Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-read-every-morning/

by hwork • 18 years ago

96 79 18 years ago

techcrunch.com

run4yourlives3• 18 years ago

We're screwed now... techcrunch isn't exactly known for its overly insightful comments.

Welcome digg-like users!

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

The arrival of less insightful people is inevitable. The goal should be presenting the site such that they matter less or don't bother coming.

mixmax2• 18 years ago

Maybe there should be some kind of validation before you can start posting and taking part in the discussions.

A smart way of doing this would be to let potential new users write a bit about themselves, and let existing users vote on whether or not they should be allowed to post based on their introduction of themselves.

Another way would be to let new users have a quota of comments that could be raised if the initial comments were voted up.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

Insightful isn't a type of person, it's a type of idea.

run4yourlives3• 18 years ago

Well put. It'll be interesting to see how pg and team handle something that every other site has failed miserably with.

I've got high hopes.

henning• 18 years ago

If there is an influx, the lack of fluff will scare them away for quite a while.

It was over about a 12 month period of time that reddit went from being occasionally political to being totally dominated by Ron Paul/Obama fanatics. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

dfranke• 18 years ago

It was faster than that. There was very little fluff in April 2006, and by August 2006 it was overrun.

thomas• 18 years ago

ugh, here they come... really hope place does not devolved into something like the digg/slashdot/techcrunch comment sections

it was nice while it lasted ; )

PStamatiou• 18 years ago

ah blast..

lyime• 18 years ago

lets put some really boring stuff for the next few days so we can push digg-like users away.

TheTarquin4• 18 years ago

Perhaps I haven't had sufficient experience with Digg, Techcrunch, etc., but it seems a touch elitist to me to denigrate someone based solely on the sites which they choose to frequent.

Example: I browse youtube. A lot. I sometimes comment on videos. Now, read the comments on any substantially popular youtube video. A lot of noise, yes? So does that automatically make me an idiot or a bigot or illiterate? No, not necessarily. A similar argument can be made for TechCrunch, Digg, or any other website. The problem is the site, not the users.

In a sense, this is a fallacy of division: Digg is a noisy site with little, if any meaningful discourse. Therefore none of its users are capable of meaningful discourse.

malanalars• 18 years ago

@TheTarqin: The problem with these sites is, that they all "were" great places to go. But as soon as the userbase grew, they went downhill... It's not so much about being elitist, than being afraid of things, we have experienced already at other places.

dottertrotter• 18 years ago

my thoughts exactly

johnrob• 18 years ago

Get ready for some LOL cats.

moog• 18 years ago

Let's ban everyone with < 10k karma!

fortes• 18 years ago

> Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Hopefully the TC coverage doesn't change this ...

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Hacker News is the Schrodinger blog. Techcrunch can’t observe it without changing its state.

jgamman• 18 years ago

ahem i think you mean Heisenberg's blog - Shcrodinger's blog would be all blogs at the same time until you actually tried to read it - then the blog wave function (a blavtion if you will) would collapse thus revealing the true observed blog. which will almost certainly be a LOL cat. it may be alive or dead - it's mileage has varied.

jl• 18 years ago

New to Hacker News? http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wumi• 18 years ago

Great advice.

Although everybody is automatically assuming only bad-mannered ilk will come from TC, has anyone thought 'hey maybe there will be MORE insightful discussions.'

Other than that, why not just led the editors do what they do best and not worry about it?

marcus• 18 years ago

Because we have almost no editors, we police ourselves and if the community grows too rapidly it can lose focus, if tomorrow we'll be featured on Oprah this site will lose everything I love about it.

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Or in simpler words "The unwashed masses are upon us"

TheTarquin4• 18 years ago

Fantastic and concise. Out of curiosity, is there a link to that anywhere on the News.YC website? Perhaps I'm blind, but I don't see one anywhere. I looked for a page like that when I joined and, after not finding one, just jumped into the fray.

It's a great resource for newbies like myself. Perhaps it deserves more prominent billing?

iamwil• 18 years ago

It's in the footer on the list pages under "guidelines". footers don't appear for comment pages, for some reason. It's even more important that they're there in comment pages, I imagine.

yummyfajitas• 18 years ago

Perhaps it should be the first thing users see after they create a login?

huhtenberg• 18 years ago

A better intro for the beginners would be nice have. How is the whole thing moderated ? What are the points assigned to the post ? What is karma ? Etc. I clicked around the site, but aside from the Guidelines page, I didn't manage to find any sort of FAQ or similar.

Thanks

hbien• 18 years ago

Oh crap, here comes eternal sept.

kingnothing4• 18 years ago

With as much as we complain about how much noobs will change the site, why did he go off and do a stupid thing like put this on the front page of TC?

Readmore2• 18 years ago

SND = Slow News Day.

garbowza• 18 years ago

Who is "he?" Arrington runs TC. PG doesn't put anything on the frontpage of TC.

kingnothing4• 18 years ago

"He" would be Michael Arrington, the person who put it on the front page of TC. If he's an actual community member here, then he should have realized that was a stupid thing to do, for the sake of the news and comment quality on Hacker News, and not to have done it.

Readmore2• 18 years ago

Hacker News gets Techcrunch'd and Arc falls to it's knees. Start your "Arc can't scale as well as X" rants here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133489

socratees• 18 years ago

Hacker News is one of my favorite sites - i love it for the quality of the content. Hope it doesn't go down because of the attention that it's getting now.

Caligula• 18 years ago

I find it amusing people are 'upset' that HN got techcrunch'd with the story being posted on TechCrunch. You should be ecstatic the TechCrunch editor frequents this site so often as you would most likely sell your first born to get featured on TechCrunch.

allenbrunson2• 18 years ago

you guys, relax. pg has been thinking long and hard about the newbie influx problem for many months now. he saw what happened to reddit, and he's applying his usual sensible approach to preventing that from happening here.

if anybody can do this, pg can.

curi5• 18 years ago

why do you figure pg is amazingly good at this? he already banned me and rms from voting. that doesn't seem to suggest great leadership skills.

Hexstream2• 18 years ago

That doesn't seem to suggest anything at all, period.

electric• 18 years ago

So does this mean that Hacker News will soon be acquired by Google?

DarrenStuart2• 18 years ago

oh well at least scoble didn't get a whiteboard out to explain how it works :p

DarrenStuart2• 18 years ago

lol, no sense of humour I guess

mrtron• 18 years ago

Does HN have an issue with scalability? The site is tremendously slow from the new influx.

How would you go about scaling an Arc app?

hooande• 18 years ago

On one hand, I'm glad that arrington validated something I've believed for a long time: news.yc is the best social news/network/app for people who are into startups.

On the other hand, I do not want to see this place get overrun by ron paul supporters and facebook fanboys. Where will all the cool people post news to then? Maybe swen.yc?

Flemlord• 18 years ago

I concur. I'm a top-10 reddit poster and Hacker News is my first site of the day now. Keep up the good work and don't be afraid to ban the idiots. Now if only somebody would set up a "Political News" site using the same code base...

comatose_kid• 18 years ago

Anyone can. pg included the sourcecode to news.ycombinator in his latest release of Arc.

staunch• 18 years ago

Hopefully we'll get to see the traffic spike chart from all this Techcrunch traffic (PG? :D)

nikolaj• 18 years ago

and news.yc jumps the shark....

ghiotion• 18 years ago

I'm not ready to pull a chicken little. I came over here from reddit after seeing pg's post on trolls on the reddit front page. Some of the earliest comments and/or posts I saw were of the "oh man, we're screwed now" type. Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I have a hard time believing the reddit crowd did HN a disservice. HN is just too darn... smart for the majority of people. On the rare occasion when some stupid POS makes it to the front page, the comment section more than makes up for it.

The community is too good to suffer fools gladly. And fools get bored easily.

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

So the obvious question is... how many sock puppet accounts does Arrington already have here? He admitted to 5 at digg, I think. Sometimes I come here first thing in the morning and it's 75% techcrunch.

eaken• 18 years ago

hey man TC isn't that bad. You have to muddle through a lot of comments from what seem to be the same trolls, but once in a while you find a gem of a comment.

too bad there isn't a browser that can filter out comments from select people ... TC would then be much more insightful

joeguilmette• 18 years ago

ok, the word is out.

SHHHHHHH...

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

"Little known?" Or is he getting confused and really mean, "Different target audience?"

dhimes• 18 years ago

HN is one of the very best sites on the web. In fact, it's probably one of the best sites the web has ever had, at least for the tech/startup group. I have confidence that the right people will find it and the others will be bored and go away. It's actually kind of boring for flame wars. But great for news and ideas.

njetx• 18 years ago

Gee, I registered only yesterday. I'm glad I made it before it became mainstream!

Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning

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