101–110 of 137 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like experiments.
Haha, I think there's so many yes votes because any group like this can't resist tinkering. Its like my grandmother told me as a kid when I took apart her iron, "Don't fix what ain't broke."
I don't know whether this is part of a viable solution, but I will say that for me, excessive browsing has become a problem (not just of this site, but in general -- mostly tech news sites and blogs). FWIW.
If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently. As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all…
I find when I've been procrastinating and there's some kind of reward coming in an hour or two (e.g. dinner) that often makes me buckle down and start working.
A poll of "what are you going to do now?" would add to the experiment. Sure, not everyone will answer honestly but a good number probably will.
How about some kind of stats? Show a user list and "off-time" visit count next to each name, or let us enter a small string to say what we're going to do instead of HN. That might get abused but you get the idea. I think what we see while the site is unavailable is a great opportunity for quick-response community building.
If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently. As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all…
Don't you think if people came to the site at certain hours and there was a page saying "get back to work, we'll reopen in 1 hour and 14 minutes" it might interrupt their procrastination in a useful way, and make them think, "Ok, I'll work for a couple hours, then read the news?" I find when I've been procrastinating and there's some kind of reward coming in an hour or two (e.g. dinner) that often makes me buckle dow…
But once people subconsciously know what that page looks like, I doubt they'll actually read the text -- they'll just come here, see "oh, news.yc is broken right now" and bounce off somewhere else.