Funny how this showed up on reddit today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/2362618676/sizes/o...
Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 ha…
Obscurity in the sense of "how many people know about this site" is not binary - every inbound link makes it a little less obscure.
Popular forums (at least in my experience) stop being worthwhile to me past a certain point, and sometimes do just die outright from the problems caused by their popularity.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#63Look 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)...
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> All websites eventually die (or, at least, all that I have observed); you can't "keep a community alive" All this makes me think that maybe community forum software should be taking reddit's recommended page to the next level and only showing me posts/discussion from people who have similar voting habits to me or even based on some social networking style "proximity". Having all submissions in one pot and giving ev…
That sounds pretty computationally intensive, if each page load is going to result in recalculating all scores for a relatively large universe of objects, but maybe "people who have similar voting habits to pg (or some small, select set of trusted quasi-moderators)" would be feasible.
I'm not so sure a technical, mathematical, and purely self-organizing solution exists -- I think at some point, standards have to come from the top. In the past, I think pg has exerted his influence by commenting on things he likes to see and doesn't like to see. He continues to do this, but either his comments will continue to occupy a diminishing share of the site as its user base grows, or he'll spend too much of his life commenting -- even lecturing and nagging.
I like the idea of giving each user a weight, calculated from how similar their votes are to some trusted set of voters. Each user's vote would then count for some fraction between 0 and 1. Scores could be updated periodically en masse to reflect new weights instead of with every page load.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#65Security 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 wi…
Someone should implement Randall Munroe's proposal, so that repetitive and cliche phrases are automatically "demoted" -- which would mean that they appear on the bottom -- with the penalty getting exponentially worse, so it starts out as a mild chiding at first, then escalates. EDIT: Come to think of it, I knew this crazy guy about 10 years ago. He was so gung-ho about being "truly alive" that he tried his damnedest…
+1, Even-Handed: for your willingness to compare your own suggestion to the antics of a crazy guy. ;)
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#66Hi 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.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#67As you can see "this community" has no consensus on the issue. I personally am fine with you posting about whatever you think is relevant.
>> "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.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All websites eventually die (or, at least, all that I have observed); you can't "keep a community alive" All this makes me think that maybe community forum software should be taking reddit's recommended page to the next level and only showing me posts/discussion from people who have similar voting habits to me or even based on some social networking style "proximity". Having all submissions in one pot and giving ev…
That sounds pretty computationally intensive, if each page load is going to result in recalculating all scores for a relatively large universe of objects, but maybe "people who have similar voting habits to pg (or some small, select set of trusted quasi-moderators)" would be feasible. I'm not so sure a technical, mathematical, and purely self-organizing solution exists -- I think at some point, standards have to come…
I like that idea, pg and friends would be the founders of the community and would moderate it simply by voting on submissions.
Maybe such a system could also give people the ability to "found" new communities within some sub-domain and have all the posts from the main site submitted to their site but ranked differently based on different voting weights.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#69[deleted]
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#70The 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.