HN Explorer

Ask HN: What do you think about invite only membership on HN?

1 points by workhorse ↗ HN
I haven't been a part of this site for long (242 days), but since I began interacting here I have noticed the community growing via comments, votes, and news submissions.

However, I am not sure growth is always good.

Take for example the increase in popular culture articles. Not too long ago Hacker News was saturated with iPad articles, so much so that someone wrote a filter to remove them from Hacker News.

To combat this, I thought of an invitation only membership.

It worked/works for torrent sites such as Demonoid...com, maybe it can save news sites from saturation.

What do you think?

6 comments

[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 29.2 ms ] thread
warwick
The front page being saturated about a particular topic isn't anything new. The content has certainly changed as the community grows, but we've had trendy topics for years. A couple years ago I wrote a little ruby script to determine the top words and phrases in headlines, so I'd have an overview of what the community was buzzing about on weeks that I was too busy to read.

If you're not happy with the articles on the front page, go to the newest links page and vote up articles that you think should be on the front page. I try to do this at least once a day.

If you're looking for a smaller community, check out the recent Ask HN thread about alternatives to HN.

And most importantly, on the days when the front page is all about the latest overblown controversy, just say 'this too will pass' and go back to work.

[Edited to correct a spelling error]

btilly
If HN was invite only, I doubt anyone would have ever invited me. Even if someone was willing to do so, I wouldn't have had enough interest to try to find someone to do so.

For me that's enough that I wouldn't want it made invite only.

tsally
IMO being a part of a community for less than a year isn't a long enough snapshot to accurately judge trends in that community. The site guidelines recognizes this too: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion."

In regards to your suggestion, invite only wouldn't work. All the accounts that submitted and up-voted the iPad articles are registered already, so how would switching over to invite only change anything in your scenario?

inerte
I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member

:)

What would probably happen is that unless a strong initial group existed, seeding the website with good content, the site would die.

I get it you are not satisfied with HN sometimes, I know, me too. And it's happening more frequently. But the solution is not to open a club where only the cool guys will hang out. Because the cool guys are so demanded that they will choose where they will go. You have to offer more than a maybe it will, maybe it will not happen good experiences for the cool guys.

Now, if you had an stablished place, inviting good people to go would be easier. And you avoid the chicken and egg problem by working your ass off to provide the community with the seeds of how you want the interaction to happen. The page layout, the design, if threads or replies or initial up/downvotes, all of this will shape the initial user behaviour and might dictate what happens next (might... sometimes you don't have control).

Anyway. Invitations == bad, unless the person wants to be invited. Which is something hard to achieve :)

Mankhool
Who would do the invites, or rather, who would administer the invitation process? As someone who hasn't done any programming since Fortran 77, I'm not sure I would meet the selection criteria. :o)