The Fluff Principle
March 1, 2009 8:09 AM   Subscribe

Paul Graham started Hacker News as a side-project at venture firm Y-Combinator two years ago. The site, which exists in the same vein as sites like Reddit and Digg, became more popular than he expected. He's just written an essay about the unexpected growing pains he discovered among the community (Discussion on Hacker News about the essay). Long-time MeFites may find a lot that sounds familiar.
posted by mkultra (6 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: PAUL GRAHAM LIMIT EXCEEDED, maybe redirect this to that thread. -- cortex



 


I suspect most of the techniques for discouraging stupid comments have yet to be discovered. Xkcd implemented a particularly clever one in its IRC channel: don't allow the same thing twice. Once someone has said "fail," no one can ever say it again. This would penalize short comments especially, because they have less room to avoid collisions in.
This strikes me as a fairly good idea. It wouldn't be any good by itself, absent other forms of moderation, since it's rather easy to defeat (just insert some random garbage at the end of the post, or make some other trivial change) but it probably does stop innocent-but-stupid posts of the "me too!" variety.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:45 AM on March 1, 2009


(It also makes practical discussion tricky, though. "So, we're meeting at that one new Mexican place at 3:30, right?" is likely to be permitted; "Yes," "yeah" and "yup" are almost certain to be forbidden.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:54 AM on March 1, 2009


Isn't it too soon for this? I mean, this is interesting, but...
posted by limeonaire at 9:02 AM on March 1, 2009


Is there a collection of patterns on how to manage communities from a social point of view (encouraging participation, moderation, friendliness, handling trolls, etc)?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:11 AM on March 1, 2009


pg; dr.
posted by mhoye at 9:14 AM on March 1, 2009 [4 favorites]


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