
Would this community prefer to be under the radar? - techcrunch
I've been getting a lot of private and public feedback suggesting I stop posting about Hacker News on TechCrunch because it's polluting the community. Do you guys think I'm hurting the site, not helping?
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murrayh
Security by obscurity is not really security at all. Perhaps the TechCrunch
exposure has hurt the site in the short term, but if Hacker News can get
through these growing pains it will be presumably better off in the long run.

The problem as I see it is not the size of the community but the concentration
of thinkers. It doesn't really matter what articles make it to the front page;
if the comments start filling up with cheap one liners and unreasoned opinions
I know that I for one will lose interest.

~~~
derefr
When it comes to so-called "public knowledge," obscurity (and more largely,
apathy) is the only kind of security there is. All websites eventually die
(or, at least, all that I have observed); you can't "keep a community alive"
so much as you can just let it die peacefully, leaving its children (perhaps
under the same ownership!) to continue its legacy.

~~~
murrayh
It is irrelevant whether or not obscurity is the only kind of protection
available; obscurity is temporary and only needs to be defeated once.
Furthermore, obscurity is not the only kind of security there is: Benevolent
moderation is another form of protecting a community. And even if obscurity
was the only kind of security available, we could simply invent a new kind of
security.

I am unaware of any websites that have "died". I assume you refer to the
digg.com and reddit.com exoduses that are so often brought up. Comparing those
two sites to Hacker News is not comparing apples to apples. The commercial
purpose of those sites is to sell advertisement space to advertisers, so
trading a small group of thinkers in favor of a large group of more
advertisement friendly users makes commercial sense. Hacker News, on the other
hand, probably has the commercial purpose of driving business to YCombinator.
It is in Hacker News' best interest to keep the small group of thinkers in
favour of the larger population. So there is good reason to believe that
Hacker News will be able to overcome these growing pains and be a community
for the thinkers for awhile yet.

~~~
staunch
The only site that I used that and reminds me of HN is Perlmonks(.org). It
never had any commercial ambitions and the quality has been maintained for a
decade. There's tons of lessons to be learned from it. They use blind voting,
have user levels, and the higher level users moderate. The community there is
unbelievably awesome and it has a very similar feel to this site.

<http://perlmonks.org/?node=PerlMonks%20FAQ>

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thorax
I'm one of the whiners on TechCrunch about exposure. Sorry!

Basically, I think the community was excellent before you made a big deal of
announcing it. It has continued to be excellent after, but the signal to noise
ratio has worsened somewhat. I'm not a long-timer, but I have very much
enjoyed this site and, for once, would be quite happy if the community didn't
grow wildly.

I think that publicity has worked out okay, though, probably just showing the
resiliency of the community.

I imagine "Hacker News" as a shy, but talented hacker. It can live with a few
minutes in the spotlight, shaking hands, and taking awards, but it's going to
do its best work when it can quietly focus and get the work done with its
team. The more time spent in front of the press, the less time it has to
improve the world behind the scenes. It understands how the fanfare is
important at times, but certainly doesn't seek it when there's clever coding
to be done.

Just out of curiosity: Why did you post about it? Was it to grow the site? To
help your readers find a good source? Or did you want other founders to know
about it to grow the number of startups that hang out here?

~~~
kajecounterhack
While I agree the signal to noise ratio has increased significantly since I
first started frequenting YC News, I'm not sure I agree if its specifically
the TechCrunch exposure that is the cause of this. My reason? I was actually
reading this at school and I've had friends sign up who could really care less
about anything about programming...and end up treating this site like its
Slashdot. Perhaps similar episodes have occurred elsewhere?

~~~
wtfguy
When you say that the signal to noise ratio has increased, do you really mean
that there's more signal? or did you mean that it's decreased? Not nit-
picking, just trying to understand.

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SwellJoe
It'll grow regardless. And, the kind of people that will actually stick around
tend to be the kind of people we want to be here. The rest will wander
off...back to digg, over to reddit, whatever.

Thanks for asking, though.

Now it's pg's job to figure out how to programmatically maintain the high
quality of results. I still want one down-vote per week for
stories...sometimes a story shows up that makes me feel ill to see it on the
front page, and it would feel real good to vote them down, even if I only got
to do it once per week(day|month).

~~~
Prrometheus
I like the idea of a karma hurdle to vote on articles, but not to post
comments. Since fewer people tend to comment than visit, this will allow a
small number of people to act as effective gatekeepers.

I also like the idea of forcing people to solve a riddle or make a simple
program in order to sign up. This can be gained, but your average Joe stupid
person won’t bother.

~~~
aardvarkious
I wouldn't like that one bit. I know a fair bit about technology, but when it
comes to most here I probably know diddly squat when it comes to programming.
I'm a reddit refugee who finds quite a bit of the articles here interesting
and is excited to actually see good discussion. Besides, I'm willing to bet
there are a fair number of people who could pass any kind of test you set up
and still prove to be quite destructive.

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DanielBMarkham
Somebody is going to do it if you don't, so I'm not sure our answer to the
question matters, does it?

I am firmly in the camp of "HN will eventually go to heck" -- mainly because
of the mod system and the way these things tend to drive to the lowest common
denominator. I know that the good-article-per-page ratio today is not as good
as it was 6 months ago. But hey, pg wants to play this thing out, so crank 'er
up, right?

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trekker7
I think the influx of new users is good; there are probably people out there
with great things to contribute, that don't even know Hacker News exists. But
of course the characteristics of the front page posts are going to change.

There is a somewhat controversial solution here... just make a sub-section of
HN where only users that signed up X days ago or earlier can post and vote. If
X = 250 and guys like me get screwed, then so be it; if old timers are
actually better voters, then at least I'll get to read the better articles.
And you don't lock out new users either, since the original front page will
still exist without any vote weighting.

Personally I don't know if the quality of the "old timers" section would be
any better or worse than the normal front page, since "interesting" is a
subjective concept. But if you miss the Hacker News of the good old days, then
maybe it makes sense to bring that HN back to the future this way.

~~~
yters
This definitely fits into the "make it too boring for 14 year olds" category.

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prakash
You are a tad bit late in asking ;-). In any case, you can't control the kind
of folks that read your website and decide to show up and participate here.

That said most of the folks here (at least the ones that have been using this
website from the earlier days) don't want this site to go the way of other
communities online, where the quality of shared articles and conversations go
down the drain.

From my time on many online communities, it's not the question of _if_ the
quality will go down, but _when_ , and I would rather see an algorithmic
solution to reduce the noise.

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cousin_it
When the programming language site Lambda the Ultimate was going through the
same transition, the admin asked long-time members for their opinions. The
discussion is here:

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1550>

My answer from there:

For me, read-only access to "old LtU" would be more pleasant than read-write
access to "new LtU". In other words: I don't think bans are "extreme", my vote
is for a lot more bans, and I wouldn't mind being banned myself if this
improves the signal-to-noise ratio.

~~~
SwellJoe
Bring Back Snacks (he of the hasty banhammer).

If you have no idea what I mean, be grateful.

------
ericb
I'm excited to see TechCrunch here--you're helping. I read TechCrunch, which
convinces me there are TC'ers who will add value. HN has to deal with idiots.
If there's going to be an influx, let it be TechCrunch's influx. TechCrunch
also has hacker, angel, and VC readers who might give real-world insight into
startup financing or business questions--we should welcome them and learn to
deal with TC's idiots (really, idiots in general) with the right control
measures, in preparation for the day HN tops Digg.

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TrevorJ
I enjoy the smallness of this community a lot. On the web, that's a commodity
in some sense.

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noodle
i still do really enjoy the idea of karma-based requirements for access to
features. that would help prevent "pollution", which i would refer to as
"dilution" instead.

as a potential example, if you want to submit a story, you need 25 karma, or
something. proof that you contribute to the community via comments.

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delackner
Look at the relatively lengthy comments on this, and yet almost all of them
are intelligent and a relatively nice portion of them add more to the
discussion.

So we aren't dead yet. I don't see much discussion of the importance of
avoiding massive comment threads, yet I think this is one of the main problems
with site growth. Over time the volume of comments that are detracting or
repetitive on a site grows to overwhelm the amount of time required to find
the good comments, or even maintain a thread of back and forth replies.

A good rubric for looking for solutions might be finding how to penalize
comments that would not be acceptable in a face to face discussion.

Sites often resort to banning bad users, but it is too easy to just generate a
new account, so it would be encouraging to see some way to make it much harder
for the same person to masquerade as a different real user. (I have no idea
how, but geolocation tools seem to be getting ever better)...

------
Raphael
How do we know you're the real Techcrunch?

Well, it's too late anyway. The cat is out of the bag. Besides, if no one had
talked about it, I never would have found it, so you have my blessing.

~~~
pg
It's the real TechCrunch.

I don't mind. Traffic had been growing pretty constantly at about 5x per year
anway, so we'd have had to deal with this problem eventually.

~~~
samwise
I find it odd that you even consider it's a problem. It's odd to hear a
founder consider a site growing a problem.

The metrics to handle the "problem" should have been addressed during the
conception stage of the site. I would be surprised if simple administration
could fix the trend.

~~~
Xichekolas
The difference is that HN was not designed with maximum growth (and hence ads
or being acquired) in mind. It seems mostly geared towards bringing people to
YC, and motivating hackers to try startups. A big community isn't necessarily
worse at this, but neither is it necessarily better.

------
lucasvo
I was a regular reddit reader(in fact at the time I was a digg-refugee) and
found HN about 6 months ago while reading about YC. Reddit started to
disappoint me more and more(e.g. Ron Paul) and I started to frequent HN more
often. I am kind of disappointed about reddit and digg, that they weren't able
to maintain the quality of their active members. I am not quite sure if PG
succeeds in protecting the value of HN without making it to a closed community
with an elite group of moderators. Let's hope he'll find a way to do this.

I think the most promising method would be in limiting the weight of new
users. Not giving them any weight in the voting would prohibit them from
posting stories that don't fit into the topic. If they stick around long
enough eventually people will find out what the community likes and will
submit similar stories.

------
webwright
Hi Mike-- big of you to ask, first of all.

I don't think so. The problem is associated with growth, and HackerNews was
already experiencing growth before you came along. You might be speeding
things up a bit, but word will get out. It always does. And that's why this
thing exists, right? Otherwise, it'd be members-only.

So Paul will have to use his big brain to solve the problem community
dilution... Perhaps a little sooner than he would've otherwise, but he's going
to have to solve it.

------
demallien
As others have noted, the problem was always going to have to be solved at
some point. So no, TechCrunch should not modify its current behaviour.

I have my own theory for how to solve this problem. You start off by putting
on a filter - all comments with less than 5 points are hidden from users
unless they specifically ask for them to be seen.

Each post, when first posted, automatically has a +5 modifier, so it gets
seen. But a post is reduced by one point after 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 hours. If you
have received a few positive votes, your comment will stay up, but if others
feel that it is repetitive, or doesn't have any interesting comment, it will
disappear after a while.

Those time values may need to change dynamically to be more rapid for heavy
traffic threads.

The other thing to fix it is to really encourage people to actually give votes
for EVERY post that they find worthwhile. This imncreases the amount of
feedback in the system. Perhaps there should be a quick three to four sentence
guide to voting at the top of every YC News page?

Anyway, that's what I came up with after many years of frustration with
slashdot...

------
tim2
Two things: 1) It would be great to have more reasonably good people here. 2)
But I just don't want the scoring to be screwed up. If the voting keeps stuff
that's only of interest to people who are into hacking and startups on the
front page then other people will simply not stick around.

PG, please consider action for #2. Don't go with the "show everyone different
rankings" approach of reddit though.

------
hooande
Honestly, I haven't seen a noticeable effect. People still post great links
and are generally cool in the comments. No influx of trolls, no flood of spam
or otherwise bad posts on the home page.

I did see someone say on twitter "There's no need to read news.yc because
everything good is reposted on techcrunch". That's not cool, but the point is
that there is still plenty of good stuff here on news.yc

------
moog
I don't think a site like this can remain occult forever. When you consider
the name is 'Hacker News' it's surprising it hasn't been swamped already with
spam and adolescent comments. Perhaps a high quality community forum like this
has a limited life span. It's a depressing thought, but I know if anyone can
fix it, then pg can!

------
greyman
>> Do you guys think I'm hurting the site, not helping?

No, I don't think so. The community pollution is a separate peril, which
should be continuously taken care of by improving the moderation system and/or
using some form of editorial control. If this site will continue to improve,
the increased traffic is inevitable.

------
petercooper
When communities get too big, even if they spoil, it's not a bad thing. It's a
good thing because people are encouraged to then start their own communities.

Digg -> Reddit -> Hacker News -> .. next thing ..

It's this progression that keeps new and interesting sites coming along. If it
hadn't happened, we'd all still be using Digg.

------
ivankirigin
The biggest concern for techcrunch should be the quality of the comments
there, not here.

They are mean spirited and often wrong.

I think you should continue to promote any site you like. Hacker News needs to
deal with this eventually, and the average TechCrunch reader (not commenter)
is probably better than the average blog reader.

------
e03179
The REDDIT.com community is saying the same thing now. They claim that their
website is now polluted and that the quality has gone down.

BTW: I found this community via TechCrunch last week and like what I see.
Still unsure that I'll fit in with you guys although I like the content.

~~~
sabat
It's funny -- I've been here for about a year, maybe more. How did I discover
it? Digg, or maybe reddit. One of Paul's essays got dugg. Ironic in a way, I
think.

------
mflinsch
The question seems to center around the universal problem of mediocrity
through popularity. It's not unique to the 'net. In the early 80s a flood of
frat boys and party hounds invaded Dead tour and pretty much destroyed a truly
beautiful thing. There's a similar trend happening at Burning Man. Pop culture
visibility tends to dilute unique subcultures to the point of obscuring the
original flavor.

Active mentoring of appropriate behavior and a willingness to exclude
offending users seems to be the only way to preserve the culture. But if you
take that approach too far you run the risk of becoming elitist and self-
righteous.

Openness has a real value and very real risks. I like the "benevolent
moderation" idea suggested by murrayh the best...

------
coglethorpe
Certainly. I think you should post a link to my startup on your front page
instead. :-)

Seriously, I think this community does have some advantages by staying out of
the flow of traffic. I go to TechCrunch as well. It's got worthwhile news and
the advantage that only one person can post (and his picks for topics are
usually pretty good). This site is actually the same, except that people can
join the pool of submitters.

Right now, there is a selection process for submitters. They have to be
interested enough to find out about startups by researching a bit. If the
doors were opened wide, who knows what might happen. Well, looking at Reddit
lately, we have a pretty good idea of what would happen, and it isn't pretty.

------
edw519
Improvement comes from stress.

To get bigger muscles, you lift weights. To increase cardiovascular
performance, you run. To improve cognitive ability, you read, study, and solve
problems.

To improve software, you load it up.

Bring them on.

------
kuldeep_kap
Yes, sometimes its good for the niche communities to have less exposure
otherwise its inevitable to hurt the community. There are lot of jerks lying
around to spam the community, but who knows the results can be surprising,
too. I wonder though how Hacker News would deal with this excessive exposure
and how many of the sites the techcrunch has hurt until now?

------
Kaizyn
If you stop promoting the site on techcrunch, then the folks here at Hacker
News will have one less thing to complain about.

------
thomasswift
Wow, I'm glad to see this question be asked here. I don't think you should
stop posting as long a the 'fake INSERT FAMOUSNAME' do not begin muddying up
threads. You have a lot of readers that could benefit from this community and
vice versa although you might create more work for pg and the algorithm :)

------
jey
Yes, because TechCrunch has _nothing_ to do with hacking.

But the other posters are definitely right: this is an inevitable problem and
it would be nice to have a more organic solution. I've been trying to read and
vote on the "new" page more.

~~~
staunch
> Yes, because TechCrunch has nothing to do with hacking.

Techcrunch is read by a huge percentage of all hackers working on tech
startups. This site was previous called "Startup News". I think the TC
audience is very well suited.

~~~
derefr
Let me re-quote the grandparent post for you, perhaps removing a bit of
subtlety in the process:

> Yes, because TechCrunch has _nothing_ at _all_ whatso _ever_ to do with
> hacking ( _rolls eyes_ )

~~~
Xichekolas
You forgot the ( _wink nudge_ ) an the end!

------
dkokelley
I think that we don't mind being "underground" or extremely popular, as long
as the quality of the site stays high. The fear is that publicity will bring
the childish masses and turn hacker news into another spam playground.

------
jhollingworth
since the demographic of this community seems to be smart entrepeneurs, what
would people here think is the best way to protect their community from the
morons of the internet? I remember in olden day's when digg was a friendly
place full of interesting news, nowadays its, well it's digg... Keeping a
social news site under the raydar is not the solution to this problem, there
should be something more elegant, any ideas?

 _disclaimer_ i am not looking for ideas for a news site, personally i feel
the market is saturated, and anyway i have far better ideas to work on ;)

------
jeremiah
I think it is somewhat presumptuous of techcrunch to consider themselves as
determining what is under or over the radar, as the metaphor goes. Techcrunch
has less influence that it supposes.

~~~
jsjenkins168
It may seem presumptuous, but it is undeniable techcrunch has considerable
influence.

My only concern is that knowing certain important people from TC now read HN,
there might be an influx of spam from people looking for attention. Especially
now that everyone knows it is possible get TC coverage by posting here.

This would only be a bad thing though if the "hey look at me!" spam really got
out of hand. Otherwise, I really like reading about peoples startup projects
(as I'm sure Arrington and others do too), as long as the intent is genuine.

------
iamelgringo
No. It's not a bad community to pick up readers/users from. And, people are
pretty quick to down-mod ugly comments here. Thanks for asking, though. It
means a lot.

------
andreyf
I see where they are coming from - the discussion was better when it was under
the radar. That says nothing about the future, however.

------
carpal
There are a lot of discussions that need to be had concerning filtering, vote
weighing, etc. We just have to have them earlier now.

------
brlewis
As you can see "this community" has no consensus on the issue.

I personally am fine with you posting about whatever you think is relevant.

~~~
dbreunig
>> "this community" has no consensus on the issue.

A community doesn't have to agree to be a community. The very fact that we all
gather similar info from a singular source is enough to define a community,
however niche it may be.

But I am completely with you on the latter point: if we start talking about
who can link to what we get into rather murky terrain.

TC: link to what you want. You don't need our approval.

------
mattmaroon
Sigh. Just more of the elitist ethic so pervasive in the hacker community.

------
deltapoint
Are you even Micheal Arrington? This is your first post... You don't have any
info on your profile... The writing style seems different... hmmm... Still an
nteresting topic though.

------
jeffrese
hurting

------
simianstyle
yes

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sabat
Funny how this showed up on reddit today:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/2362618676/sizes/o...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/2362618676/sizes/o/)

~~~
jdavid
that picture forgot the viagra, and the botnet posts.

------
weegee
there's always the reddit effect. reddit gets popular, gets bought out by
corporate swine, becomes a tabloid full of duplicate articles and complete
wastes of time. at least this community is still populated by more thinkers
than stinkers. well, except for me.

