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by markmccraw
5395 days ago
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If it is the kind of thing where people vote up stories, you are going to have to fight very hard to avoid the influx of low calorie news (same goes for crappy comments). Unless that's what you want of course, but people already get that from digg/reddit/gawker/fark. From one of PG's essays:
"Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it." It would be nice to see a social news site that ends up with an intellectual feel instead of the polemic vibe that a lot of places give off. |
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I submitted a link on a article about a "morning after" pill for Aids that actually works and is already available, it's been available for a long time, if you have been exposed to the aids virus you can take it within 24-48 hours and it won't allow the virus to attach to your cells or something like that, it was created for people working in sanitation, in case they get pricked. It's pretty toxic but it works. It was called the Aids prevention pill you've never heard of.
NO ONE cared. Not on Reddit, not on Digg. And when I compared it to the articles that did make the front page it seemed like my contribution would be just what Digg/Reddit wanted.
With Reddit, I hated how good stories get overlooked yet kittens and pictures of "my girlfriend made this for me" and "nailed it" and "found kittens what should I do", "here's a picture my autistic nephew made" and all that other shit makes it.
I looked at what Reddit wanted and I submitted appropriate content. My submitions were ignored, yet other people's submitions of the same category and quality were upvoted. Wtf?
With Digg, the problem was if you weren't part of some circle of elite friends, or didn't submit your article at the right time of the day it didn't get upvoted. Again, it's shit like this that really drove me away. Reddit just pissed me off by going from a 'sacredly intellectual' site to '4chan for educated people', complete with kittens and politics and memes in a year or two.
Hacker news, although I've heard it has changed, seems to have avoided the lobotomy. 2 out of 2 of my submitions made it to the front page. It worked the way I expected it to work. Hacker news is a place for startup news, tech news, entrepreneurship, show and tell. So I submitted content that matched and it got upvoted to the front page. I feel like I contributed and helped the community, and I don't feel abandoned or pushed away like I did with Reddit.
My only annoyance with Hacker News is how it works. I'll visit the home page and see some amazingly interesting links, 4 hours later I'll refresh the page and many of those links are gone, 1 or 2 of them have moved back 2-4 pages... wtf? So if I'm not on 24/7 I'll miss out on content?
So that's how I feel about social news sites. I'm either confused as to how they work or annoyed by the communities that make them up.
I personally want something more static. I know constant incoming news is great for traffic but it's terrible for our productivity and brains. I'd like to try out a site that updates once a day at midnight or twice a day at most instead of constantly updating. And the community votes on what links will be posted tomorrow, once that list of links is finalized, they are posted, and they don't change order or dissapear. Each Page on the site, is exactly one day, if I click 2 pages back then I'm going exactly 2 days back, that way I can keep track of all the links I've gone through easily. That's what I'd like to see, I'm not sure if it would work out as well as I theorize it would, but it would be a nice experiment.