Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

3. New news.

I think users of Slashdot/Reddit/HN/Digg might like this, especially those who are longing for an eternal September, since it's primarily an idea regarding keeping chat forums from degenerating: given that we can readily see the interesting, well-behaved, consistently high quality participants on other forums, why not simply invite them to a new forum or news aggregator site, and limit participation to those people? We can all think of names off the top of our head- byrneseyeview, for example. I'm guessing there are a lot of these great posters who would love to participate in an environment free of trolling and other bad behavior, which might be more easily maintained by controlling the population than in having lots of moderators and complex valuing algorithms. Just as important, make the forum public for viewing- I know that there are thousands of people like me, who rarely participate, but love to read great discussion.

To this you might say- "but what about those people who could chime in with something interesting, who are barred from participating?". For this I suggest making a "ghost forum", a mirror copy of the elite forum, but which allows anyone to participate in pseudo-tandem with the comments on the elite forum (i.e. elite posts show up there simultaneously, but anyone can write anything in response). This would further make it possible to see who would be a worthy addition to the elite forum, at the same time as the forum administrator could scour other sites for any new, consistently high-quality discussion participators.

This idea could easily be commercialized, with participators earning some money as well. People love to watch good discussion- just look at the large number of TV and radio chat shows, and magazine group interviews. Or, more direct to the Internet experience- the fact that there are generally about 100 readers for every 1 writer. Or, the number of times I have read on Reddit "what keeps me coming back to Reddit are the commenters". If the discussion is interesting enough, I am sure that there will be enough eyeballs that it must be worth something. Or the forum could simply be left standing as an excellent public institution- I believe something like this could be an excellent teaching tool, something to demonstrate "this is how you participate constructively" for the readers.

Ironically, I recently wrote the above paragraphs (except the intro), intending to email it to PG, since I thought he might be interested. Never got around to it. The idea could be extended to the news, and to submitting links. Some people are pretty consistent in their journalism, or their quality taste in links/news. My personal belief is that it all comes down to the people involved, more than to any set of rules, since no person is as simplistic as even the most complex set of rules ever devised. Useful people are self-regulating, and dysfunctional people are hard to moderate, no matter the number and type of rules, or how much authority you have.

My great personal hope for the forum idea, if it is ever implemented, is that we might finally see constructive dialogue between people of opposing political viewpoints (the same goes for any other subject in which few people talk to the other side). There are some people capable of debating constructively with their opponents, but on every forum I've ever seen, it all goes to hell because of trolls, or mob rule downvoting the dissenter into oblivion.

But if you narrow the debate down to the people who can manage to disagree without being disagreeable, there might be some hope for progress. I think that until average people can learn to debate opponents constructively, our politicians will never do it, because even if the politicians wanted to, their constituents will pressure the politicians to behave like the constituents would.

2. Simplified browsing.

I got nothing on this, since I'm not in the target market. Btw, my pet theory is that smart people will have the best luck inventing commercially successful solutions, if they focus on jobs and activities that hardly any smart people do. Like, bagging groceries, and data entry. I've done both of those, and I had plenty of germinal ideas on how they could be improved or automated.

The corollary to this would be that it's hard to be a big new success in Web 2.0. Tons of smart people are avid Internet users, and they're interested in that. Unless you're towards the apex of that group, coming up with a market-shaking new Web 2.0 idea will be tough. This is also the reason I left quant finance- given how many smart people were competing with me, I could much more easily invent something useful for other people (which feels better and is less stressful), and make a fortune that way.

But here's the browsing idea I'd like (I don't know if this has been proposed already- I hope it's technically feasible): cluster links. This is where you click on a link, and it opens a whole lot of links at the same time. Like, a link to open all the links on the front page of Hacker News in new tabs or new windows. Or all the links in one of PG's articles. Or a link which opens all the links from the bibliography of an article. Or a link which opens Google's top 20 search results.

For someone with a lot of bandwidth, and not listening to music online, and browsing from home, automatically opening 30 windows at once is not going to cause any problems- just close whichever ones look uninteresting. I open an awful lot of links every day, and my fingers get tired. Make it easy for me.

If there was some sort of a risk (like a spam link that has 200 links), make it so a warning window opens if, say, more than 40 windows would open (or a number chosen by the user)- allowing the user to individually decline or accept links, or give a batch OK/reject to all of them.

Corollary: this might be a useful idea in, like, software help searches. A lot of times it's hard to tell which help page would be useful when I do a keyword search- why not be able to open all the results at once? I hate wasting time making a decision about "is this worth opening or not?" when usually it would be easier to make that decision when it's already open. If the summary is so great, put it at the top of each opened page.

13. Online learning.

Well, if educational materials were either cheap because of my idea for #17, or the government were putting educational materials in the public domain (that would be a good place to start, in my opinion, before branching out), that would help.

I'm in the middle of an article about reforming the education system (how the institution could be restructured). It will be posted to anamazingmind.com/blog (a friend's blog) when I'm done. It would definitely create new educational markets, and online education would be a big winner.

28. Fixing email overload.

I have an integrated solution which might also fight spam, and which would relate to contact lists / social websites. I.e. if someone is in the contact list of one of your contacts, their email gets treated as not-spam, and if you had an automated ranking algorithm for email (emails with frequent correspondents go towards the top, email from contacts is second tier, newsletters go towards the bottom, etc.), it could go towards the top. Or, the email comes from the friend of a friend of a friend, it's considered to not be spam, and put in the middle.

I'm not suggesting you be able to see your contacts' contacts, but something akin to the six degrees of separation application in Facebook. This could get computationally intensive if you were checking for enough degrees of separation. But it's obviously doable, if the Facebook application can do it- and if it were too CPU intensive, maybe some people would choose to pay for the service.

This would also fight spam even if it were only applied in a small number of email inboxes. Because, if it sees that emails from an email address aren't in the first six degrees of contacts of any of, say, the first 10 receivers, it could inform ISPs that all future emails from that address are suspected spam.

This is the idea which is most off the top of my head, so be wary of it :).

Another idea- add a reddit-like button next to emails which lets you move stuff up and down in your inbox. This would serve dual functions- letting you sort emails and to-do items by priority (a right click on the button would let you move stuff up or down by 10, 50 places, etc.), and it would also tell your filter what you prioritize (which contacts, which key words, etc.- like, PG's filter might notice he likes emails with the SIP "Lisp" in it).

That wraps up my ideas that are relevant to PG's list, as far as I can recall. If anyone has any questions about any of them, let me know. I've fleshed out most of these much further than you see, I just don't feel like doing a 50,000 word writeup as a comment. If you want to contact me privately, my email address is ben dott seeley att gmail dott com.

IANAL, so if you say exclusivity would be unenforceable, you might be right. But it's not really crucial- the only important thing is collecting useful data, and there are myriad ways to do that.

You'll have to tell me how consumers would game the system. Declaring it doesn't make it so. I've thought on this idea for over three years- I could have missed something, but if I haven't seen it by now, I need someone else to point it out for me.

Retailers might lose control over the "perceived" value, but if they are making higher profits, what do they care? Bear in mind, retailers already have many ways they try to take advantage of the pricing spectrum, they're just really inefficient, by and large.