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Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

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Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#11

Post by boredguy8 »

tstegart wrote: post #9
brk wrote: post #3

Here's my thought on the matter... The "Killer feature" here is the lack of killer features. There are no buddy lists, stupid picture icons, special groups, or karma-whoring incentives. It's just a simple place to exchange news that is generally relevant to a hacker community. The lack of needless bells and whistles to constantly hold peoples attention will generally make this site un-fun for the unwashed masses of D…

What? there's no karma-whoring incentives? Damn! I totally thought I was going to get to change the color of the toolbar...

And polls! Why else would I post but to reach the HN Nirvana of being able to post polls?

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#12

Post by parenthesis »

gwc wrote: post #10
davidw wrote: post #6

PG has said he won't let it, and will do what it takes to keep it high quality.

This is a very noble aspiration, but many benevolent stewards of online communities have tried and failed; it is a historically intractable problem. I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?

There is the difference between HN and reddit/digg etc. that pg and co. do HN for love, whereas, whatever other motives they may have, the other sites are trying to make money.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#14

Post by pg »

I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#15

Post by tstegart »

boredguy8 wrote: post #13

It probably will. I followed a similar path of another person on here: /. -> k5 -> reddit -> HN. At the end of the day, nothing can stop 50 users up-voting cat pictures except to shut the site down.

Except a Bayesian cat-picture filter written in Lisp!

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#17

Post by deepster »

pg wrote: post #14

I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.

As long as the desire for excellent content outweighs the desire for growth and the users vote down irrelevant stories, then we are good to go.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#18

Post by froo »

pg wrote: post #14

I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.

As a relative newcomer here, I sincerely hope lolcats are a bannable offense.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#19

Post by gwc »

pg wrote: post #14

I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.

Is it sufficient to simply not target growth as a goal?

HN, if I'm not mistaken, has kept a general upward trend in number of users; presumably, this is accompanied by an ever-increasing variance in quality of those users and what they consider to be interesting news and good etiquette.

Don't get me wrong; I certainly agree that it is easier to make changes with an eye towards quality when you're not concerned about growth. However, I do wonder if there it a point where the dark side of network effects, which are primarily sociological in nature, will simply overwhelm any technological aspects or other moves on the part of a community's stewards / leaders.

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