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"Rate My Startup" Post Policy

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 140 posts

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#41
post #2

I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.

Agree. I commented on a recently killed "Rate My Startup" submission asking the reasons behind killing it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861551. Now I know.

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#42

So a hacker who has been reading HN everyday while coding his product, but does not post often; is not allowed to post RMS anymore?

I'm in your boat. I read HN pretty religiously but don't have much time to comment or follow up on comments. Every time I even think about doing that I'd almost always rather spend more time obsessing about my product. Thus I barely have any karma points. But every once in a while, I like to post my latest project.

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#43
An effective way of dealing with spammers is letting the community moderate it. You can add a "Mark as spam" link to every post and only make it visible to users with a certain amount of karma or whatever metric. Basically giving trusted members the option to moderate.

On top of that, record the IP address of the poster, and display the post but only to the spammer. Basically hiding it from everybody else. The spammer will think the post is still active. Everybody else will not see it.

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no first hand knowledge, but I would be surprised if a 2.5 year old account with 250 of karma (like you do) is not considered established enough for this purpose.

What about a 2.5 year old account with no karma? You'd be surprised at how many lurkers there are. I know quite a few (and was one myself up until a short while ago). EDIT: added emphasis

Karma's really a proxy for community participation, albeit kind of one-sided since you don't get increased karma for up-voting someone else (and rightfully so). I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that if you don't participate, then you don't get to solicit the help of others.

But the bar is much lower than that. For the purpose of just keeping spam accounts out, I think the combination of a karma threshold with average non-karma accruing activity over time (such as upvoting others, clicking through on articles, etc) could be an effective filter.

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#45
post #33
post #2

I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.

As a side effect, if you're legit, not a spammer but are new to HN (0 karma), then maybe one of the paths to getting an RMS is to be able to convince at least 1 non-new HN member with enough karma to stake their reputation and post an RMS on your behalf. Therefore the RMS is already vetted by someone real that's been around HN for a bit. Crowdsourcing RMS spam control sounds like it could work well. Like how investor…

Cue the PPARMSFM (please post a Rate My Startup for me) posts :)

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#46
post #25
post #3

I can definitely imagine lurkers creating accounts to show off their latest project, so auto-killing posts from newly created accounts doesn't seem like the best way. Perhaps make it policy that all RMS submissions be text submissions explaining the idea to give it a bit of authenticity, and every RMS submission with a link in the title be auto-killed. I don't imagine spammers would go through the effort of writing o…

If there was an established rule about who got to submit RMS posts, lurkers would know that and create accounts.

An option might be to send RMS posts from users with low karma into a slashdot-esque crowdsourced moderation. Randomly show it to 10 users with a high enough karma on any of the list pages (frontpage, newest, classic, etc.). It's then only made public if a high percentage of such "moderators" approve of it (not necessarily counting "approval" as an upvote, just meaning "this is legit"). The percentage could be pretty high, say 80%, and it could optionally be log(karma)-weighted or similar. 100% might be risky; I have no idea.

I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the slashdot moderation system in general, but it could work within this sort of limited scope. Allow people to opt-out altogether via a setting if necessary.

Tangent: I was amazed at the first spammy RMS submission I encountered. It had actually been upvoted. Spammers self-upvoting, or people wholesale upvoting any RMS they see without looking at it first?

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#47
post #2

I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.

I'm about 2 months away from having something to rate, so I started commenting/writing/posting just so that when the time came I wouldn't be "that guy"...

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#48
I see a few things happening: we've got a separate link for "Ask HN" topics, another one was created for "offer HN" topics, and now we're talking about having one for RMS topics.

Perhaps it's time for a more generic categorizing system of some kind? You could make it so that people can't post in certain categories without meeting a certain karma threshold.

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#49
post #2

I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.

What about just requiring a certain number of active days being signed up? Is there data that shows spam is ever posted by long running users?

Re: "Rate My Startup" Post Policy

#50
As a fellow hacker in the trenches I like to see what others are doing. The rate my startup posts are a great way to see what is going on and some of the current trends. I have learned a lot from the posts, not only evaluating the site myself but the feedback that is received. Some of it has been spammy or half-baked. Maybe a karma threshold is in order. Better yet as a site of mentors maybe a RMS should be sponsored by a “senior” member. Karma of the sponsor would be on the line if it is spam as judged by his down voting peers but share the rewards of karma if it is a worthy site.
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