21–30 of 78 posts
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.
Death. Taxes. Gentrification.
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 is a big part of the problem. It's much the same for movies. You can either appeal to a more discriminating audience, which is inherently smaller, or go lowest common denominator. Actually, the pattern is to start out appealing to the discriminating crowd to get a "cool" cachet, then expand and go mass-market.
Another big problem is the monkey-see-monkey-do nature of Homo Sapiens. Over time, you will see more noise in the form of attempts at imitating signal instead of true signal.
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!
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!
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.
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…
Also, some kinds of filtering (and related things, like informal community norms) don't scale, so if the community hasn't grown too much, the problem might tend to be easier. Hacker-oriented mailing lists with 100 posters don't seem to be too hard to moderate, but I'm not eager to try 10,000 posters.
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.