What I've Learned from Hacker News
paulgraham.com
What I've Learned from Hacker News
1–10 of 126 posts
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#2I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest.
I think on HN, editor transparency is less important than story Quality.
Reddit and Digg were built explicitly around some democratic idea of deciding what stories should be displayed on the front page. While both have their problems living up to this, it is their stated objective.
Hacker News has a different objective. It's goal is to be interesting to Hackers. I really could care less about democracy and I think others would agree. Submissions and voting are just a means to the "hacker interesting" end.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#3Glad to hear that the orange names won't be back. I think people do more than enough judging based on the poster name as it stands without any highlighting.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#4I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. I think on HN, editor transparency is less important than story Quality. Reddit and Digg were built explicitly around some democratic idea of deciding what stories should be d…
Absolutely agreed - and this goes for the voting system as well. I don't necessarily care about up-modding a submission or comment; I do so to try and help out and keep discussions clean and at least somewhat intelligent. If there was some intelligent way to filter submissions or comments without user input, then I wouldn't mourn the loss of "democracy" in the system at all.
Oh, and from the post - snarky comments and memes are definitely becoming a problem on HN. They add nothing to a discussion, are not insightful in any way, and do not express anything except the author's ability to regurgitate old jokes. They need to stop.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#5A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days, and I suspect Digg's is the extent to which the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors.
These also make for excellent reads. What was Viaweb's? :)
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#6Does the submitter have a script that automatically posts new essays from paulgraham.com? You've submitted the last three in a row almost instantly. Not that I'm criticising; just curious :-).
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#7Thanks Paul.
I know many of us have probably wondered what you've been thinking about your experiment. I know I have. As usual, you've managed to write the essay before people are even asking the question.
The addictive/interesting balance is a fascinating subject. I'll be looking forward to hearing from you about that in the future.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#8Hear, hear: if you have a solution for detecting stupid comments, let Paul know.
I liked the two ideas Paul mentioned: length of comment is related to stupidity, and not using the same words again. Just make those fall toward the bottom of the page and we'll all be happy.
While any algorithm can be gamed, length is still pretty good. If I have to go through the extra effort of adding two paragraphs each time I write something, well... it takes time to type. So I have an incentive to think and improve my comment.
Really, I like this. It's really the same problem as Google search: out of all the junk out there, how can you tell interesting content? Because we all want to read only amazing stuff and engage in discussions with brilliant people. In practice, it doesn't work that way yet, but what if technology made it possible?
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#9A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days, and I suspect Digg's is the extent to which the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors. These also make for excellent reads. What was Viaweb's? :)
Ours was that initially we couldn't give it away. The first couple merchants would only agree to use the service if we gave it to them for free and did all the work of building their stores ourselves.
There was also the fact that many of our most successful merchants were selling something dubious. But I wouldn't call it a secret because we didn't know it ourselves. We had no idea why the stores selling Japanese comics or "dietary supplements" did so well.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#10What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN.
The reason HN is so addictive is because it is filled with things we think might be useful someday. We're like pack rats at a flea market.
The question is, what utility do we get out of what we find here?
Idea: maybe there could be a second class of upvote, which could only be given, say, a week, or a month after a story or comment was submitted. The meaning of this upvote would be, "This proved to be useful to me professionally." And so, in addition to HN/best and HN/bestcomments, there could be HN/useful and HN/usefulcomments.
Anway, thanks again for the site, Paul, and please keep experimenting. Watching you experiment is at least as interesting as any particular post.