AmitinLA

You're right, this is strictly an attempt at prevention, not a cure. But it might be interesting to attack a problem like this on multiple fronts. Right now, however, most of the focus seems to be on the "cure" side of things.

What I'm curious about is what sort of data is available on these negative comments. If we were to identify (and agree) on a large enough sample population (n>30, probably) can we start seeing any trends in terms of downvotes, account age, posting frequency, etc? Do any of those correlate with a sample population of comments we identify as positive?

Other half-formed ideas I have that may be interesting: - mandatory cooling off period (one to two weeks) before account activation - analyzing downvotes by user and, once a threshold has been reached, putting them in a "time out." - being able to block certain users from appearing in stories once you've logged in

I'm relatively new to this community, but I've thought for a while that the problem with any points-based system is the inherent competitive nature. One of the interesting things I've learned in improv classes is the "Yes, and..." structure that performers use to build on each others performances to create something bigger and better.[1] Structurally this may be as simple as implementing a mandatory "Yes, and..." string to the beginning of each comment. Maybe it is only displayed as the user is writing comments, but it could be a simple, effective nudge to be more constructive used in conjunction with the existing points system.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvisational_theatre

This is a logical, well-thought out argument that I largely agree with. The one thing I wonder is if, as brand advertising is increasingly transferred to the internet and those dollars are spent on sites like Facebook, we see overall spending drop and an increase in spender (and consumer) surplus to the detriment of the middlemen. The analogous example is Craigslist -- a site that destroyed millions (billions?) of advertising revenue and that will likely never be recovered but was overall a net gain for consumers and advertisers both in a way that is hard to quantify.

I'm not a coder/hacker/tech person and largely ignorant of the issues that are being discussed in this post. But, I'm curious: is some of this similar to the (mostly light-hearted) tension I've seen in my personal life between physicists and engineers?

I don't know what OS you're using, but I believe this is possible with Fluid, an SSB app generator for Mac OS X that uses Webkit. I quit FB a while ago, but use it for other sites in a similar fashion.

http://fluidapp.com/

I'd like to highly recommend the Rhodia Meeting Book[1]. The front side of each page is broken up asymmetrically into three sections: a general date/description field, a notes section and an actions section. The back side of each page just has the notes and actions section. The books also come in two sizes: 9"x11.75" and a more svelte 6.5"x8.25" which I personally prefer.

I've found the simple division into notes and actions is enough and I can jump back and forth very quickly and clearly between the two of them. In addition, if you think of questions as actions, which 99% of the time they usually are (What types of tchotchkes will my boss appreciate a suitably subtle distance from bonus time?), than you're good to go. The remaining 1% of questions are usually more notes anyway (Am I ever going to be pretty?).

Like many preprinted notebooks, it's something that you could easily design yourself. But then people would think you're weird, or worse, poor. And I do find them quite fetching, especially the orange ones. Combined with a nice pen (I'm digging the new Sharpie "pens" that don't bleed through pages[2]) that clips handily into the spiral you have everything you could possibly want to build an empire. At least, that's what it feels like.

They're aren't available on Amazon with Prime or free shipping so I actually had to leave my cave and go to a Dick Blick art supply store to get them instead of dealing with some semi-anonymous online retailer.

[1] Flickr link: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=rhodia+meeting+book

[2] They still kinda bleed through pages, but only sometimes and barely. http://amzn.to/atbrsg

This is possibly the single best blog post about entrepreneurship I've read in the last...I can't even remember. Thanks.

I'm currently using this to learn programming and couldn't agree more.

It's not just more access. This is a case where FB has, for some reason, signalled that they want to work with YC companies, and specifically YC companies. As some people pointed out already, maybe this is them outsourcing R&D. So let's accept that for a second, that this is a way to get them to outsource R&D b/c the FBfund isn't working. If that's the case, that means that they're looking to acquire companies. And not just any company, though that's always the case with any company anywhere with sufficient resources and an eye on growth, but specifically YC companies.

If we presume that the odds of an exit of a YC company before this interview were even across all industries (i.e., that no matter whether they were into working in travel or B2B or whatever a company's odds of being acquired/going public where the same) that is certainly not the case anymore. The odds of an exit for a YC/FB company probably just went up dramatically. In actuality, it seems like it went up dramatically; it's too early to tell if it actually did. And maybe not just b/c the YC company is not going to get acquired by FB, but b/c the YC company can get revenue quicker with preferential access to FB's revenue making methods.

But here's what the cynic in me thinks: based on the RFS[1], this seems really like a way for a cheap and easy way for FB, which has has major credibility issues with Connect, etc. to get good publicity for Facebook Instant Personalization. Since YC is super, super hot right now and just came off their demo day, the tech news was all about them. I don't know if money switched hands -- after all, if YC took a million (cheap for this buzz) that would be enough for them to invest in 66 companies at $15K a pop but with absolutely no risk to them since it's other people's money. If so, it probably wasn't enough.

In addition, YC's other RFS have been generic and in fields that have been buzzworthy enough that they didn't need YC entrants to attack the problem. In other ways, "The Future of Journalism," "Things Built on Twitter," and "iPad applications," -- these are not solving obscure but lucrative problems[2]. It's simply a way for YC to signal their interest in a hot space and that they want to work with the best of the breed in this space. Now, I presume, they're getting paid for it.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/rfs7.html

[2] I'm assuming that there was no similar deal announced with Twitter or Apple, which I feel like I would have heard about, but I could be wrong.

What I find interesting is how this is going to change the types of YC companies that will be funded, especially in the short term. One of the things I've noticed about past YC companies is how diverse they've been in terms of the markets/industries they're going after. This will largely change the focus of certain companies already funded as well as the types of applicants. Presumably YC has an upper limit of companies they can fund due to human capital restrictions, and if this means that they fund or focus more on companies focused on "transformative social experiences" this will mean that other incubators and angels that don't have the brand of YC may be able to market themselves/differentiate themselves from YC better.

Snow Crash and In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson both introduced me to tech culture in different ways with the same result: it got me more excited about tech than anything else and made me realize that I had to work in tech, and also filled me with respect for what hackers do and regret that I was never going to be a good hacker.

A few things:

1) The intro video is amateurish and uncompelling -- nobody wants to see a deck poorly animated with black bars on the side.

2) The web design needs some work. I'd recommend hiring someone with more modern sensibilities/tastes to redesign the front page. There are little things: the first signup button isn't centered, the bottom one is way too small and laid out wrong.

3) "Wait, does Facebook do that?" Answer this question, clearly.

4) Show your product. I should be able to see it, get a taste of it without signing up for it (this matters more in the beginning/without network effects which is where you're at).

5) What are your USPs? What is Facebook not doing? The major two problems are context collapse, which you're addressing, and privacy. Think about addressing that as well. That was the major reason for the fundraising success of Diaspora. Their home page is closer to how a landing page should look in 2010 as well: http://www.joindiaspora.com/

And yet the $70 a month you spent was funding shows like Mad Men. Advertising is such a small part of revenues but since it's the only side the consumer sees (well, DVD sales) we see these things as game changers. The real problem to solve here is that of affiliate fees[1]. Without cable fees it's a pretty safe bet that quality programming like Mad Men wouldn't be around. Maybe we're moving that way anyway where all that's available are cheap web series, but it'd be a bummer in my opinion.

[1]http://abovethecrowd.com/2010/04/28/affiliate-fees-make-the-...

1. DON'T write it down

2. Think about it for weeks and months and years.

3. Tell my various entrepreneurial friends about it and bask in the glow of their compliments.

4. Congratulate myself on being smart.

5. Dream about making so much money I could punch a cop and get away with it.

6. Dream about how great my life is going to be when I'm harpooning great white sharks from a helicopter that can turn into a boat.

7. Curse the idiots who came out with a product months or even years after my idea except it's executed all wrong and I woulda done it so much better.

8. Curse the same idiots who are now making so much money they can punch a cop and get away with it plus have that boat-helicopter thing.

9. A few weeks later I come up with a great idea. See step 1.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has an interesting real-world analogue when he has to deal with q&a during his public speaking event. He believes that people are behaving in status-seeking ways and so forces people who want to ask questions to write them down and pass them up where he answers them anonymously[1]. Winer's 24-hour limit seems to be partially addressing this problem as well, but I agree with the comments already posted about that being too much time to care.

One possible solution I'm thinking about implementing in a new blog I'm starting is a separate Twitter comments account. This forces brevity and accountability among other things, and people could link to their own posts or places where my posts are (hopefully) being discussed. In addition, if the blog is successful, I could potentially see what comments are being retweeted, etc. and run some quick and dirty analytics to help determine high-value comments. Additional benefits would be connecting with high-value readers in a more intimate way that could improve dialogue as well as gently guide users to providing comments via email for longer dialogues. I'm concerned that 140 characters is too short to provide feedback, though the majority of comments I post on non-conversational sites seem to fit into that range.

Any thoughts?

[1] Sorry, I can't find a link to the article so I'm paraphrasing heavily.

A bunch of cash from the conference. They're making a ton off these events.

I agree from what I have heard from people working with similar YT stars. What is surprising is the incredible amount of cross promotion done between seemingly unaffiliated stars in an effort to gain subscribers/viewers. From the rough description I heard about, it seemed somewhat scammy/gross to me but I don't know enough to make a definitive judgment. Do you have any thoughts or information about that?

...there isn't anything fundamentally wrong about this form"

I think the only way to definitively prove either of my points is with A/B testing, etc. But one way I can try to make my argument is to look at forms from other successful companies. Almost every single long web form I've seen or filled out goes down where there is a clear sequential order. Think about long forms on SurveyMonkey or the product selection form on any computer manufacturing website. The main exceptions seem to be for very short forms (~4 fields).

They provide a phone number, office hours, and a satisfaction assurance.

None of that is different from the competition.

About whether manually quoting prices is a good idea or not... I think overall it facilitates the sales process, not harms it. It's a fact of the industry, for one.

There may very well be good, or more accurately, rational, reasons for manually quoting prices but the ones that I can think of (there's human judgement involved, etc.) are all business opportunities. From a buyer/consumer perspective, this pricing uncertainty and lack of information can be confusing and even bad. Imagine having to do this for airline prices, etc. Even FedEx will quote you a price for a similar service (and they use vertical forms: http://at.fedex.com/QX58q).

An aside: whenever I hear something along the lines of "a fact of the industry" I usually smell money. That doesn't mean I know how to get it, but it's somewhere out there.

But does that really matter?

Absolutely. This is not an industry where there are one or two or three players. There are dozens of competitors and if I'm entrusting my business -- and goods worth thousands and thousands of dollars -- I'm going with the "most professional" people. I may pay more for it, though I don't want to. I'm not going to go with the firm that has so little attention to detail that they can't correct typos on a website that has likely been around for years. The fact that they didn't even notice bugs the crap out of me.

Here's a way to test this, if you'd be interested: Take screenshots of this site and I'll pick another site that I think is better designed but that offers the same services. We ask people to pick one based purely on sight. Some third party has to be willing to set up the survey though and email it to some of his or her friends to ensure impartial results.

I'm really not trying to be nitpicky.

I don't think this is a bad thing. I think if you're really passionate about this stuff you care about it to the core or it's not worth caring at all.

Interesting. I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you w/r/t HN, because the UX of HN is great, though at this point we may be disagreeing definitionally over "design."

As for the trucking website, I would completely disagree for the following reasons:

1) You have to receive a quote over email. Why? Either their systems are built that way, which is ridiculous, or they require a human to look up values and quote a price, which at this point is also ridiculous.

2) The form design is terrible. Eye movement/focus is all over the place.

3) There's absolutely no reason to use this company vs. other companies based on their home page. What's their selling point? They have the same boilerplate as everyone else.

4) Amateur hour: They misformat their own phone number: "(256) 852-553 5." That nav bar. That frequent shipper link.

Ha, yeah I completely agree. I wish I'd picked a different example.

I should have been more clear. My point is not that it's a bad design per se; as you point out HN isn't the best designed site in the world either. My point is more that these industries are old, established industries that haven't yet built up innovative approaches (whether from the consumer side or the business side) to their business models.

I used trucking because I did some research on the industry and found that they have a fair amount of logistical innovation but still have major inefficiencies in the way that their customers book business. It's not the perfect example. But I think my point stands.

Consumer packaged goods.

I come from a similar situation and faced similar challenges, especially after trying to launch a web startup with no financing and no developers on board. It failed. I'm determined to stay in tech, so here's some of my (occasionally conflicting) thoughts.

1) You call yourself a business guy, but are you a product guy? If you're a product guy -- if you can understand the soul of a product and how it interacts with people -- that can be inherently valuable. In my experience, most people I've met may be "tech" or "business", but they're not product people.

2) Get an internship. Beg. Show up, prove why you're valuable, send unsolicited resumes with advice and biz dev/product suggestions. Be humble, but not too much. Work for free for a couple months, or at minimum wage or whatever is legal. Just get your foot in the door.

3) Read. The Elements of User Experience (http://amzn.to/aFNjSn), The Mythical Man Month (http://amzn.to/cFLDlB) -- these are just to get you started. Learning to code a little bit will be good as well. The point is not to become an expert developer, but to learn how developers think. Think of your reading as travel literature and learn about different cultures.

4) Look for non-sexy opportunities. Twitter, FB, 4SQ, Zynga etc., get all the hype, but there's tons of need for software development and product design in what I call the "iceberg industries." The trucking industry brings in $250 billion dollars in revenue every year. That's almost twice the size of the airline industry and yet a typical website of theirs looks like this: http://www.highwayfreight.com/index.php

5) Think about CPG (even though it's not tech, it still can be a startup). It's a risky, tough move and faces lots of market forces, but can be incredibly lucrative. You could find a small local product that you believe in, invest some cash to get equity, and try to make them big. As a consultant, your skills may be valuable because the problems in these types of entrepreneurial efforts are operational problems, not innovation problems.

6) Don't worry too much about the idea or where you're working right now: your goal is to build professional and personal credibility. Give away your great ideas. Most people who have them don't tend to have just one.

7) Don't worry about home runs. Most entrepreneurs I know have small lifestyle businesses and love their companies no matter the size. It's kinda like having a kid. S/he's probably not going to grow up to be president, but you're going to love 'em anyway.

So one of the major cake mix companies spent millions of dollars developing a no-mix no-stir cake mix product that, though a great product, ended up being a terrible failure largely because buyers of the mix felt like they weren't doing enough work.

Even though this may be an apocryphal story (I can't find a link on Google), I think it illustrates an important point about user experience. As someone who has played tabletop games, physically rolling dice was an integral part of the game because it was, to romanticize it, the closest physical analogue I was going to get to actually slaying that diamond spider. Pulling out an iPhone to roll dice doesn't have that same appeal, and in addition, you are trying to supplant a long-standing ritual that is inextricably associated with tabletop games.

This is, of course, merely a possibility to consider. Personally, I would talk to more customers, if you haven't, or even test them out at local gaming nights and see what people are reacting too. See what other products gamers and DMs need -- after all there are over 20 million of them out there for D&D alone according to Wiki, which is a big enough market to make money out of. Maybe DMs would like a way to manage characters or stats, for example. Build a brand out of related, high-quality products in the process.

The problem with this strategy is that it is impossible to engage in a high-risk/high-reward strategy like entrepreneurship where your effort has to be 100% committed to the business, especially in the first couple years and especially if you are venture backed.

There are a couple solutions to this:

1) Invest more of your wages in low risk investments to offset the monetary risk of a startup.

2) Work full-time or as a contractor whilst also working 20% of the time on your own startup to try to gain traction which would lower the risk. Though if that succeeds, you should be then reinvesting your time in another startup. It's a vicious cycle :)

Semi OT: Most of my browsing time is in Reader, and I got initially excited about this post since I thought what this was doing was something similar to Fever (http://feedafever.com/), but maybe more powerful.

What I really am looking for is a way to manage my Reader feeds so that links to similar sources (or similar stories) either get grouped or prioritized based on the number of shares a la Techmeme.

Here's the use case. When Google shut down Wave or when the EFF did their analysis of the Google/Verizon deal I had at least 20 feeds linking to the same story, which I didn't really need. I should be able to exclude my Tier 1 feeds so they don't get caught up in these rules (i.e., if Gruber talks about it I want to see it, no matter what). The rest of these stories get buried in a Folder similar to the Gmail spam folder (or label, more accurately); I don't see their unread count but they're there if I suspect I'm missing something.

Plus maybe a bonus option to exclude any stories based on productivity or 8-bit cupcakes.

Kensington Microsaver Security Cable (http://amzn.to/bkV7Jd). Coils neatly for easy backpack storage. I work almost every day out of coffeeshops and lock it to a chair and will walk away for sometimes an hour at a time with absolutely no trouble. Someone will either have to spend 10+ minutes sawing through it or try to steal a chair, which most people will notice.