Sigh. Just more of the elitist ethic so pervasive in the hacker community.
Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#92Security 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…
Someone should implement an algorithm that demotes anything by Randall Munroe.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#93I'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 oka…
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 hav…
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.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#94As 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...
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#95hurting
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#96Earlier 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 The sample size is small so far. I can't think of a lot of sites that have tried really hard to avoid becoming lame, even at the expense of growth. Most put growth first.
That you can't think of many might imply most that have tried never grew large enough to get your attention.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
All websites eventually die The sample size is small so far. I can't think of a lot of sites that have tried really hard to avoid becoming lame, even at the expense of growth. Most put growth first.
That you can't think of many might imply most that have tried never grew large enough to get your attention.
Less than it would with other people. I get a lot of info about which forums exist from referring urls. That was how I learned about both Delicious and StumbleUpon. So I can at least say with fair certainty that there's no good smaller forum where people link to my stuff. Except here of course.
Metafilter might count as an exception. They often have interestesting links. But reading the comments is like eavesdropping on a bunch of freshmen at Oberlin.
TechMeme is not bad, but I don't think the sites they link to are decided by user votes.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#98Yes, 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?
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
That you can't think of many might imply most that have tried never grew large enough to get your attention.
Less than it would with other people. I get a lot of info about which forums exist from referring urls. That was how I learned about both Delicious and StumbleUpon. So I can at least say with fair certainty that there's no good smaller forum where people link to my stuff. Except here of course. Metafilter might count as an exception. They often have interestesting links. But reading the comments is like eavesdropping…
Presumably the internet is big enough that there is a small community with no overlap with your essays. Hard to find if they are small.
Re: Would this community prefer to be under the radar?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than it would with other people. I get a lot of info about which forums exist from referring urls. That was how I learned about both Delicious and StumbleUpon. So I can at least say with fair certainty that there's no good smaller forum where people link to my stuff. Except here of course. Metafilter might count as an exception. They often have interestesting links. But reading the comments is like eavesdropping…
Presumably the internet is big enough that there is a small community with no overlap with your essays. Hard to find if they are small.
I'm sure there are thousands, for everything from hydroponic gardening to fursuits. I wasn't saying there aren't good small communities, just that there aren't any except News.YC in the subset of the world that reads the kind of thing I write.