If I may respectfully say that the domain name is terrible. There must be a nice .COM brand name for such a concept?
I was curious about the Hacker News backend, interesting to see it is open source. I really like the http://slinkset.com hosted service which is essentially the same functionality.
A friend of mine used to live in NY and he tells me how lots of people think that Giuliani, by fighting crime, ruined the city. By making the city safer, the residents had to start dealing with the influx of annoying tourists that they couldn't avoid, whereas once you learned where trouble was, you could just keep away.
Also, his argument is that the city lost lots of "colorful characters". People that were not exactly dangerous but were not exactly postal card-worthy. The city is just not the same without those weirdos, he said.
Perhaps that is the also the reason that my friend likes (Cambridge's) Central Square so much. Not a day goes by without some freaky (and usually funny) event close to the T.
The point is: amichail is a colorful character, yes, and the place wouldn't be the same without him. But does it necessarily mean that it would be worse?
Also, would you encourage "more amichails", or one is all we need?
You shouldn't make people feel self-conscious about putting their ideas out there. Maybe something that sounds silly at first might develop into something more interesting with some discussion.
Of course, you can have mechanisms in place to give everyone a chance to express their ideas. For example, you could make people pay for submissions using karma points.
I'd argue exactly the opposite. I want people to feel self-conscious about their own ideas. I want people to be reasonably good filters. We already live in an information overloaded world. If I started "putting my ideas" out there with no filter, I would certainly be a source of information with a terrible SNR.
And please, this is not saying that I want to conform to the majority. What I want is for you to stop transferring the burden of testing and validation of your ideas (especially ones at such an early phase) to others.
You say "maybe something that sounds silly at first might develop into something more interesting with some discussion". Honest question: has it happened before?
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As an example, I'm going to take your last paragraph and show exactly what kind of "filters" I'm talking about, the kind of filters that you should be using:
Of course, you can have mechanisms in place to give everyone a chance to express their ideas. For example, you could make people pay for submissions using karma points.
Before typing the question, you should've recognized that:
1. There already are mechanisms in place to "give everyone a chance for people to express their ideas". It's called comment box.
2. Not everyone is here to "express their ideas". I am here to find good content. Some are here just because of the community. Some are here just because of YC.
3. There are other ways to express your ideas. For instance, you could easily start a blog or stick to twitter.
It does not take much to see that what you want is not "mechanisms in place to give everyone a chance to express their ideas", but actually what you are trying is to devise a solution for a problem that exists only in your head, i.e, "How can we turn this simple forum into some sort of discussion game?"
What bothers me is not the fact that you want to think on problems with little practical utility. What bothers me is that you expect others to join you without showing no glimpse of a solution!
Case in point: HN and reddit's source code is free. If you really think that either website would be better with your proposals, show us the code!
I really don't like this personal attack. If you don't like amichails post / comments ignore him or vote him down.
Inspiration can come from the most unexpected sources and we have the vote button in order to express what we think is good stuff and what isn't.
As of this writing amichail has 5x the karma that you have, and you are both members of the sites for roughly equal duration. I think I'll let that speak for itself.
As for the quality of amichails content, it would not be the first time that a 'wrong' idea with a bit of tweaking made someone a fortune.
@amichail, please keep them coming, worst case you will make us laugh, best case you will make us proud by scoring one day with one of your 'odd' ideas.
I'm sure whoever dreamed up the hula hoop must have been ridiculed, but I am fairly sure he/she laughed last.
- It's not a personal attack. I'm trying as reasonably as I possibly can to show why I don't like this particular kind of behavior. I got into the same kind of argument when Jeff Atwood started shooting drivel at HN.
- I do ignore his posts. In almost three years of HN, this is the second time that I've tried to make my point, and it was not out of nowhere.
- Argumentum ad populum.
- As for the content: I think that a website for the discussion of ideas is where amichail will thrive. If he moves his usual posts to the new website I would have absolutely nothing to say about it. I'd probably participate, precisely because I know that is the website's purpose.
- I'd be (even) less vocal about his posts if he showed he is working on his ideas. If you read what I wrote carefully, you'll see that my criticism is not for the ideas, but rather the fact that he throws millions of them without any follow-up work. Whoever dreamed up the hula-hoop built the damn thing, he/she did not make it big by sending mail to people with "Why don't we make a object that is simple, cheap and fun? That would certainly be a successful toy."
It is as personal as can be, it is in a public forum and you are specifically singling out one individual for this 'treatment' and you are effectively telling him you think this forum has no place for him.
Let me give you one simple example of why I think this kind of contribution is useful, maybe even very useful.
I've seen in practice several times that people that shoot off their wild-ass ideas for literally years on end suddenly hit one right out of the ballbpark. Having ideas is like having to paint, or blog or anything other that is creative that is a drive outside of yourself. You literally can't control it.
And if in all those ideas there is ONE golden one and it is recognized as such amichail will be the one to reap the benefits from that.
HN is a great place to get criticism for your 'stupid' ideas, and it isn't always the smart ideas that end up making you money.
If I look at my own history it is the stupid ideas that made be lots of $ and the intricate and lots of work stuff is what gave me great intellectual satisfaction but ended up losing literally buckets of money.
Give the guy a break, there is room enough for everyone here.
One of the reasons these 'niche' HNs seem to fail is simply because of the lack of volume and requiring the potential audience to monitor yet another website.
If amichail were to take his 'idea fountain' elsewhere I for one would miss him, and I would consider it a loss to all of us.
A couple of years ago I guy I knew was bugging everybody about his idea for 'foldable storage boxes'. He eventually made a cardboard model, and couldn't stop talking about it. The follow-up was dreadful, it never went anywhere. Fast forward 10 years, he's back at it, only now he's gotten this idea that maybe he can make them larger, so that trucks that drive south with flowers can use these boxes on the way there, and fold them up on the way back so they can carry payload both ways, instead of driving back with empty flower racks. Oh, and of course everybody was telling him he's nuts.
Same basic idea, took well upwards of 10 years for the coin to drop. I would not be surprised at all if amichail is like that guy. He takes a shower, comes back out and can literally fill 10 pages of his 'notebook' with ideas.
99% of them are crap, and everybody keeps telling him.
"... What bothers me is not the fact that you want to think on problems with little practical utility. What bothers me is that you expect others to join you without showing no glimpse of a solution! ..."
I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Do you have a problem with Amichail? If you keep on repeated attacking, causing distress and others join in this is technically bullying. The beaut thing is all it takes to stop even a hint of bullying is for bystanders to stand up for the attacked.
So what's your call? Are you going to continue this vein of argument? Do you feel the need to continuously dominate others? Because bullies should not be tolerated and I'll stand up for Amichail.
"... If you were attempting a parody of amichail, you've failed, ..."
Parody? No. Having just done some work on identification and analysis of bullies in social systems by mapping behaviour using network science techniques a couple of weeks ago - identifying & neutralising bullies is quite fresh in my mind. No failure on my part.
"... Talking about ideas was never taboo. It's just that your ideas are consistently inane and not worth talking about. ..."
I don't think Amichail is inane. Inane is defined as "empty", "vain" or "lacking of meaning". I recognise the behaviour Amichail is displaying, "continuously asking lots of questions". As a kid I did this. I asked so many questions I distinctly remember my old man telling me to shut-up. So I did. Then had the problem of teachers asking me why I never bothered asking for help. In the real world continuously asking questions and being curious seems stupid, pointless and suppressed.
HN isn't a slice of the regular world. Tolerance of eccentric and unusual behaviour strengthens HN not weakens it. So let Amichail ask as many questions as possible, don't suppress the questioning, it's a sign of youthful curiosity.
Harnessing Amichail as a sounding board for ideas and pointing out any weakness in ideas seems more reasonable than scolding.
The questions that I see coming from amichail are either questions that have no real, objective answer (Are parents essentially AI researchers? Why not turn twitter into a massive brain for problem solving / brainstorming? Should games like The Sims be banned?) or questions where the best way to get an answer is to just be scientific about it and create an experiment - Would presenting less evidence for evolution convince more people? Allow PhDs to apply for expert status in various subreddits?. This is why I think they are inane. It's not about asking questions. It's about making the right ones.
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Whenever I'm around a child that keeps asking me questions, my standard response is "I don't know. How can we figure that out?". It usually works. If it's genuine curiosity, then they will be really excited to be able to take part in the discovery. If they were just trying to be annoying or looking for an easy answer, then they just forget about it and move on.
It's always the crazy ideas that get marginalized by the majority, because chances are the majority are right. However the ideas that turn out to be great initially manifests as crazy to the majority. Rather unfortunate "adaptation" but the one way we can avoid killing potentially great things is to not discredit something until it can be proven to be bad, and to not discourage "weird" behavior.
It's not my job to filter out every idea out there and try to prove it's a bad one. It's not up to me to carry the burden of proof.
Also, I don't "discourage weird behavior". I do discourage "weird behavior who relies on my acceptance of the terms", and that's what bugs me about amichail constant polls and 'ASK YC' posts.
To make an analogy, I don't mind reading about people who are into body modification, even to the point of sewing off their twin brother's arm, and reattaching to their own body (http://www.bme.com/news/people/A10101/addsub/). That is weird as fuck, but their experimentation does not rely on me participating in any way. You can bet that I would mind a lot if said twins start going around telling people how cool it is to have your brother's arm attached to your arm pit and that is "rather unfortunate" that nobody else listens to them.
When I say "weird", I really mean anything that you may think of as stupid. The whole point is that we can't filter out every idea and prove it's a bad one, but if we don't dismiss them they can at least rise through to the top through natural selection via survival of the fittest.
whats next? now we have a simple, yet functional community based idea incubator. definitely not the ideal tool for the job, but a really good start. We also have startups.com, a stackoverflow type knowledge exchange, focused on startup experience. Tools like skype, github, basecamp or fogbugz let startups and developers coordinate efforts across the office or across the world. Social networks let users discover mutual friends with aligned interests or ambitions. Finally, we can't forget about the extensive libraries of articles, presentations, and videos that are multiplying at a frightening pace. I, for one would be interested in a service that integrated all of the above together. Would anyone else?
The Venn Diagram for $100 custom suits would have "all the people without much money" in one circle, and "all the people who want to be really well-dressed" in the other. The intersection represents a huge market, which means this idea is nothing short of brilliant.
I had that idea 3 years ago and even sourced the tailors in Vietnam :-) I want to Saigon with a backpack full of GQ, Esquire, and tons of catalogs. All that came out of it was some tiny tailors started making fashion-house suits in some Saigon slum and nothing was exported due to the messy business that is Vietnam shipping industry (they work best when you stay in the country and show up at the port. Vietnam Post is unreliable for frequent small shipments, for made to order garments. If you're gonna do business with locals make sure they have a $ stake in the venture, and foreigners there are slacker-type teachers, isolated in their own expat-communities and are not very business minded.)
This is a great idea for a site. But it's success will depend entirely on how serious the majority of submittors take it. On that, I don't have much confidence. If there were some kind of incentive, like the top-voted idea each month or bi-monthly is somehow actually funded, then the jokers would become completely irrelevant.
What if you could vote with money? So everyone who votes on the winning idea can then choose to contribute some amount and the sum of everyone's contributions buys, say, a 25% share in the idea, acting as seed funding.
If only there was a website where I could discuss with people if this is a good idea or not...
Ideas have little value because they must be tested. That is, any idea is useless unless you know it works, and If you know, you must have already implemented it.
While ideas might not be worth as much as the implementation of ideas, an implementation without an idea would probably be worth less. I think anyone would agree that it's better to start with a good idea than a bad one. I think it will be very interesting to see what ideas an intelligent, invested community would select.
I was curious about the Hacker News backend, interesting to see it is open source. I really like the http://slinkset.com hosted service which is essentially the same functionality.