Show HN: The List

The problem with this system is it actively penalizes use. I see the point of wanting users to have skin in the game, but if I had to give up 2% of my HN "karma" to post this comment, I probably wouldn't do so. If you extrapolate that across all users, you may gain more quality content, but using the site would feel like being punished. And with a social news site, your biggest problem is gaining critical mass. The last thing you should do is discourage use in any way.

Instead of penalizing those things, you should be using them as a metric for measuring site use. Pinterest, for example, would use "repins" as a way to see how much the users are enjoying their experience. Reddit and HN might use upvotes or comments. What you want is as much content as possible and a good sorting method to weed out the best stuff, which is what HN has.

But I could be wrong; we'll have to wait and see.

udp• 13 years ago

And the fact that it's 2% rather than some fixed amount means that it costs established users more to post, and new users less. Which seems somewhat backwards.

WiseWeasel• 13 years ago

But with more initial karma points, the high-karma user's post would appear before the new user's, giving it a visibility bonus in exchange for the extra karma cost. Seems like a worthwhile trade for high-karma users, though it would skew the most visible content towards that of high-karma users and raise the barrier to entry for new users, for better or worse.

tferris6• 13 years ago

The 2% reminds me a little of the ELO system of chess. The stronger you are the higher is your risk (i.e. when playing against a much weaker opponent) which is good. Only because you are sitting on 10K of Karma won't hinder to post crap and opinionated stuff on HN right now. It could keep threads more in balance and bringing refreshing views on old subjects

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

I suspect this policy would lead to a Keynesian recession in karma due to a constriction in the circulation of points.

thaumaturgy10• 13 years ago

> ...but if I had to give up 2% of my HN "karma" to post this comment, I probably wouldn't do so.

But, is that necessarily undesirable? I don't think that a social network should be looking to encourage idle chatter; look at what a cesspool Reddit has become. I'm having trouble seeing a downside to encouraging people to only post when they really have something important or useful or substantial to add.

fudged71• 13 years ago

You don't always know how valuable your comment is when you post it. That's why being validated through voting is so great.

Being penalized for posting an opinion that you don't even know will be popular is not going to end well. In this case, people will only post things that will give them high karma.

colbyaley3• 13 years ago

Commenting on The List costs nothing. The List encourages discussion between members. Posting does cost karma, however, to force people to put 'skin in the game' when posting. They should be able to feel confident that they can recollect their karma that they used to post with upvotes.

lominming• 13 years ago

How do you fight spam if you essentially gave out your algorithm?

shurcooL• 13 years ago

Security via obscurity will not help much.

tferris6• 13 years ago

Very nice game mechanics since on HN the 'old boys' have some advantages when submitting and commenting.

But I would like to know more about you guys and why or how you want to get traction on this before I put myself on the waiting list.

Besides: I love the .io TLD, it looks nice and it's typed fast but won't bring you less search traffic since Google haven't ranked it as a generic TLD yet (like .co, .biz, .org, .com, etc.)

Another side point: HN lost traffic over time when looking on Alexa, I don't know if this relates to the real traffic though.

EDIT: a small note: .io brings you then less search traffic when you try to target more than 1 country/language. If you just target let's say en-us you can set (one) target audience in Webmaster Tools which then would be us-en despite being on .io but if you target more than 1 language then you have a problem since you cannot address multiple targets and you should go with a gTLD or gccTLD. However, if you want to get some decent search traffic choose ALWAYS .com (or at least .net or .org but nothing else, you need much more efforts with other TLDs to rank similar to a .com)

jmartens5• 13 years ago

Unrelated question....is .me ranked by Google as a generic TLD?

tferris6• 13 years ago

Wikipedia says yes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.me ) but to go for sure go to the Google Webmaster Tools and somewhere deep in the menus you can check which TLD are classified as generic

EDIT: here is Google's list of gTLDs and gccTLDs (generic TLDs with country code), fresh from Webmaster Tools, so .me is included but as said .io is still not included

.aero .biz .cat .com .coop .edu .gov .info .int .jobs .net .mil .mobi .museum .name .net .org .pro .tel .travel

.as .bz .cc .cd .co .dj .fm .la .me .ms .nu .sc .sr .tv .tk .ws

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

matthuggins2• 13 years ago

Come someone link to (or explain in detail) some info about Google and how it ranks generic vs. non-generic TLDs? Where did the list of .co, .biz, .org, & .com come from?

tferris6• 13 years ago

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

tptacek4• 13 years ago

The commenting advantage is obvious, but what's the submission advantage? I'm pretty much used to all my submissions falling off the site with 2-4 points.

obilgic2• 13 years ago

Why does it cost more for experienced high karma users to post?

JacksonGariety4• 13 years ago

When you post, you invest your karma. If you have a lot of karma, your post starts out with more, so the likelihood of front-paging is higher for users who have a track record of quality posts.

obilgic2• 13 years ago

If I have a lot of money, It does not mean that I am willing to invest a lot of money.

vacipr• 13 years ago

You should really do something about the way comments are displayed.There is too much wasted space.

pbateman• 13 years ago

I see a few problems with this:

* The website doesn't have critical mass or any special hooks (like pg's essays and pg himself, for instance) to help build it

* I'm not "applying" to post on a website

* Costing people karma is going to drive everything towards a hive mind as soon as possible; if you're going to lose karma by posting you're going to try to make sure that you'll earn that karma back. People are also not going to burn karma making civil responses, everything will become a political performance.

tptacek4• 13 years ago

I'm with you, and would be happy to post a bet (proceeds to Watsi!) that none of these invite-only HN clones are going to succeed long term.

angersock4• 13 years ago

What was it Grouch Marx said? "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept people like me as a member"?

Edit: Updated caps is from telegram, apparently.

Edit 2: Undid caps--sorry everyone. can't take it.

thaumaturgy10• 13 years ago

> The website doesn't have critical mass or any special hooks (like pg's essays and pg himself, for instance) to help build it

I think this is the only real problem with the site, really. It's going to need some kind of attractor to make people want to be there. (And honestly, I'm hoping it finds one.)

> I'm not "applying" to post on a website

Why not?

> Costing people karma is going to drive everything towards a hive mind as soon as possible...

"Hive mind" is a label that people seem to be applying to, "opinions I don't like". I can't think of a reason why this system would penalize different opinions, so long as they were thoughtful presented well. It would however penalize stupid ones, which would be just fine.

I hope it draws enough traffic to become a useful experiment. I think it's got some good ideas.

protomyth• 13 years ago

Your stupid opinion is seen as thoughtful by me or the other way around. Different is often seen as stupid by those invested in the difference.

desigooner• 13 years ago

Is it just me or have people stopped testing how the font renders on anything other than a Mac? Don't people believe in cross-platform readability anymore?

The font being used looks terrible on a Windows machine (Win 7 with Chrome at 100% zoom).

http://i.imgur.com/OmWJiyn.png

Xymak1y• 13 years ago

Same here.

tferris6• 13 years ago

Oh this looks really like living crap. But I'have to admit with everything non-commercial I develop I give a shit on Windows compatibility (it's so hard to test Windows' browsers, either you need some VM running or netbook).

icebraining• 13 years ago

Testing basic stuff like that is easy, just use one of those "website screenshot" services.

thekevan• 13 years ago

Looks fine for me on the latest FF in XP. Also looks good on Chrome 25 in Ubuntu--which I also bet it wasn't tested on.

chc• 13 years ago

I'm looking at it in Firefox on Windows 7, and while the headline looks OK, the body text is still atrocious. The tops of the capital letters are all fug beyond belief.

JacksonGariety4• 13 years ago

We decided to go with .woff on the font cause it's the trendy, cross-browser thing to do. We now know Windows won't anti-alias .woff files. In the next commit I'll add fallback to .ttf or .otf for Windows machines.

thaumaturgy10• 13 years ago

Oh! Oh! This is something I actually know something about! So, if you're willing to use something like FontSquirrel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator) to convert a single font file into four different formats, and if you're willing to store all four formats on your site, then you can fix your font problem by loading the .eot version of it first in your stylesheet, followed by a "?". Like so:

    @font-face {
    	font-family: 'Crimson Text';
    	src: url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.eot?') format('embedded-opentype'), 
    	     url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.woff') format('woff'), 
    	     url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.ttf')  format('truetype'),
    	     url('/style/v6/fonts/crimsontext-regular.svg#svgFontName') format('svg');
    }

The browsers I've tested on so far will only load the file they're interested in, so it doesn't add much overhead in requests.

There's a breakdown of the hows & whys of this method at http://www.fontspring.com/blog/the-new-bulletproof-font-face...; I think that's the most current method in use. It seems to work well.

Skywing• 13 years ago

The font used on that site is literally broken and unreadable in Chrome, on Windows. It cuts out parts of the letters. For an example of what I'm seeing, here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/e6SVAsY.png

RexM• 13 years ago

I'm on Windows, when I have text zoomed at 100% in chrome, I can't read it, at all. 110% makes it readable. Firefox looks ok, but the looks a little strange. Some parts of letters look bolder than others.

jakobe• 13 years ago

It makes me a bit sad that this is just as unusable on mobile as HN.

colbyaley3• 13 years ago

Pushed an update that should fix that.

businessleads2• 13 years ago

Applied to get in? They're listing you publicly: http://thelist.io/applicants

jmartens5• 13 years ago

One of the great things about the site...get rid of the riff raff

businessleads2• 13 years ago

Holy smokes, Mark Zuckerberg's listed as not even being able to score an invite. This shit is exclusive!

angersock4• 13 years ago

Looks like a WASP sausagefest.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

One feature that would make me apply right away: no down-voting a comment without commenting on why you down-voted it. In other words, everyone should be required to give a reason when they down-vote a comment.

columbo• 13 years ago

The problem with any sort of online gamification is you have winners, losers and cheaters. You also have dangerous unexpected consequences.

I used to be part of a MUD (yes, go ahead, laugh) back in the 80s and 90s. It just so happened that quite a few of us in town were part of the same game. So we game'd the game. There was about 20 of us and we effectively created our own league. When you are dealing with a game with maybe 100 active people a league representing 20% of the total population was huge. Not only that but we were able to synchronize our events and became the most hated group in the entire system. They wound up banning all the ISPs in our city (but then they opened them back up when their game turned into a ghost town).

Karma, badges, points, notoriety are all the same. Phbb and VBulletin (and muds for that matter) have been doing this kind of thing for twenty years. None of it really works all that great. The biggest killer tends to be when people organize (SRS). What happens when enough people organize on this system?

A successful community is small, focused and diligent.

The next -big- system that will replace reddit/et/al isn't going to be rehashing the karma system or increasing the complexity. Rather it will be smart enough to know who you like and who you dislike. It will deliver you the content and people that you want to engage in, not provide a battle to the bottom where only the most watered down high-school level content is going to pass through the masses.

blissofbeing• 13 years ago

Any background info on the people/person running this?

JacksonGariety4• 13 years ago

We're two high schoolers in Portland who like to build all kinds of things.

https://github.com/JacksonGariety https://github.com/ColbyAley

thaumaturgy10• 13 years ago

Wow, nice work guys. For what it's worth, I think you've got some interesting ideas on tackling online forums; I hope you get enough activity to see how they work out.

orangethirty• 13 years ago

A better HN would be an HN where some bugs are fixed, and (some) people are a bit more civil. That's it. But nobody is perfect.

notatoad• 13 years ago

The problem with these high barrier to entry discussion sites is that they lack productive people. The people who have the time and inclination to put up with rules like this spend far too much time posting on internet discussion boards, are far too little time building awesome things (i know this from first-hand experience). The best part of HN is the first-time commenters who have made something awesome and come here to reply in the thread about it. If you put up walls to keep casual users out, you drive all the best posters away.

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

That's a very good point.

xijuan• 13 years ago

I also see many problems with the karma system and the rules. Like many others have pointed out, if you punish people for postings, people are way less likely to post and a forum without posts are useless. Also the rules for what to posts are way too strict. It is like not allowing students in the class to ask 'stupid' questions;overtime, students will be too afraid to ask any questions.

samwilliams• 13 years ago

A couple of things to note: - The applicants list features every person's email in plain text (in the 'send x an invite' href). - The list is orderly illogically. As the idea behind this site is that you would sort the best from the worst, having the longest waiting people at the top of the queue until they get picked makes no sense. - As mentioned previously, the applicant link takes you to a non-existent site.

Please don't claim to be something you are not. This is by no means a better Hacker News.

ctruman• 13 years ago

Looks like my user name throws an exception, might want to create some rules and validation on usernames: http://thelist.io/user/chris.truman

colbyaley3• 13 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out. This is on our Issues List https://github.com/JacksonGariety/The-List/issues/48

JacksonGariety4• 13 years ago

UPDATE ON TWO ISSUES:

When you sign up there's now a checkbox to hide yourself from the applicants list.

Font smoothing now works on Windows machines so looking at The List should be much nicer for Redmond devotees. (might have to clear cache)

Signup link on the docs page links to the right place now.

_b8r0• 13 years ago

I've been thinking that costs for upvotes or comments are probably worth a discussion on HN. The problem with online karma versus offline karma is that for buddhists, offline karma has a real cost in some respects. Yet online karma is just a positive score. If you really had to stake your reputation on a link, would you really post that lolcat?

jswift• 13 years ago

Question: Why did you choose a single thread comment system over nested comments?

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

WARNING

If you submit a request and allow it to be public, your email address becomes available for all to see and harvest! Nice idea overall but this is a horrible, horrible flaw.

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