Would a /leaderposts on YC make sense?

[bayareaguy]

At times when the top stuff on YC seems less interesting, I've occasionally gone back through the recent submissions of the leaders to look for older stuff I may have missed that doesn't appear in /best. I.e.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=edw519

Does anyone else here do this sort of thing? If so, would it make sense to have here or would it be better for something like http://searchyc.com to have?

[mixmax]

Yes I do the same thing, but the profiles that I look at are a bit different from yours.

I think that what is needed is some sort of algorithmic approach, like my yc news. I note that I see many of the same users in the discussions I'm contributing to, and that not all of these are in the top list. And some of the people in the top list I never see. What this suggests is that there are different subsets of users with differing interests.

[edw519 → mixmax]

"there are different subsets of users with differing interests"

What a perceptive observation of something I never understood. I submit and participate all the time and, for the life of me, could never figure out what helps a story get "traction". Sometimes I submit something I find extremely interesting (Enterprise moving to Web 2.0 or How to Make Trains Go Faster) and they go nowhere. Then I'll submit something with what I think is of marginal interest (Indian Outsourcing), and it goes wild. I used to think it depended who was on-line the critical first hour or two to make it to the first page. I like your theory better.

One extremely popular type of thread I never find interesting (so I never participate) is the "language war". People seem to love these discussions. My attitude has always been, "Write it in whatever you want, and I'll rewrite it in BASIC (heh heh)".

[mixmax → edw519]

I think that this observation is actually the key to growing a social news site without it becoming diluted, as it happened to Reddit. If you make an algorithm that simply looks at what posts you contribute to, post in and look at it should be possible to locate other users that fit into the same subset. These users submissions and comments are probably the ones that you like.

I also think there's a pretty good business model in developing a good back-end that people can use to create their own social news sites.

Maybe someone from here would be interested in helping explore it?

[iamelgringo → edw519]

Yeah, I've tried to figure the community out, and it's impossible. A lot of times, an article that I've posted gains traction, and hits #1, so I'll find other articles that expand on the idea, or follow up the idea, and they'll get buried. Strange.

I think that you're correct in that it's about who's online at the right time.

I think the timing of an article is becoming a lot more important these days. Before we got a bump in users from Arc's release, I'd post 4 or 5 articles at 3-5am Pacific time (6-9 am Eastern), and at least one would hit the front page. These days it seems there are so many people submitting new articles at that time, that the new posts get buried.

Anyway, I tend to pick users that I enjoy reading, and I read their comments as well as their submissions. It seems like a way to increase signal/noise ratio.

[pg]

Sounds like you want http://news.ycombinator.com/best

What I should do is let people adjust the time on that.

[gscott]

This page links to the profiles where you could then click on the submitted link http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

[bayareaguy → gscott]

That's in fact what I do. It's just a little tedious.