

Ask PG: What are your thoughts on current YC News community? - j2d2

I am curious what you think of the quality of submissions, comments and attitudes found here as of late.
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pg
There are always a few highly ranked stories that make me think "how could
anyone vote that up?" but on average they're pretty interesting. There's no
other site I prefer.

I think the thing that makes me happiest is how civil and thoughtful people
are here. That experiment seems to be working. I'm shocked when I see the
stuff people say in comment threads on other sites.

~~~
DarkShikari
I think one of the problems is that a vote is either up or down; there's
nothing in between. A vote that means "this is a really good article" is the
same as a vote that means "I laughed" or "this article is so awful its funny"
or "this was mildly interesting."

But having a scale where you can vote up an article by different amounts is
pointless too, since it leads most people to voting either the max or the min
score in order to have the most impact possible on the overall score. One idea
would be to have different types of upvotes (much like the moderation on
Slashdot) that correspond to different things the reader liked about it; this
information could be used to organize and sort the submissions, in addition to
rating them up or down.

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noonespecial
The little arrows to me mean

Up: Thanks for adding that. I appreciated it.

Down: I wish this weren't here. It doesn't add anything at all and just
clutters the discussion.

If none of those two options presents, I don't touch it.

I really like the touch that as things are modded down, they fade (and
sometimes really do vanish!)

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hooande
Personally I think we should try to expand what we do with our community. We
should do more in person meetups and hackathons. There is a lot of value in
networking that shouldn't just be limited to those selected for ycombinator.
We're a niche community and it stands to reason that we can all help each
other. How cool would it be if people could find co-founders based on
relationships formed from HN?

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saundby
Personally I find nearly all the mass-media submissions to be a dilution, no
matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written
for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN.

~~~
pedalpete
I'd be tempted to add TC, Mashable and the like to that as well. Though the
stories are good, how many HN readers also visit those sites anyway.

Maybe a grey-list for anything linking to those sites, and then one of the top
100 users needs to vote it up in order for the article to be white-listed?
Something like that? Unfortunately, that means that the most dedicated users
are burdened in cleaning things up for the rest of the community, but by
definition, they are already dedicated and would probably/hopefully like the
site cleaned up for everybody.

I'm curious where the 'Rate my start-ups' fit into this? Do people like them?
Or do you find this to not be the best venue to view them.

I posted my start-up here and the feedback I got was amazing, but that doesn't
mean the community wants that stuff here.

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xenoterracide
I still like the idea of categorizing things like startup feedback. and ask
hn/yc/pg.

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maxwell
An "ask" or "questions" link in the nav bar could work, which would just show
posts with /^Ask .+:/.

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stcredzero
That would make those "opt-in," which would be a good thing to me.

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cmos
For the last month or so the quantity went up and the quality posts got harder
to find. For some reason I get the feeling that the last week has been a bit
better, but I can't say why for any reason.

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xenoterracide
after seeing a twitter at 11 points I'm not sure I'd agree.

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ionfish
I can't agree with this. What should be important is what one says, not where
one happens to say it. If what one has to say can be expressed effectively in
140 characters, what's wrong with using Twitter publish it?

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unalone
It's not that it's wrong, it's just that it clutters up the site. When you see
30 links on a page and that page is relatively static compared to other news
sites, one post being 140 characters is a little bit silly.

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rtf
I had a thought re: site quality -- which is that a community ends up with a
focus whether it likes it or not, as the community hardens and desires a
regular feedback loop -- so while Digg and Reddit opened themselves to a
"lowest common denominator" and reaped what they've sown....YC started with a
focus on hacking and startups. Which is good for YC content, since it means
the people who are interested in it are predominantly optimistic, thoughtful,
or both.

Lambda the Ultimate is another good example of this; even as it's gained
popularity, it's preserved an agenda that avoids language wars and other noisy
content. I would say that because of its narrow focus, its quality is even
higher than news.YC!

One online community which has imposed some standard of quality from above,
without topical limitations, is the Something Awful forums. The strategy there
is to use fee-gating and heavy moderation with frequent and somewhat
inconsistent punishment. The results are dubious - for some posters it becomes
a game to see what one can get away with, and the overall quality is only
increased in that a larger percentage of posters take time for spelling and
grammar, and obvious trolls get banned, but clever ones do not. Basically,
moderation treats only some symptoms of an underlying problem: people treating
the online world as if they were sitting down at the bar with 30,000 of their
best friends.

That said, the worst elements of YC in the long term will probably correlate
to the worst elements of the startup world.

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globalrev
I discovered HN in spring and Reddit to and I have found the quality of HN
going down in the last month, it could of course be the novelty wearing off
but I think it is the quality. But that is unfortunately to expect as the
community grows.

HN has been around a lot longer than that though but perhaps it is growing
fast lately?

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urlwolf
I also think the last month or so quality went down.

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qwph
I wonder how many people who think the quality is going down try to do
anything about it?

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Hexstream
I try to downmod the offending articles. I've been failing hard so far.

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unalone
Wait, it's possible to downmod articles?

~~~
Hexstream
Just a sarcastic way to push for the introduction of such a feature. It's long
been wished for by many.

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ashleyw
As somebody who is pretty new (a few months), I would have to say HN is THE
BEST community I know of.

It actually blows my mind that the site is 100% public, most sites get trolls
(or even just douche bags) no matter what, but all that is rare here!

Though its kind of a shame that it blows my mind when I find a community is
civil 99.99% of the time, I wish the whole internet was like it... :)

~~~
allenbrunson
oh, this site gets trolls all right. and spam, and ads, and all the other
effluvia of a popular web site. it's just that pg and the editors are a lot
more aggressive about removing them than on most sites.

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bitdiddle
I'm very happy with it, the quality is generally good and I daily scan it for
interesting articles in areas I'm currently keen on such as Erlang, etc.. As a
programmer it's a valuable source and often I will read entire comment
threads. That's rare nowadays as the signal to noise ratios are pretty bad at
most sites.

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rokhayakebe
I am sure most users here are very smart and well mannered in real life, which
translates in the way they behave here.

Another thing that helps is that from the start HN was seen as PG's baby. What
does it have to do with it? Well, I think it helped attract like minded
people. "Game recognizes Game"

For the first time in the history of entrepreneurship (at least for what I
know) we had a successful person answer the "average joe"'s (like me)question
1 minute after he hits reply. I am sure everyone enjoys it when PG answers.
Well, I did the few times it happened to me.

Other successful entrepreneurs quickly joined and started to interact with a
community of smart, hungry, creative hackers and business guys. Do you see
what I am seeing? All the banner ads and Adwords campaign in the world will
not attract the same audience.

"When a few individuals were gathered in the name of Software, HN was born as
democratized news and resources channel, the rest is History in the making and
one better glad s/he is part of it".

EDIT: If you must have a resume or portfolio, you should most definitely add
your HN username and link to it.

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bitdiddle
excellent idea

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aleo
go and multiply

