61–70 of 300 posts
sounds like my suggestion was a bad idea. (won't let me delete).
As members of the community, we're all able to have whatever requirements we want for our support of an application. In my opinion, the fewer that are "officially" imposed, the better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the sake of discussion, I'll offer a counterargument. Be Nice is a good goal for Apply HN since it promotes civil discussion and stops the threads from devolving into semantic "lol no https u suck" that some Show HN threads tend to devolve into. Users are not nice . They don't comment on HN or Twitter, they just stop using it without fanfare. And what determine a startup's success in the real world is if people w…
Being nice and being direct are not opposite to each other.
Whether successful or not, you guys (and your machines?) will learn something valuable about your process vs. the wisdom of crowds. Really commend your approach to experimentation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the sake of discussion, I'll offer a counterargument. Be Nice is a good goal for Apply HN since it promotes civil discussion and stops the threads from devolving into semantic "lol no https u suck" that some Show HN threads tend to devolve into. Users are not nice . They don't comment on HN or Twitter, they just stop using it without fanfare. And what determine a startup's success in the real world is if people w…
> "Be Nice" may dissuade commenters/potential customers from pointing out legitimate, immediate flaws. I don't think HN users are going to have trouble doing that, but there are different ways to do it, and the nicer ways have the critical property of opening the discussion further instead of shutting it down. We HN users are used to thinking of ourselves as the scrappy underdog, calling out incorrectness and badness…
I think it would be really cool if you did the experiment blind. E.g the startup applys to YC, if they want to participate they also do HN. you have your interview make what would be your decision, then do the HN piece. that way you can gauge the delta between how the community thinks & how you would've decided without our input.
Either way, this is pretty great idea. As you flesh it out a more, an in depth write up would be great!
> Questions or suggestions? Let's discuss and refine this together. The upvote/commentary is likely going to be highly problematic: A) I'm pretty sure Dang can't list all 9 accounts I've used on HN over the past few years. I'm also pretty sure 9 accounts in good standing [1500+ karma] would be enough to seed an initial vote if handled carefully. The ones he'd be able to name are the 3 most recent. This being the case…
Kudos for the 'be nice' rule - rejections really really hurt, and if they are in public, even more so. Anyone who is willing to put themselves out there like that deserves to be treated with kindness - even if the actual feedback is critical. Snark is very easy.
A question: What are the situations where you think it will benefit people more to go the open route than applying directly?
One way of thinking about it is
advantages of "Apply HN": getting significant calibration and feedback on an idea that improves it whether or not it is selected, a chance for a partial team to begin discussions with other potential co-founders, and the (small) chance of having an idea selected because of overwhelming support when it wouldn't have been chosen through the normal process
disadvantage: exposing the idea in a very early state to thousands of smart motivated people who are then have the time to come up with better variations on it
Obviously the tradeoffs are different for different teams and ideas ... and there certainly might be some advantages and disadvantages I missed. In any case, I'm curious about who you think might benefit most from this.