Why Y Combinator’s Hacker News Is Flawed

http://thezukunft.com/2010/02/24/4-fixable-reasons-ycombinators-vc-hacker-news-flawed/

by jtemplestein • 16 years ago

16 19 16 years ago

thezukunft.com

IsaacL• 16 years ago

1. It takes only 1 hour for a post to disappear from the “New” page.

Inevitable for a news site.

2. The Point system sets the wrong incentives Most people seem to be in it for the points.

This could happen, but I haven't seen many signs of it. Personally, I try to avoid making comments that might get a negative karma score, but I don't much care how high a positive score I get. IMO The points system works well; I especially like the way that negative karma posts are 'named and shamed'.

3. There is no way to search

This is a reasonable point.

4. Using HN as a discussion forum doesn’t work.

Ask and Tell HN threads appear frequently, so this doesn't seem to be a problem. And I find the discussions on HN to be excellent.

5. There is no way to revive old discussions

IMO, this is a good thing for HN. It prevents it turning into a traditional web forum - not that web forums are a bad thing, they just tend to be more insular, and there's more of a split between regulars and newcomers.

cpach• 16 years ago

If there's some topic that's worth reviving one could always write a blog post and submit it.

viraptor• 16 years ago

5 is also a very nice feature that allows never-ending fights known from forums to die. There's no way to bring back some old rant by replying "You're wrong!". Unfortunately that happens on mailing lists and forums quite a lot.

Otherwise I can imagine the front page would consist of "git vs hg", "dvorak vs qwerty", "python vs ruby", "nosql vs rdbms", "lisp vs everything", ...

cjoh• 16 years ago

None of these "flaws" are actually flaws.

That's not to say HN doesn't have flaws. But these aren't the droids you're looking for.

The droids you're looking for have to do with solving the problem of growing a community and keeping it intelligent. Inevitably, the tyranny of the majority will prevail, people will leave HN and go to some place smaller and newer, as did those who came here from reddit who came here from digg who came here from slashdot who came here from John Carmack's .plan file.

jiparker• 16 years ago

LOL.

He can go about his business....

In other words, thanks for visiting, make sure you tell your friends all about us, see you later....

Move along. Move along.

jhuckestein4• 16 years ago

Great point!

Maybe this is the essence of what all these points amount to.

This reminds me of research I'm doing with Vivek Wadhwa on how the effectiveness of entrepreneurial networks (say TiE) decreases as they grow (or any innovation networks for that matter; maybe even Google) :)

Sukotto• 16 years ago

I disagree. I found him pretty much dead on with regards to the things I find annoying about this site.

moe• 16 years ago

I'm ambivalent about his points. What annoys me are two different, purely technical flaws:

1. Comment formatting is too limited. I want multi-level quoting and lists.

2. Unknown or expired link.

wakeupthedawn• 16 years ago

This site times out more than any other site I visit regularly. I wish they would fix that first.

seiji• 16 years ago

HN is written in the 100-year programming language Arc using the first Unlimited Scalability tactic of keeping everything stored as serialized hash tables. Any performance problems you may experience are due to your lack of ability to perceive perfection.

jhuckestein4• 16 years ago

I think most distributed "unlimited scalability" databases (S3, Google bigTable) are (essentially) serialized hash tables.

JayNeely• 16 years ago

Voting on features on the HN Feature Requests page is the best way to get action taken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

For searching HN, http://searchyc.com is a fantastic service, much better than the HN Search linked at the very bottom of HN.

If you're interested in more discussion with startup folks / if you find that Ask HN posts are usually your favorite, you may also enjoy: http://answers.onstartups.com

eru• 16 years ago

About searching: Interestingly Google loves HN. At least I when I search for stuff that is mentioned in the comments, I often get the very comment as a search result.

tptacek• 16 years ago

I think the fact that conversations go stale quickly is a feature. It keeps things from becoming too unproductive, and makes "the last word" in a debate arbitrary.

If you want to continue a discussion that has gone stale, you write a new blog post about it and post it. Discussion continues.

jhuckestein4• 16 years ago

Point taken. But still, as a data-mining person (yes, shame on me), it feels like a lot of information and opinions that have ben created by some of the smartest guys around the internet are discarded of.

Maybe a best-of page would help collecting really thoughtful, long and well-crafted comments on a subject?

scott_s• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

Old comments don't go anywhere. They're still here, and are searchable via Google or searchyc.

_3ex7• 16 years ago

Is this his http://twittershouldhireme.com attempt at YC ?

synnik• 16 years ago

Maybe I just have a different perspective -- I think of HN as online "hallway discussions". None of his points are flaws under this perspective...

jhuckestein4• 16 years ago

That's true, but if you keep meeting smart people in the hall, maybe you would like to start a more substantial discussion with them. This is currently not directly achievable (except for writing blog posts back and forth)

Why Y Combinator’s Hacker News Is Flawed

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