
Show HN: The List - JacksonGariety
http://thelist.io/docs
======
pbateman
I see a few problems with this:

* The website doesn't have critical mass or any special hooks (like pg's essays and pg himself, for instance) to help build it

* I'm not "applying" to post on a website

* Costing people karma is going to drive everything towards a hive mind as soon as possible; if you're going to lose karma by posting you're going to try to make sure that you'll earn that karma back. People are also not going to burn karma making civil responses, everything will become a political performance.

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tptacek
I'm with you, and would be happy to post a bet (proceeds to Watsi!) that none
of these invite-only HN clones are going to succeed long term.

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angersock
What was it Grouch Marx said? "I don't want to belong to any club that would
accept people like me as a member"?

Edit: Updated caps is from telegram, apparently.

Edit 2: Undid caps--sorry everyone. can't take it.

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thaumaturgy
So, what you're saying is that HN should ban your account?

All snark aside, I hope you can see the irony of your comment.

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tptacek
I am not seeing the irony. HN isn't an invite-only site; it's not a club at
all. That's the point.

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thaumaturgy
HN has all the properties of a club, it's just very cheap to get in. It's
certainly possible to be kicked out of the club (just ask LoseThos/SparrowOS);
so, since HN continues to accept angersock as a member, why is he still here?

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tptacek
Terry Davis is schizophrenic and his HN accounts feed random noise into
threads; at times, the noise is more than just disruptive. He hasn't been
"kicked off" of HN. If he created an account tomorrow and used it to post
coherently, or even just in a markedly different way than he uses the site
today, that account would not get banned.

The point 'angersock and I are both making is that it's not that HN is a
different kind of club or a better club. It's the fact that it's _not_ a club
that makes it relevant. Overtly clubby alternative sites (with invite-only
participation) are destined to fail, for reasons both obvious and subtle.

You say HN has all the properties of a club. But it doesn't:

* There's no shared purpose or interest, unless you count typing words into text boxes as that.

* There's no membership.

* There's no bar to entry.

* Half the site's participants are anonymous; for all I know, you and "angersock" are the same person.

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thaumaturgy
I disagree with most of your statements here, but I don't think this is an
argument worth having. angersock & I already circled back to the main point
elsethread and settled it.

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desigooner
Is it just me or have people stopped testing how the font renders on anything
other than a Mac? Don't people believe in cross-platform readability anymore?

The font being used looks terrible on a Windows machine (Win 7 with Chrome at
100% zoom).

<http://i.imgur.com/OmWJiyn.png>

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tferris
Oh this looks really like living crap. But I'have to admit with everything
non-commercial I develop I give a shit on Windows compatibility (it's so hard
to test Windows' browsers, either you need some VM running or netbook).

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icebraining
Testing basic stuff like that is easy, just use one of those "website
screenshot" services.

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tferris
is there any free one around?

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thaumaturgy
<http://browsershots.org/>

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austenallred
The problem with this system is it actively penalizes use. I see the point of
wanting users to have skin in the game, but if I had to give up 2% of my HN
"karma" to post this comment, I probably wouldn't do so. If you extrapolate
that across all users, you may gain more quality content, but using the site
would feel like being punished. And with a social news site, your biggest
problem is gaining critical mass. The last thing you should do is discourage
use in any way.

Instead of penalizing those things, you should be using them as a metric for
measuring site use. Pinterest, for example, would use "repins" as a way to see
how much the users are enjoying their experience. Reddit and HN might use
upvotes or comments. What you want is as much content as possible and a good
sorting method to weed out the best stuff, which is what HN has.

But I could be wrong; we'll have to wait and see.

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udp
And the fact that it's 2% rather than some fixed amount means that it costs
established users more to post, and new users less. Which seems somewhat
backwards.

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WiseWeasel
But with more initial karma points, the high-karma user's post would appear
before the new user's, giving it a visibility bonus in exchange for the extra
karma cost. Seems like a worthwhile trade for high-karma users, though it
would skew the most visible content towards that of high-karma users and raise
the barrier to entry for new users, for better or worse.

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notatoad
The problem with these high barrier to entry discussion sites is that they
lack productive people. The people who have the time and inclination to put up
with rules like this spend far too much time posting on internet discussion
boards, are far too little time building awesome things (i know this from
first-hand experience). The best part of HN is the first-time commenters who
have made something awesome and come here to reply in the thread about it. If
you put up walls to keep casual users out, you drive all the best posters
away.

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RivieraKid
That's a very good point.

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Skywing
The font used on that site is literally broken and unreadable in Chrome, on
Windows. It cuts out parts of the letters. For an example of what I'm seeing,
here's a screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/e6SVAsY.png>

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RexM
I'm on Windows, when I have text zoomed at 100% in chrome, I can't read it, at
all. 110% makes it readable. Firefox looks ok, but the looks a little strange.
Some parts of letters look bolder than others.

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columbo
The problem with any sort of online gamification is you have winners, losers
and cheaters. You also have dangerous unexpected consequences.

I used to be part of a MUD (yes, go ahead, laugh) back in the 80s and 90s. It
just so happened that quite a few of us in town were part of the same game. So
we game'd the game. There was about 20 of us and we effectively created our
own league. When you are dealing with a game with maybe 100 active people a
league representing 20% of the total population was huge. Not only that but we
were able to synchronize our events and became the most hated group in the
entire system. They wound up banning all the ISPs in our city (but then they
opened them back up when their game turned into a ghost town).

Karma, badges, points, notoriety are all the same. Phbb and VBulletin (and
muds for that matter) have been doing this kind of thing for twenty years.
None of it really works all that great. The biggest killer tends to be when
people organize (SRS). What happens when enough people organize on this
system?

A successful community is small, focused and diligent.

The next -big- system that will replace reddit/et/al isn't going to be
rehashing the karma system or increasing the complexity. Rather it will be
smart enough to know who you like and who you dislike. It will deliver you the
content and people that you want to engage in, not provide a battle to the
bottom where only the most watered down high-school level content is going to
pass through the masses.

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tferris
Very nice game mechanics since on HN the 'old boys' have some advantages when
submitting and commenting.

But I would like to know more about you guys and why or how you want to get
traction on this before I put myself on the waiting list.

Besides: I love the .io TLD, it looks nice and it's typed fast but won't bring
you less search traffic since Google haven't ranked it as a generic TLD yet
(like .co, .biz, .org, .com, etc.)

Another side point: HN lost traffic over time when looking on Alexa, I don't
know if this relates to the real traffic though.

EDIT: a small note: .io brings you then less search traffic when you try to
target more than 1 country/language. If you just target let's say en-us you
can set (one) target audience in Webmaster Tools which then would be us-en
despite being on .io but if you target more than 1 language then you have a
problem since you cannot address multiple targets and you should go with a
gTLD or gccTLD. However, if you want to get some decent search traffic choose
ALWAYS .com (or at least .net or .org but nothing else, you need much more
efforts with other TLDs to rank similar to a .com)

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matthuggins
Come someone link to (or explain in detail) some info about Google and how it
ranks generic vs. non-generic TLDs? Where did the list of .co, .biz, .org, &
.com come from?

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tferris
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922)

~~~
matthuggins
Thanks :)

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samwilliams
A couple of things to note: \- The applicants list features every person's
email in plain text (in the 'send x an invite' href). \- The list is orderly
illogically. As the idea behind this site is that you would sort the best from
the worst, having the longest waiting people at the top of the queue until
they get picked makes no sense. \- As mentioned previously, the applicant link
takes you to a non-existent site.

Please don't claim to be something you are not. This is by no means a better
Hacker News.

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businessleads
Applied to get in? They're listing you publicly:
<http://thelist.io/applicants>

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jmartens
One of the great things about the site...get rid of the riff raff

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businessleads
Holy smokes, Mark Zuckerberg's listed as not even being able to score an
invite. This shit is exclusive!

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vacipr
You should really do something about the way comments are displayed.There is
too much wasted space.

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jmartens
I love the idea of putting some skin in the game when posting/voting/etc.

~~~
davidkellis
Agreed. The guidelines (<http://thelist.io/guidelines>) are nice too:

The List is not for:

Social media news

Traditional news

Funny images

Angry rants

Advice animals

Linkbait

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citricsquid
The apply link is to thelist.dev/apply

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nirvanatikku
-> <http://thelist.io/apply>

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manish_gill
And yet, front page has the story of Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie. :)

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jmartens
down-vote it then....

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xijuan
I also see many problems with the karma system and the rules. Like many others
have pointed out, if you punish people for postings, people are way less
likely to post and a forum without posts are useless. Also the rules for what
to posts are way too strict. It is like not allowing students in the class to
ask 'stupid' questions;overtime, students will be too afraid to ask any
questions.

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iuguy
I've been thinking that costs for upvotes or comments are probably worth a
discussion on HN. The problem with online karma versus offline karma is that
for buddhists, offline karma has a real cost in some respects. Yet online
karma is just a positive score. If you really had to stake your reputation on
a link, would you really post that lolcat?

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JacksonGariety
UPDATE ON TWO ISSUES:

When you sign up there's now a checkbox to hide yourself from the applicants
list.

Font smoothing now works on Windows machines so looking at The List should be
much nicer for Redmond devotees. (might have to clear cache)

Signup link on the docs page links to the right place now.

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enraged_camel
One feature that would make me apply right away: no down-voting a comment
without commenting on why you down-voted it. In other words, everyone should
be required to give a reason when they down-vote a comment.

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ctruman
Looks like my user name throws an exception, might want to create some rules
and validation on usernames: <http://thelist.io/user/chris.truman>

~~~
colbyaley
Thanks for pointing that out. This is on our Issues List
<https://github.com/JacksonGariety/The-List/issues/48>

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jakobe
It makes me a bit sad that this is just as unusable on mobile as HN.

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colbyaley
Pushed an update that should fix that.

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kintamanimatt
__WARNING __

If you submit a request and allow it to be public, your email address becomes
available for all to see and harvest! Nice idea overall but this is a
horrible, horrible flaw.

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lominming
How do you fight spam if you essentially gave out your algorithm?

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shurcooL
Security via obscurity will not help much.

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orangethirty
A better HN would be an HN where some bugs are fixed, and (some) people are a
bit more civil. That's it. But nobody is perfect.

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jswift
Question: Why did you choose a single thread comment system over nested
comments?

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obilgic
Why does it cost more for experienced high karma users to post?

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JacksonGariety
When you post, you invest your karma. If you have a lot of karma, your post
starts out with more, so the likelihood of front-paging is higher for users
who have a track record of quality posts.

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obilgic
If I have a lot of money, It does not mean that I am willing to invest a lot
of money.

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blissofbeing
Any background info on the people/person running this?

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JacksonGariety
We're two high schoolers in Portland who like to build all kinds of things.

<https://github.com/JacksonGariety> <https://github.com/ColbyAley>

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thaumaturgy
Wow, nice work guys. For what it's worth, I think you've got some interesting
ideas on tackling online forums; I hope you get enough activity to see how
they work out.

