Ask HN: Idea Sunday Didn't see one created and found the thread quite valuable, so moving the series along! From the previous one: "A small HN experiment. Every Sunday, a thread will be started to share product ideas. Why? Because many people have ideas they will simply not have the time to implement, and many need product ideas to work on." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910 |
For better or worse HN is run to meet YC's objectives. YC does not appear to value engagement for the sake of engagement very highly. People can disagree with that, But it remains a fact.
Most of the reasons dang put forth as to why he killed those particular threads could be applied to almost every thread on this site - depending entirely on the opinion of whomever happens to be reading them at the time.
Granted, you're right - it's YC's sandbox and they get to set the rules. But reading dang's post I can't help but wonder whether he's confusing diversion for intellectual quality.
My opinion regarding what beliefs`dang holds is that the 'Idea Sunday' was consistently earning karma disproportionately to it's contribution to the quality of HN and that this was creating a genre of similar high reward high noise threads [e.g. Screenshot Saturday, Tweet Tuesday etc].
My guess is that he looked at the threads closely before pulling the plug, not only because his post implies it but because it was allowed to run for several weeks before he stepped in and moderated. By the time action was taken a fairly detailed picture of who was looking at and participating in the threads was available.
Is it the call I would have made? I don't know because I'm not charged with that, (though I did flag this thread because of its poor quality) and I haven't seen all the facts.
Of course I may be just projecting what I do, and anyway this response is largely driven by my need to think.
Your post fell into the form of argument because that's sort of what the internet trains us to do. It's the path of least resistance when we want an excuse to write another post after the one we are currently writing. It's the primary game of internet fora.
One of the observations of 'dang and PG before him was that a problem which is particularly salient in political threads is people arguing rabidly when they agree...and those 'arguments' turning heated and nasty. In other words the comments devolve to look like the rest of the internet. That's sort of the reason why the Idea thread was problematic: the conversation could have been happening anywhere. There were none of the elements that make HN HN.
And that's just what I used the opportunity provided by the reply button under your post to write because I felt like writing, i.e. I was just indulging my thinking habit...and working to improve my writing in more or less a free writing exercise with writing as the topic.