

Tell HN: Fate of a typical webapp - paraschopra

I remember http://hnstartups.com/ was launched here and it received some 200+ votes. I genuinely think it is a good idea but when I tried visiting it today, I found it full of spam. I feel sad for people not caring about their apps. What do you do with your project where you lost interest and motivation but somebody else might be using it?<p>Btw, thread where the app was announced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=572631
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jacquesm
Attention span is a huge problem for developers in general. Creation is more
fun than maintenance, so there is plenty of drive to fire off new projects,
but only a little bit of energy for maintaining stuff.

I think that if something does not take off almost instantly (say within the
first month of roll-out) that the attention will shift to something new for a
large number of people that are capable of making these things.

That site is a sample-of-one though. The funny thing is that it would be the
ideal vehicle to keep track of what is happening to sites announced as 'new'
here...

This is roughly where it went wrong:

<http://hnstartups.com/newest?page=1287>

If the spam had been removed right from day one (but hey, how to figure out
with the theme of that site what is spam and what is not, that's a tricky
one!) then it would be a useful resource today.

~~~
joshsharp
It's the 'broken windows' metaphor: [http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-
programmer/extracts/so...](http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-
programmer/extracts/software-entropy)

Once you let something that is clearly wrong hang around, problems (spam)
increase exponentially until it is no longer worth trying to fix.

~~~
jacquesm
Yep. HN seems to be doing a pretty good job of it though, hardly any spam ever
makes it past the bottom of the new page without a [dead].

But for that to work you have to have an active community that values the
resource more than they value the few seconds it takes to flag a bad
submission. Absent such a community you have to do it yourself at least until
such a community has formed.

The funny thing is that the combination of 'flag', karma thresholds and
community seem to be enough to let the 'submission' box sit there without any
tricky stuff like captchas and so on.

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erlanger
A well-developed site blocks most spam. There are plenty of good services out
there for it too, like Mollom.

