwald

Just a thought about the recent surge of traffic from Coding Horror's link. It's true that things like this can threaten to swamp HN with an "Eternal September."<p>And making the front page boring is a very amusing defense against the random hit-and-run tire kickers. But let's not forget that 33,000 new visitors will contain a few potential hackers.<p>Sure, most will say "Erlang, WTF!" But a few will say "Erlang, What the... Wow!!!" It would be a shame if HN lost its way and suffered from the tragedy of mediocrity that has poisoned reddit and other sites. But it would also be a shame if folks with lots of good stuff to contribute stumbled upon HN and found it repellant.<p>I guess I'm just trying to say that while we should be very aggressive about keeping undesirable content and poisonous commentary off HN, we should also be careful to make sure people know that the door is wide open for like-minded folks to join in and participate, no matter where they came from.
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jimbokun
"Sure, most will say "Erlang, WTF!" But a few will say "Erlang, What the...
Wow!!!""

I think that argues even more for flooding the front page with ultra-geeky
stories. Several people (including me) discovered that we found a page full of
Erlang stories more interesting than a lot of the more general common interest
stories often found on the front page. We should try to create more
"Erlang...Wow!!!" moments by promoting more articles with deeper content.

I tried to start a thread about promoting lots of deeper articles on a
specific technical topic as a "theme of the day" kind of thing. The thread was
killed, not sure if it was because it was thought to be an attempt at humor or
if it just runs counter to the spirit of Hacker News. But I still think more
articles with deeper content on the front page makes for a better Hacker News.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_lots of deeper articles on a specific technical topic as a "theme of the
day"_

Permit me to disagree. The Erlang flood was not a favor to Erlang, from my
perspective. Because if there is one thing I do _not_ have it is the time to
read an entire page full of in-depth links on a topic that I barely know the
first thing about. Especially when at least half of those links aren't
necessarily good: They were chosen mainly because their titles contained the
_word_ "Erlang". Yesterday was not about quality. It was about quantity.

All that yesterday accomplished for me was to create a subconscious
association between _Erlang_ and concepts like _boring_ and _spam_ and
_slushpile_ , an association which I must now work to overcome. Any good links
in that pile were lost in the shuffle. And this is terrible, because the
design of HN is such that a link _cannot be submitted twice_ unless you find a
way to hack its URL. (It's a perverse form of reverse SEO. I'm pretty sure
that standard SEO advice is to give each piece of content a single, canonical
link -- but text which is accessible by multiple URLs can be submitted
multiple times to HN.)

If you want to promote excellent, deeper articles on a specific technical
topic the correct plan is to release them gradually. Declare Wednesday to be
Erlang Day and submit one Erlang link to HN each week. Or, if you want,
declare Erlang Week and do one article per day. But don't waste our time.
Don't overwhelm us with noise.

~~~
vorador
I like the idea of the topic day. And what about sub-HNs, that would discuss
very specific subjects ?

~~~
enki
remember kids, every friday is a fortran day

~~~
jimbokun
Hey, it's Friday now! Where are all the Fortran articles? :)

------
neilo
Thanks for this to make me feel welcome. I came in through CH and have
immediately fell in love with the format and content here. I was a bit
confused by the rush of Erlang posts right after I arrived (did I do that?),
but now I'm settled in and trying to absorb as quickly as possible ...

like a shamwow

~~~
spoiledtechie
Happy to have you.

------
emilis_info
I learned a few things from this Erlang WTF:

1\. HN is not a news filter website, it is a community. I am glad to be in
this community.

2\. HN as a web app is really a kind of a forum. It was shocking for me to
realize this, because I hated forums from the days when they killed
participation in mailinglists and irc in some of the communities I loved to be
part of. I considered myself to be a person who "doesn't get" forums.

3\. I am very interested to see how HN community will solve all those issues
with filtering out trolls, foolish memes, menacing eternal september, boredom
with the same type of news we will start to expect from each other and so
on...

I hope to learn so much more :-)

~~~
pavelludiq
The day i realised i had started to read the comments before the actual
articles was the day I realised this. Sometimes the comments are of greater
value.

------
rgoddard
I did enjoy seeing the articles on Erlang. If I want to see more stories like
that, then I just need to take the time to either find similar articles or
upvote the ones which I am interested in. The top list of stories is a
reflection of the members of the community who are actively posting/upvoting
articles. If there are certain types of articles you want, then it is up to
you to support them.

------
tptacek
How do we know that the "right" contributors even care about Erlang? Or who
the "right" contributors are? There's always going to be a subset of people
here that will be naturally interested in things like Erlang or the design of
the Lua VM. But there are also hundreds of people who are worth engaging with
who couldn't possibly care less.

------
yawn
How about we just move on?

~~~
raganwald
I have no objection to the moderators killing this discussion if it improves
HN. Or of them leaving it up while it seems to be constructive.

------
adrianwaj
How about an online test to obtain membership?

~~~
xenophanes
I have a good test. It's very exclusive. You have to beat the crafty chess
engine at a 60sec game of wild 5 "reversed". With black. Good luck.

~~~
adrianwaj
I was thinking about an IQ test, something like at Google. Maybe a coding
problem, and then a special Hacking intelligence, Macgyver type test.

~~~
raganwald
I can write a long blog post explaining why I think this is a bad idea, but in
all honestly the simple truth is that I'm afraid I would fail such a test and
that would be embarrassing. So I make up some mumbo-jumbo about why the test
doesn't correlate to good HN citizenship or some-such.

~~~
randallsquared
Your saying that made me realize that was my reason for disliking the idea, as
well.

