

Invention Worms - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/03/invention-worms.php

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russell
Daniel is proposing to create a HN-like site to aggregate interesting hacker
news and writers that no one else is serving. He proposes some variation on
the HN karma system because it's an itch he wants to scratch. Some
experiments: no down modding,karma is fungible,tunable aggregation, finding
little seen material, and making it more sociable.

If he can create a site with good, people, good material, and good
discussions, I say more power to him.

Of his 6 bullet points, "There's good material out there nobody is using" is
the only one that strikes me as significant. This is the hard one because he
will have to activelh dig it out. I dont think automatic aggregation will do
the trick.

Does he need more on the social side than HN provides? Just contact info for
those who want to be contacted or maybe RSS feeds for particular commentors.

So let me give a couple of niche areas that I am interested in. I am wallowing
alone in the complexity of the Jboss/hibernalte/spring/struts stack. What are
others doing? Collect entrepreneurial best practices. Browser side best
practices or programming techniques. What's new on the programming language
front, particularly concurrent programming? OK that's 4 suggestions.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Thanks for the validation on the "there's good material out there that nobody
is using" point, russell.

I'm still working on ideas for collection, but I know an easy way to filter:
simply refuse submission from any of the top 10K internet sites or so.

What would a news aggregation site look like without material from Engadget,
CNN, NYT, etc but yet with stuff you really enjoy reading? Is such a thing
possible? Or in other words, does the popularity of the source determine how
much you enjoy reading the content, and not the content itself? Kind of like
the expensive wine taste tests, where people consistently view expensive wine
as tasting better but _only_ after somebody tells them the price!

I don't know. I do know that it's been bugging me.

~~~
russell
10K top sites seems like an awfully large ban, so I would edit the list to
allow interesting sites. Another tactic would to subscribe to feeds from
particularly interesting sites, maybe filtering them for content length. For
example, take joelonsoftware. He has interesting things to say, but most of
his posts are there to keep the site fresh and should not be aggregated.

As for what I am looking for, I want information about techniques and
developments in the software development and web entrepreneurial spaces.
Popularity is probably a negative, because I have already seen it elsewhere.

I value commentary. I read the comments on HN before I read the story to see
if it is worth the investment of my time. I also do first comments as a kind
of payback. An interesting twist on HN would be to require a comment on a
submitted article rather than prohibiting it. That might be an effective junk
filter.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yep, you're right. Perhaps only 1K sites as a rule. I also like the idea of
getting feeds and just manually sorting through them. I firmly believe that
there's a mix between old-fashioned editing, user-editing, and user-
submissions that hasn't been tried yet. Seems like everybody wants to do one
or the other, when mixing them up might be the best solution. Perhaps an
editor scours the top-hundred or so sites in a niche, along with user
submissions. After the editor is finished, users can validate or not the
entries based on feedback, like you said.

At the end of the day, how many articles do you really need to provide the
average reader? It can't be that many. If you can find four or five truly
unique and high quality articles for a reader each day, I think you'll build a
loyal following. So the goal is to have zillions of articles enter, but only a
few appear to the reader. I don't think "herd mentality" or voting systems are
the way to sort that data. There has to be a better way.

Good stuff to think about.

~~~
russell
You probably need to allow more than 4 or 5 per day to encourage your readers
to submit stories. I would suggest putting featured stories at the top and
other noteworthy submissions below or on anther page. People really like to
see their names in lights. Some concession to that will encourage that. Of
course the downside is more trash. HN survives by the diligence of its
community. Manual moderation should work well too.

------
DanielBMarkham
I've always been curious as to why people start programming projects. The
usual answer is because they have some problem they want to solve, but a lot
of times people just enjoy coding.

Sometimes, however, the problem overtakes the person. You're stuck _having_ to
code, to get it out of your system. I was trying to ask in this article -- is
this a common thing or not? It happens to me maybe once every year or so.
Didn't know if anybody else felt that way.

