

Should it be a bit harder to submit on HN? - egiva

Just a quick question/concept: should it be a bit harder to post on HN - thus leading to higher quality links/submissions? In general, the quality of content posted is amazing, but what if a description of minimum character length was needed to post? Average number of posts per user might decline, but there might be more discussion per post, creating more value for the community.  Is this a good idea or bad?
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JoshCole
I'm not sure, but I've been thinking about quality for a bit and figure I'd
share my thoughts.

Eternal September is named the way it is because in the past online
communities only had to deal with influx when students got to college, but now
they have to deal with a constant influx. Given this, it seems obvious to me
how you go about countering Eternal September: remove the eternal.

This could be done in a few ways, but the core idea is having a period in
which registration has a barrier for most of the year and periods in which the
barrier is removed for the sake of growth.

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mooism2
There's value in the links, not only in the discussion. I don't see the point
in discouraging submissions (except for spam/off-topic submissions).

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egiva
Yeah, I think you're right - maybe there's a "push and a "pull" effect
involved - creating barriers to make submission more difficult might be a
"push", but something like flagging or marking spam and off-topic stuff would
be more of a "pull" to encourage quality posts? I think pulls (incentives of
any sort) are better for communities than pushes (barriers or punishments).
Just some random thoughts...

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bergie
On Maemo News we handle off-topic submissions via ability to downvote posts.
And one downvote is worth 5 upvotes.

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phlux
No.

EDIT:

There should be the ability to be more granular in posting. More topic
options, subscribability etc.

I've said it before - and I'll keep saying it - take the best aspects of
Reddit and apply them here.

Why can I easily see top, new, threads and comments - but I have to go to my
profile to see my submissions? I can't see if there have been replies to my
posts etc.

Rather than making it harder to post - lets make what we already have better
to use.

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bmelton
If you enable notifo, and have a supported client, you can get instant
notifications of replies to your posts.

