

Would a /leaderposts on YC make sense? - bayareaguy

At times when the top stuff on YC seems less interesting, I've occasionally gone back through the recent submissions of the leaders to look for older stuff I may have missed that doesn't appear in /best.  I.e.<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=edw519<p>Does anyone else here do this sort of thing?  If so, would it make sense to have here or would it be better for something like http://searchyc.com to have?
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mixmax
Yes I do the same thing, but the profiles that I look at are a bit different
from yours.

I think that what is needed is some sort of algorithmic approach, like my yc
news. I note that I see many of the same users in the discussions I'm
contributing to, and that not all of these are in the top list. And some of
the people in the top list I never see. What this suggests is that there are
different subsets of users with differing interests.

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edw519
"there are different subsets of users with differing interests"

What a perceptive observation of something I never understood. I submit and
participate all the time and, for the life of me, could never figure out what
helps a story get "traction". Sometimes I submit something I find extremely
interesting (Enterprise moving to Web 2.0 or How to Make Trains Go Faster) and
they go nowhere. Then I'll submit something with what I think is of marginal
interest (Indian Outsourcing), and it goes wild. I used to think it depended
who was on-line the critical first hour or two to make it to the first page. I
like your theory better.

One extremely popular type of thread I never find interesting (so I never
participate) is the "language war". People seem to love these discussions. My
attitude has always been, "Write it in whatever you want, and I'll rewrite it
in BASIC (heh heh)".

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mixmax
I think that this observation is actually the key to growing a social news
site without it becoming diluted, as it happened to Reddit. If you make an
algorithm that simply looks at what posts you contribute to, post in and look
at it should be possible to locate other users that fit into the same subset.
These users submissions and comments are probably the ones that you like.

I also think there's a pretty good business model in developing a good back-
end that people can use to create their own social news sites.

Maybe someone from here would be interested in helping explore it?

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pg
Sounds like you want <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

What I should do is let people adjust the time on that.

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gscott
This page links to the profiles where you could then click on the submitted
link <http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

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bayareaguy
That's in fact what I do. It's just a little tedious.

