

Make it slower and harder for your users - siavosh
http://siavoshb.tumblr.com/post/19475954197/make-it-slower-and-harder-for-your-users

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unimpressive
Most non-trivial posts in most conversations will take at least minute or two
to write. And honestly, that's probably the highest that you can set a post
time limit before people get fed up with you. We've finally created the medium
that lets written communication occur in near or real time and you want to
slow it down? Looking at HN itself, theres no limit on the time between posts;
account signup asks for a username and password only, the only features not
available to new users are (As far as I can tell.) downvotes and flagging. And
as you no doubt know HN has better quality discussion than at least 90% of the
web. With virtually no barriers to entry.

The focus topic probably helps, trying to keep the trolls out through
aggressive downvoting also helps. Delays on posting? Not necessary.

~~~
dfc
_Looking at HN itself, theres no limit on the time between posts;_

That is not true. As nested replies increase the reply link takes longer to
show up under a post...

~~~
unimpressive
Thank you for the correction. It still takes a while to get towards anything
like five minutes. (That or the pace of discussion on HN is slow enough that I
didn't notice.)

Another thing to keep in mind with this is that HN isn't really like a
traditional web forum. If you were to put a limit like this on a more
traditionally threaded bulletin board it would stall the whole thread for five
minutes at a time. Which would be obnoxious.

EDIT: One also has to keep in mind that the way HN handles your posts is also
a bit different from most other sites. (At least the ones I've been to.) The
ability to see who has replied to you anywhere on the site means that you can
carry on conversations over a longer period than your attention fixates on the
parent thread. I've seen replies to my posts made days after the fact. That
just doesn't happen in most of the interfaces I've seen.

