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.
Keep Writing. I, sometimes, would like to write on a subject but I fear no one will read the material. If I had X people simply suggest to "keep writing" I would be more willing. Keep writing is something like Medium but it allows someone to post text (news, fiction, stories, anything) that is not complete. Writers set a (hidden) number of votes they should reach before they keep going then they publish what they currently have.
I'm interested, but where would an author get people to vote on the piece? While a fiction story could get votes from various communities, I imagine it would fail for specific posts? Feel free to email, mail at namanyayg dot com
I think it could be a simple like button, hence it could be anywhere. You could also build the platform to write and publish if you wanted, but regardless of where it is it would work the same. I will email you.
What about riffing on the Povio idea (http://pov.io/) where people "ping" you to request a photo, but in your case they instead request you to write something on a particular topic?
So someone might request a blog entry on the most interesting accommodation you've stayed in overseas, or the biggest waste of money you've experienced, or the most memorable meal, etc.
I could imagine a variety of services to go along with modular, open hardware for proximity communication. My impression is that this is a relatively unaddressed market.
Yes it is. I'm a Media Asset Manager / Digital Archivist and there is no EASY way to collect metadata about people (from their name tags for example, that could hold name, company, title etc.) or environments.
I've been thinking about a much more general idea recently: basically twitter, but for data (in JSON format), not just text.
A company could simply announce all new publications, and you could subscribe to that stream, filtering for paperback (and possibly authors you are interested in).
Of course, there are hundreds of alternative use cases.
(Interested in doing the project with me? drop me an email moritz@faui2k3.org).
I've had this sitting on my idea list for a couple of years. It almost seems like this is what app.net is supposed to be. It also seems like this is how applications would talk to each other with https://tent.io/
I guess the question is how big of a market is there for this service? You could have alerts for Kindle version, audiobook and/or paperback. The monetization would be simple through Amazon affiliates, and implementation could just scan Amazon periodically.
Luzme.com does similar for ebooks (audiobooks and deadtree books coming soon). Shows availability and prices for ebooks across all major stores in 8 countries; use your existing watch list at Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing or setup a new one and we'll email you price drop alerts; register an interest in an author and we'll tell you when they release a new book.
1) Businesses have tasks that they need to get done. Many of which are probably too low-skill to make it worthwhile to give to a talented employee.
2) There are prospective employees trying to build their resumes, who would do the task to a) get experience, b) explore a field, and/or c) display their talents.
I don't know enough about businesses to know what sorts of tasks would be good for this.
A programmer social network. I find myself with two distinct sets of friends on Facebook: my tech friends and my normal friends. With my tech friends, I just want to post neat snippets of code as statuses and share github gists on walls and whatnot. So I'd like basically github with more social elements thrown in.
Imagine seeing a cool repo, then being able to friend the owner, and open a chat box to have a quick chat about it right there on the page rather than having to go to another communication method.
EDIT: I know this super similar to github. Really I just want github to implement the equivalent of friends, chats, and public profiles people can post things to (a la facebook wall).
This could be solved by something like Google Plus, if circles could be defined by topics that people subscribe to rather than by people you want to send a message to.
e.g.: I want to know what Jim thinks about coding, but not politics
What you describe sounds like the existing Communities feature, but until there is code block formatting in posts it'll still be a pain to read code in G+
Only dead trees there. It used to be a great place, but after it got acquired, acquired, sold and then acquired again, all of the community was long gone. It had its peek under Kyle Bragger when he was actually running a community with staff full-time on it, but after he sold it, it went downhill. Fast.
There's some recent attempts to bring back the community and improve all sorts of things, but it's just renovating and feeding a rotten tree. Sure, it will live for a long time but it will never be as beautiful as a real living tree fed by nature.
I built something like this about 4 years ago called BigStartups.com. It was built to help network the startup community and was moderately successful. Unfortunately, there were co-founder issues and we shut it down. I often think about what it could be in todays world if we kept working on it. Oh well...
Dude. I've often thought about doing exactly this, but I felt like there was probably something already out there and just haven't taken the time to research whether that's true or not. If there's not, and there still isn't by the time I finish launching my current project, I might just look into taking this on next!
I'm part of a huge Facebook-group (maybe 2000 members) with only programmers in my city. It's really great and the only thing that I like and enjoy about Facebook nowadays.
That's why we've built http://DoerHub.com . We have hackers, entrepreneurs, surgeons, PhDs, and doers of all kinds posting and contributing to projects. The purpose of the site is to enable everyone to share what they are working on and grow it with help from others who care about the same topic (teammates, advisors, beta users, feedback, single-task contributors, word of mouth, you name it ). You can already message anyone, but we're adding group chat and anything else doers request that makes collaboration easier. You can just connect with GitHub.
I think GitHub is in a strong position to do this. They can easily turn it into something more social that allows you to add friends and share codes in your feed.
A mobile app that combines flight info with airport food listings and reviews. Let's you put in your flight numbers for a connection and will make recommendations based on the time if your layover, gates you are flying into and out of, etc.
I don't think it does exactly what you want but it somewhat useful: GatesGuru (by tripadvisor). Can see a map of the airport and what they have to eat etc.
Just for developers: Something that allowed you to change the IP your request resolves to with a modified URL instead of editing the hosts file, like this: 127.0.0.1::http://mysite.com/
Benefits: Not as much work, not as permanent, you can use multiple at once, you can easily see where you are connecting.
I think this is something web developers would pay a few bucks for. I know I would.
is virtualhostx [0] what you want? personally i ditched it many years ago in favor of editing the hosts file. it really doesn't get easier than that.
not sure i'm on the right track though because the benefits you list seem contrived. "not as permanent"? "not as much work"? we're talking about editing a single line in a short file.
Vimeo is Youtube for great, quality video productions. I'm looking more for snippets and/or past work.
The reason I say this is because in the past week I started looking for video animators/designers (I don't even know what the right name is) who can design/create a 5-10 sec intro + ending animations/videos, and Google isn't the best option. I'd love to browse through dozens of snippets a la Dribbble in order to contact those companies/freelancers I find their work appealing.
Popcorn Time for quality children's programming - Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Avatar. Shows that are entertaining AND educational, none of that advertising filled, sassy attitude, Disney Channel crap.
edit: Seems like there is some interest in this. If anyone wants to discuss this more, email my username at me.com
Given the source is open, it may be more like curating a list of children's programming torrents and providing a delivery system for people to add their own child appropriate work.
I wouldn't be opposed to ads but not the sort you currently find on kids tv hawking toys
What if it was a Spotify-like model. ~$4.99/mo unlimited streaming, money is pooled and then pay out a % to content owners based on # of plays each video gets? The more popular episodes earn more of the money.
That seems to be the direction Amazon is going with Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, also includes books and apps. Not the best library of content just yet, but it seems to have potential.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1000863021
This extends to regular quality programming as well.
Sometimes I spend 30 minutes looking for a good movie before giving up and watching The Bourne Supremacy again because at least I know I won't regret the 2 hours I invest in it.
I would pay $1 bounty every time someone just recommended a good movie that I end up liking.
Place for all scientific studies to be elucidated with plain english explanations, analysis, information on shortcomings, links to related studies, open questions, links to further information. Would be community created content, but needs some sort of community voting/moderation system to surface the best content and empower the most knowledgable/trusted contributors.
Ideally this would be where you go when you see sensationalist headlines in popular science magazines -- here you can find out what the study actually means.
The difficult part is getting contributions and building anything sustainable around this idea. You can reach me at info@sciencegist.com if you want to chat.
Thanks but that just does backup. I have a domain I use with google apps. I'd like to move that to a non-ad-driven email server that doesn't mine/sell my data and preferably that I can own.
First off, you must either have all clients have a full copy of the song, or have a remote site with the full song available for seeking-and-streaming. If you stream it, you have to be able to seek to the position in the song that everyone else is at so you can add more devices dynamically. You couldn't just stream whatever your phone is listening to (e.g. pandora) because it would add latency to the other clients' players and it would sound out of sync. The exception is if your player actually cached the sound data coming out of pandora, created a 10 second buffer, and started playing it "late", so the other clients would have enough lead time to buffer the song and start playing in sync.
Once you have resolved how to distribute the sound, you have to establish synchronization with all the clients. Ways to do that:
* Ship an ntp client with the app. Downside: network latency, firewalls.
* Synchronize nearby players by playing a loud tone four times, allowing clients to sync to the tone. Downside: latency of speed of sound, can only do once (otherwise someone has to play tones in the middle of your song to sync a new client)
* Listen to a track already playing, analyze own song's structure, find that point in the song, start from there. Downside: must already have decent portion (or all of) the song to seek to the correct positions. (Possible solution: implementation of rolling checksum/deltas?)
* Child clients buffer the song data from the parent client. Assuming the parent has slept N time before playing, communicate with the parent to discover what point the parent is streaming from now, download its 10 second buffer, and start playing at the correct point once synced with parent. Downside: must do all of that (network establishment, sync with parent, download buffer, start play) within 10 seconds or the buffer will be out of sync. Possibly do a 60 second buffer?
If your remote host just has all the song data, you could also just record a few seconds of whatever's playing around you, discover the song in your remote host's database, sync to the sound you're hearing, and seek, stream and play it. That would probably be the easiest thing, assuming your remote server had whatever song was playing. Possible to index local songs too.
It's much worse than that: if the soundwaves from all the different stereos aren't at least roughly phase-aligned, it's going to sound pretty bad. When working with installed soundsystems engineers typically apply sub-millisecond delays on each channel. Touring setups don't always do this stuff, but they're working with a few dozen speakers from the same manufacturer, not many assorted stereos.
Still, it would be a lot of fun to try. Best to just use FM radio.
A notepad that can send my handwritten notes to the cloud. It should have a mini-scaner embedded into the top cover so when I want to backup a note, I just close the notepad, push the cover, remove the first page, close, push again.
None of these ipad apps can substitute the good old pencil drawings
Aesthetics is another (arguably more marketable) aspect of car sound.
Have you seen The Dilemma? About two guys (tech founder and business founder) working on a system for giving traditional muscle car sound to electric cars. (And some romantic comedy type stuff too.) When I saw it I thought - that idea would really fly. Whilst silent cars may be great for the majority (especially those living near busy roads), there is still a sizeable group that will pay extra for a great engine/exhaust note combo. See also recent criticism about the sound of the new hybrid Formula 1 engines, including from world champ Sebastian Vettel "sound like sh*t". There's a definite market there, but obviously depends on the electric car market itself.
A cheap hardwire device that I can take to the gym and not worry about breaking it. There are lot's of great workout tracking apps but I won't risk having my expensive smart phone smashed in order to record my workouts. I see more people using pen and paper even with all the amazing apps out there.
As a (relatively) new dad, I would find this very useful. There doesn't seem to be a central repository of such places and the ones in my city (Cincinnati) are really badly organized, maintained, ect...
There is room in OpenStreetMap for this sort of data. Parks and playgrounds are already frequently marked (along with stuff like museums), and there are at least a few people trying to figure out things like changing tables.
I guess it would take a while before people were chasing details like kids menus.
- Movie Quote Search
- Search for a movie quote and it brings up the part of the movie where the quote starts. User can then adjust the length of the clip they wish to share. No longer than 30 seconds.
- Mobile App - Timed Deals for local businesses.
Company registers their deal and how many they wish to offer. A potential customer who follows certain types of products may get the promotion, The catch is, Promotion only last 30 seconds(max) and you have to buy it right then.
Anyone wants to help me with any of these I'd love the help.
I am trying to make something similar to the Movie quote search. I am focusing more on making an easy way to share your favourite clips from shows.
I made a tool to do selection screen recordings that record the system audio. Makes it really easy to record clips from youtube/netflix etc: https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter
I am working on a simple website to host the clips as well. cuts.io (live again soon). I want that as a hassle free alternative to youtube, for short clips!
An IaaS provider which meets "paranoid" security requirements -- essentially, being able to remotely provision a box in a trustworthy way, and know you "own" that box at least as much as if you'd carried it to colo yourself.
Then, the ability to secure those boxes (and boxes you drop off in colo) against tampering short of powering them off.
Hey, interesting, I'm a researcher working in this area as it happens. Have you any particular classes of application you'd want to use this for? What level of performance hit would you be willing to take? Would you be happy to just have a mechanism that enables you to determine after the fact that you've been hacked or data has leaked due to a misconfiguration, or would you mainly be interested in mechanisms for preventing such issues ever happening?
I have been wanting this for a while as well. Performance is not a huge issue in this scenario for me, as security is the really the reason anyone would use this. I would want to prevent data from leaking completely if possible. My ideal scenario is that an adversary/host could take down my box, but they couldn't get at the content inside without my authentication. I don't want my instance to be clonable/rootable by the FBI, NSA, the hosting provider, or anyone else. Ideally I should be able to set up a Tor host in this instance, no one should be able to see inside under any condition, and I should have some proof/verification that it is secure from outsiders as claimed. If they realize that something undesirable is going on, I have no problem with the instance being shut down, but I don't want my privacy/security compromised.
So you don't ask for much then :). As I'm sure you're aware, even with TPMs/TXT/SGX/Trustzone etc, once your threat model includes a capable adversary like the NSA with physical access to your box, it's hard to see how you can provide bullet-proof guarantees. I'm excluding fully homomorphic encryption based systems on the grounds of practicality here (although there are interesting 'somewhat homomorphic' systems out there that achieve practicality by restricting what kind of operations you can perform on the data).
I guess, but it still seems like no one offers this and its not trivial. Do you know of any research/systems/practical offerings in this area? This has been something that I would be interested in learning a lot more about honestly. I agree that bullet-proof guarantees are basically impossible and that physical security is probably going to be the weak point at the end of the day. Maybe some system could be created that made it hard to individually tamper with one instance without alerting others, or made it hard to isolate one from another from a hardware view? Do you think even something like SGX can't prevent some level of physical threats? It seems like it would at least make it harder/reduce the scenarios in which hardware is vulnerable, but I haven't researched it extensively.
SGX is pretty reasonable IFF you believe in the Intel PKI.
I have been looking at how to do cheap ($20-50 slow USB connected (essentially smartcard), $500-1000 PCIe) HSMs. If you do shared-computation with a host (with or without SGX/TXT), you can get pretty decent performance with quite modest HSM hardware.
Those provide NSA-type protection -- in that attacking a single instance isn't guaranteed, and takes time, so a system with key rotation or k of n split across locations is going to provide pretty reasonable security.
Private Core is definitely the most interesting TXT-based solution today; if you built an IaaS provider with that tech plus live video monitoring, alarms, etc., you could probably offer quite reasonable security assurances to people. (i.e. the tools to defeat it require physical access, and if no one can gain physical access to a rack once the rack is put into production...)
The k of n split across multiple locations idea is interesting.
I agree that if you're paranoid about the NSA it probably doesn't make too much sense to have faith in the Intel PKI. When you say pretty decent performance for your HSM, do you mean less than 10 % for real world apps?
I'm currently assuming a threat model where an attacker doesn't have physical access however, and looking more into how to use hardware to bootstrap a minimal TCB that doesn't require OS or application rewrites but still gives good performance. Even if only for specific use cases.
ARM or possibly Atom in a box, so pretty decent performance. The pain of the HSM is the physical packaging, and my ultimate goal is to make that reusable and let users select their own components and do their own final assembly and certification.
But nobody cared. Perhaps I was doing it wrong or I have not do many/any promotion. Anybody wants to take this idea and solve it for us I will really appreciate it.
There was a discussion on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489401) about bringing App Stores to servers. Would people use and/or pay for something like this?
Untangle is a firewall with its own app store, and it works great! It's hard to imagine a firewall app store, but once you start using it, it just makes sense.
A way for employees to push back against their coworkers when they email too much crap to too wide an audience. In other words, I wish my Inbox had a little voting widget next to each message:
+------------------------------------+
| 4,376 people received this message |
| |
| [Cool, it was ] [It was a waste] |
| [important and] [of my time to ] |
| [worthy of our] [ read this ] |
| [ time ] [ message ] |
| |
+------------------------------------+
Then, as votes are collected, the sender (and maybe everyone else) gets some kind of feedback on how their message was received. Maybe the report could include a total of how much time was spent reading it: "Your coworkers spent a total of 36.4 hours reading your message. It cost the company $1458 in employee time. Sending it was therefore a moderately bad use of company resources" .. or, if the voting was favorable, "1722 of your coworkers enjoyed reading your message. When you were deciding whether to hit Send or Discard, you made the right choice in clicking Send."
Edit: As I've said in the past when posting ideas on HN, if you think this is worth doing, please run with it! I make no claim on "owning" the idea, and all I ask is that if it makes you a billionaire, you commission of bust of me to install in your parlor. (Bronze or marble only, please.)
I love this idea, except that the conclusion about something being a moderately bad use of company resources doesn't necessarily follow. The benefits of things like team rapport are hard to quantify, but that doesn't mean they should be dismissed as waste. The same goes for things that certain individuals feel are a waste.
Taking jokes, just one subset of such emails, as an example: For you, a particular joke may be a waste, but having the team culture be such that it is open to jokes, may provide benefits beyond each individual joke.
Still, great idea, and maybe the objections I raise could be overcome just by the right wording.
That is true, but at a very large multinational, I used to recieve over 100 send to all emails a day, and three real ones.
Some of the 'send to all' emails were pretty important, so I had to read them, but a lot of them added nothing, and were sent to 400'000 people. I think each inappropriate global send to all cost $1000+, assuming people disgarded it pretty quickly.
+Low estimate, assuming it takes 1 second to disgard the email, everyone reads it, and gets paid minimum wage.
I love the idea of getting feedback on what you sent. It took me posting to HN and Reddit to realize how unimportant most things I work on are. It's one of those things that should be obvious but aren't until you are confronted with numbers.
- A variation: to have emails you want to send go in a pending pool moderated by a team of trusted confidants, to avoid sending out email that is a waste of time.
Hopefully not being unnecessarily critical, but I can't see the trusted confidants bit working:
1) They're trusted confidants, probably more likely to
a) share your opinions
b) support you when they shouldn't
2) The more value your e-mail consumes (i.e. the more people that receive it), the more likely your trusted confidants have expensive time.
I agree trusted confidants is an improvement, but probably not enough on its own.
Isn't Gmail Priority Inbox a solution for this use case? I don't use it, but keep an eye out on it's classification efficiency, looks like it does a fine job already.
Attent by Seriosity has an interesting solution to this: http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html. They create a scarce currency that companies use internally to send messages.
The broader point this raises is the cost of information exchange, not just corporate email but all valuable content. I can envisage some system attaching cost to information exchange. Kind of like curating through market forces. I suppose it's an extension of what a search engine does. Anyone come across this idea anywhere?
It's a nice idea but I think it would be a little too burdensome for every single email. Maybe if the mail was going out to >N people where N is configurable by the organization.
I think one of the reasons why no one's ever done this is that with traditional email, it's impossible for the sender to know how many people one email has reached, or will reach. But I think Threadable (recent YC startup) could actually do this.
Nice idea but the big problem I can see is that nobody will want to vote their bosses emails as a waste of time.
Also in large corporations a lot of long emails will be sent that relate to company policies etc that nobody reads in practice but the purpose of the email is that it protects the company in the event that an employee says they were not aware of policy X.
I think you have two issues here. The first is that in a larger business there are a significant number of messages that get sent out as a matter of corporate policy that don't get the attention management thinks they should. Quite possibly email is not the best approach to these, but telling management that the email was a waste of time is going to make no friends, especially if there are legal reasons for the announcements.
The second problem is that there are managers who do send out de facto spam and probably could use the feedback.
It might be cool to make it like a neutered spam button. Instead of actually training your mail app to reject it as spam or notify any spam registries it could just function like clicking the "waste" button and cut out the "worthy" button since it is sort of default.
:) reminds me of the "warning" message that used to appear in "rn" before you posted a message to a usenet group:
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
When I am wistful for particular aspects of the Usenet, the degree of self control exhibited in its threads is clearly not among them. Audience size fueled many a flame war, and reliance on self control by contributors allowed spam to overwhelm most communities.
Great idea and I think this would be awesome as a GMail extension/addon (ala Rapportive). You could even have it only appear for messages from the same work domain.
On the other hand, some E-mails are actually not crap and get lost in the waves of mailing list spam and build reports. While we're fixing E-mail, here are a few suggestions that would correct a major problem with E-mail, the ability to miss/ignore it:
1. Non-optional delivery/read receipts
Various clients have these, but it would be nice if these were universally supported and could be made non optional. This is useful so that when I don't get a response and have to go hound someone, my first question doesn't always have to be "Hey, did you get that E-mail??"
Speaking of responses...
2. Response required flag
Be able to mark an E-mail as requiring a response from a specific recipient. Such E-mails could be presented differently in the recipient's client, highlighted or called out in a different color. Client software could generate a TODO list out of them, issue reminders if the E-mail has been un-replied-to for more than some configurable period of time, etc. The longer the message is ignored, the more annoying the presentation might be. This highlighting could be silenced by either a. replying to the E-mail, or b. clicking an "ignore" button (which also sends notice of the ignore action back to the sender). The sender could also cancel the flag after the message is sent.
3. Response required by date
As an enhancement to the above, instead of a flag, a date/time by which a response is needed. This could allow the recipient's client software to display these E-mails in a sane priority order.
If the voting doesn't work it should be possible to gather other metrics such as how long the message was visible on the screen - in other words did the recipient actually read the email. Over time it would learn the users typical reading speed. Another would be how long was it sitting in the inbox before it was read. A smart email client can detect when the recipient actually notices that the email is there.
With these metrics it could then work out which members of the company send out the least well received emails. There are certainly some people where I work who have a very low interesting email ratio. These people would be prompted to sort this out.
One risk would be the employee that just sends out jokes would of course appear to be highly effective. Some algorithms would be needed to filter out work vs play emails.
To creep employees out, these metrics could be readily available to management and used in their performance reviews as part of all the other data obtained about them!
>"Your coworkers spent a total of 36.4 hours reading your message. It cost the company $1458 in employee time. "
This in itself could be a nice plugin for your mail. You need 3 values to be able to calculate it:
* Number of employees the mail will be sent to (hard with aliases, easier with Outlook PDLs)
* Average fully burdened cost of employees (managers should know this, or you can default to something like $120K)
* Estimated time to read (based on wordcount and an average reading speed)
From there you can get the "hours wasted reading this mail" and "cost of this email".
EDIT: You could go above and beyond and use an open rate percentage to more accurately determine the cost, but that's not something an email client could record, it'd be server side.
First rule of HR : fire the ones who talk bad about HR. Come to think of it, that's what bad bosses do, too. Oh no, I should add the epiphany that "Enterprises are like Operating Systems in which, by design, the malware has the Highest Priority" to the thread on Epiphanies : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7545284 !
Here's a version of that that we did using our Django app. You create a new email with a unique ID and get a link to vote that you can put somewhere like your email footer. We've posted some of the code here: https://github.com/FlowStacks/email-voting and the email voter is here: https://flowstacks.com/emailvoter/
Spotify released iOS SDK. Can someone make an app that will just have one button? Just play the goddamn music. I think Spotify works on the wrong level of abstraction. It should work exactly like a radio. Many people just want to listen some good music for running, relaxing etc. They couldn't care less about following artists and making playlists.
Also, I'd like to be able to play it while I'm on a train. Pre-fech 30min of music to play when I'm underground and I have no internet connection.
If there is a hacker (London-based ideally) that want to work on that idea give me a shout on lukasz.madon at gmail.
Check out http://molli.es! I made this only for EDM music right now, but ya I just wanted the very basic site that plays music, and trying to bring back visualisations. Miss those from the Winamp days!
This is less an idea, more something for someone to think about.
We need to figure out how to defeat the internet echo chamber effect.
Notice how often, when a community gets started between a small group of people(such as early Reddit or HN), it's a place of intelligent, productive discussion, where people measure what they say instead of just spouting extreme rhetoric?
Yet, once these communities grow, you inevitably see the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem, where it seems like the point of discussion is more to get the most approval instead of trying to argue a point, and where anyone with a disagreeing opinion feels unwelcome even if they're willing to put a lot of effort into their response?
I haven't quite figured out how to solve it, but I really want to. I've been a part of several online communities like that now, and it always ends up the same way. Once it gets big enough, finding good conversation gets very rare.
You can't. Not without banning those responsible for that kind of behavior or severely dis-incentivizing them somehow from coming to the community.
I think more generally, if I understand what you mean correctly, that that is really nothing more than water-cooler talk. Talk meant to be pleasant rather than investigative.
I also think with that said, it's really only a property of small communities because once it reaches a certain size, the amount of substantive things to discuss and hash out doesn't scale with the number of users.
I don't think you can solve it because it's not the platform, it's the userbase. Although voting systems to highly encourage downvoting/upvoting based on whether you agree or not. An idea I've had is to rank all content separately for each user, by predicting what content they will upvote or downvote.
At first it sounds like this would exaggerate the echo chamber effect, but I think it would do the exact opposite. There's no reason to downvote or upvote things because you agree or disagree, downvotes only affect what you see in the future and no one else sees them. And instead of different ideologies being pushed away into different communities, they all exist in the same place, occasionally interacting with each other and mixing.
I can only think of one solution: moderation. And that does not scale very well.
The only way out I see is a paid forum, so that the site can hire full time mods. I'd like to build something like this one day, but its such a herculean task that I figured I'd need at least a year of runway to make it work.
This doesn't necessarily work, though it does help. One already exists- SomethingAwful.com. It's better than most forums for sure, but it's certainly not perfect and the size of the community still clouds conversation significantly.
Did anyone experiment yet with a tree-like comment system (just like the one on HN) that completely hides comment points (even in the profile pages and to the users themselves)? To me it seems that, contrary to the intentions to achieve high quality comments, the crowd often optimizes for low effort and high score. Maybe the lack of publicly visible reputations points could reduce that high score mentality. Maybe we are all wrong with this kind of behavioristic approach.
Spam and trolls would still be punished and one would still have the benefits of having the most favored comments at the top.
afaik the scores are just hidden with CSS, so you can see them if you really want, and I believe that RES even has an option to enable this without having to dig into CSS wizardry oneself.
The issue isn't just about the internet echo chamber though, it's a more fundamental thing that people seek out news sources and opinions that reinforce their own biases - totally the right thing to tackle, but it's not just about internet communities.
Be wary of overly technical solutions for what are essentially people problems. Technical solutions can be useful tools for moderators but removing too much human judgment from the process creates more problems than it solves.
This is an interesting space to me. I hope to write more about it in the future. I think I have done one blog post (on my current personal blog) on the topic of moderation but I have been a moderator a few times and have done some A/B testing of different approaches. But I still struggle with how to talk about it to other people, who often think I am just full of hot air.
Developing a site conducive to good conversation, in general, needs work.
It's not just the echo chamber. It's the spam, the repost/duplicates and the following discussion, the trolls, the downvoting-for-disagreeing, gaming-the-system-for-'karma', the caring-about-karma, the offtopic-but-'funny'-jokes, paid-posters, etc.
The fact that every site fails when it becomes sufficiently popular says that good conversation is hard, and harder still while maintaining anonymity - and even then, exorcising anonymity doesn't seem to have helped the quality of Youtube comments.
There are various measures like hiding comment scores or capping karma that help but there's no site out there that combines them all.
I think you misunderstand communities. Vibrant communities are full of people who share a materially common set of opinions about various things. They engage and interact within that world view.
At the same time people evolve and communities evolve. Sometimes you move away from the community, sometimes they move away from you. Either way, you can end up feeling like an outsider in a group you once considered yourself to be part of the 'in' crowd.
Because a large part of anyone's current point of view is driven by past experience, communities often segment by age but sometimes segment by politics or world events (the mechanism is that people take away different things from the same experience, it "changes" them in different ways, and that puts into further out or closer to other members of the community.
The internet "echo chamber effect" as you call it is defeated by visiting multiple communities and watching and noting the differences. That your favorite 'hang out' on the Internet has become distasteful to you can no more be "fixed" than you can will your favorite eatery or bar to exist for all time.
Things change, people change, places change. Keep moving and an open mind.
Speaking for Reddit, it was an unfortunate consequence of the pseudonymous and point system. As communities got larger, there would be less and less tolerance for discussion and focus would stray towards quick (easily digested) posts.
Although, the counter point is that people in general are less likely to produce discussion. Or, that a lack there of of easily digested posts invokes discussion.
So does the karma/points thing make it an attractive nusiance for trolls? It does seem to encourage participation which is one of the challenges of any community (way more lurkers than speakers)
I think that analysis is interesting but incomplete.
I think that there are two different kinds of interaction in social media: growth oriented interaction (show and tell) and approval/support oriented interaction (counselor sessions).
Show and tell takes more work. You have to teach your community members something to be successful. But it is also more enriching because it encourages meaningful comments that explore and expand on the ideas shown to the group.
Support group posts are much easier. Just relate your story, grievance, or thought. Meaningful comments are harder to come by because they tend to be simple messages of support or derision or a comment that could be their own support group post -- people will tend to go ahead and collect points with a second post rather than 'hijacking a thread'.
I believe the reason support group posts begin to dominate even in social forums that start off as member enrichment oriented is because they are easier and everyone harbors them. Through sheer numbers one strikes a chord and gets voted up. Then another, then another. They are easy to craft so the raw number of posts begins to guarantee that the forum will become dominated by support group posts. At the same time, it becomes harder and harder to teach the group something new: the circlejerk effect.
This is also called Eternal September[1]. And I think the Spiral of silence[2] adds to the problem, as people not only see their own opinion echoed, but also stay away from expressing it if it's not in line with the community.
The only solution to this I've seen so far is making it harder for "ordinary people" to discover the community, as HN tries to do it.
I just had this idea: How about making it really easy to be promoted to a volunteer down-vote moderator for an hour or so, just a button away. The task would be to downvote comments with mean and extreme language. The down-votes would count twice during that time and the actual moderators would be able to monitor what the volunteers are doing and to act accordingly in the event of misuse. That maybe results in less work for the actual moderators and at the same time it’s maybe more effective. I think, I would happily do this on a lazy sunday afternoon as a service to the community.
I have an idea: Remove visible karma. Your personal karma is invisible to you and you have no feedback on how a post did. Karma is still used to kill comments, but everything above a certain score (say 5) is ranked arbitrarily (say MD5 of unix timestamp of comment).
Alternatively, make it public what everyone voted up on. That way everyone is open to criticism for what they voted on, and like people do on Facebook, they'll try to curate their upvotes so that they look sophisticated. Hopefully that will modify their upvoting behaviour.
Well, that's okay, isn't it? It's the idea that counts, so the discussion will still occur. It doesn't matter that it is centred around your comment that came after mine.
EDIT: Context for those who come after: Some other commenter said he downvoted my comment because he posted something similar. I assumed he said that to illustrate a flaw in my proposal and that he did not _actually_ downvote me. Since I can't find the comment that is similar (he's deleted what he's said), I'm leaving it up.
I think I have a solution to this, something I called Reddit150. You have divisions, like in soccer or american foot ball leagues, where the highest rated members can be promoted to the "higher" league and also demoted if their contributions are not good enough. People from a lower division cannot comment on a higher division, but everyone can view all divisions, this would result in situation where the media would always reference /r/science from the Alpha rankings for example, the prestige of maintaining your position would ensure a higher quality of content at all times. I called it Reddit150 because that is a typical number of names a human can remember for our social structure before it starts to breakdown, the member number in each division number would have to be in the order of 150k or possibly something that adapts with the total user base.
Wouldn't putting more emphasis on karma just lead to more karma whoring? You want to encourage quality dissenting opinions rather than just making the echo chamber louder
Oh, would you only be able to vote in your classification and lower? If that's the case, doesn't that make it extremely hard for a crowd to overthrow a close-nit elite that refuses to upvote the plebeians?
In the starting days of Reddit and then HN this really bugged me a lot.
One of the solutions I wanted to try was to partition the user base on a similar way that posts are filtered to you. That is based on the up votes you give. Now I'm not sure if it happens here but at least on Reddit you have it on your customised first page.
I believe that it isn't the user base that gets worse but that it gets much more diversified and people entrench themselves in groups and the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem arises.
Think of it as user and posts clustering, the secret sauce would be how those clusters interact, I don't have a tentative answer for that. This idea would top current aggregators by valuing discussion and intervenients in the same way that posts are valued.
I'm currently building a solution to this which is still in very early beta. Using machine learning, I'm working on solving the Goldilocks problem of community affinity (not too close, not too disparate), aiming to fix the hivemind problem that reddit has and the strictness that topical communities like HN have.
I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a few moments to spare!
That looks great. I think they experimented with this idea on reddit aswell at an early stage. However it didn’t turn out to be beneficial. I unfortunately don’t know the details, I read about it in some comment on HN a while ago (I unfortunately don’t remember where exactly).
I'm part of a community that limits how much you can post and (up)vote in a day. The points for these actions are shared. There is no down-vote.
There are two kinds of users, regular ones and "elders" of sorts. First few were established years ago and they can vote on others to become "higher tier" users as well. How much votes you need depends of how many people can vote.
The registration is not automatic, but you fill out a form with an open-ended question and selected users (mentioned above) can vote to approve the registration.
The system has threaded discussions where every post is equal. So you create a post and it can become a new "topic" (or forum, or however you want to call it). These can be nested of course. Whether something is a comment, topic, list of topics, blog, ... depends entirely on the template used to view that entry. You can manage privileges (rwx) to these subtrees (or any single node in the tree).
588 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadSo someone might request a blog entry on the most interesting accommodation you've stayed in overseas, or the biggest waste of money you've experienced, or the most memorable meal, etc.
-a site to upload Evernote notebooks to share/view online.
-a service that saves all your snapchat stories on the cloud
A company could simply announce all new publications, and you could subscribe to that stream, filtering for paperback (and possibly authors you are interested in).
Of course, there are hundreds of alternative use cases.
(Interested in doing the project with me? drop me an email moritz@faui2k3.org).
What is wrong with using taskrabbit itself? What tasks do you envision? What about virtual assistants like Zirtual.com?
I don't want to negotiate, I want a quote and a yes/no decision on the quote. That's it. Period. End of story.
--- has tried to use TaskRabbit on three different occasions to get something done, all failed, two were to get lunch for an office. (so, business)
Never using TaskRabbit again.
I don't know enough about businesses to know what sorts of tasks would be good for this.
So people could like something like I will do x for you for $y amount, all I need is you to fill out this template / give me this info.
So automate it as much as possible, and know how much it would cost. Break big tasks down into small ones.
For example, someone may offer to find you the cheapest place to buy tires in your area. All they need is <city>, <any necessary details on tires>.
Something like that.
Imagine seeing a cool repo, then being able to friend the owner, and open a chat box to have a quick chat about it right there on the page rather than having to go to another communication method.
EDIT: I know this super similar to github. Really I just want github to implement the equivalent of friends, chats, and public profiles people can post things to (a la facebook wall).
e.g.: I want to know what Jim thinks about coding, but not politics
There's some recent attempts to bring back the community and improve all sorts of things, but it's just renovating and feeding a rotten tree. Sure, it will live for a long time but it will never be as beautiful as a real living tree fed by nature.
>So I'd like basically github with more social elements thrown in.
Benefits: Not as much work, not as permanent, you can use multiple at once, you can easily see where you are connecting.
I think this is something web developers would pay a few bucks for. I know I would.
not sure i'm on the right track though because the benefits you list seem contrived. "not as permanent"? "not as much work"? we're talking about editing a single line in a short file.
[0] http://clickontyler.com/virtualhostx/
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hostadmin/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hostadmin/oklkidkf...
Also you get HTTPS out-of-the-box and can introspect the data transmitted over the tunnel.
mysite.com.127.0.0.1.nip.io mysite.com.127.0.0.1.xip.io
Your server must route the request to the appropriate vhost though (e.g. ServerAlias mysite.com.*.xip.io).
The reason I say this is because in the past week I started looking for video animators/designers (I don't even know what the right name is) who can design/create a 5-10 sec intro + ending animations/videos, and Google isn't the best option. I'd love to browse through dozens of snippets a la Dribbble in order to contact those companies/freelancers I find their work appealing.
edit: Seems like there is some interest in this. If anyone wants to discuss this more, email my username at me.com
Parents all over the world approve this idea.
Given the source is open, it may be more like curating a list of children's programming torrents and providing a delivery system for people to add their own child appropriate work.
I wouldn't be opposed to ads but not the sort you currently find on kids tv hawking toys
Sometimes I spend 30 minutes looking for a good movie before giving up and watching The Bourne Supremacy again because at least I know I won't regret the 2 hours I invest in it.
I would pay $1 bounty every time someone just recommended a good movie that I end up liking.
Place for all scientific studies to be elucidated with plain english explanations, analysis, information on shortcomings, links to related studies, open questions, links to further information. Would be community created content, but needs some sort of community voting/moderation system to surface the best content and empower the most knowledgable/trusted contributors.
Ideally this would be where you go when you see sensationalist headlines in popular science magazines -- here you can find out what the study actually means.
Anything like this out there?
The difficult part is getting contributions and building anything sustainable around this idea. You can reach me at info@sciencegist.com if you want to chat.
There's also http://usefulscience.org/ and http://sciworthy.com/ but I think they both have staff to write content.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/cloudHQ/backup-gmail-to-dropbox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaireeka#The_Parking_Lot_Exper...
First off, you must either have all clients have a full copy of the song, or have a remote site with the full song available for seeking-and-streaming. If you stream it, you have to be able to seek to the position in the song that everyone else is at so you can add more devices dynamically. You couldn't just stream whatever your phone is listening to (e.g. pandora) because it would add latency to the other clients' players and it would sound out of sync. The exception is if your player actually cached the sound data coming out of pandora, created a 10 second buffer, and started playing it "late", so the other clients would have enough lead time to buffer the song and start playing in sync.
Once you have resolved how to distribute the sound, you have to establish synchronization with all the clients. Ways to do that:
* Ship an ntp client with the app. Downside: network latency, firewalls.
* Synchronize nearby players by playing a loud tone four times, allowing clients to sync to the tone. Downside: latency of speed of sound, can only do once (otherwise someone has to play tones in the middle of your song to sync a new client)
* Listen to a track already playing, analyze own song's structure, find that point in the song, start from there. Downside: must already have decent portion (or all of) the song to seek to the correct positions. (Possible solution: implementation of rolling checksum/deltas?)
* Child clients buffer the song data from the parent client. Assuming the parent has slept N time before playing, communicate with the parent to discover what point the parent is streaming from now, download its 10 second buffer, and start playing at the correct point once synced with parent. Downside: must do all of that (network establishment, sync with parent, download buffer, start play) within 10 seconds or the buffer will be out of sync. Possibly do a 60 second buffer?
If your remote host just has all the song data, you could also just record a few seconds of whatever's playing around you, discover the song in your remote host's database, sync to the sound you're hearing, and seek, stream and play it. That would probably be the easiest thing, assuming your remote server had whatever song was playing. Possible to index local songs too.
Still, it would be a lot of fun to try. Best to just use FM radio.
FM radios though just might sound better.
Think that is what your talking about or similar?
This site's demo video shows they got it working?
Though it's not open to the public; errr, I want to see how they did it!
None of these ipad apps can substitute the good old pencil drawings
http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/
Electric cars must make noise under new EU rules:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26857743
From the article:
> MEPs agreed that in future the vehicles must be fitted with devices to make them "sound similar" to cars with combustion engines.
So you'll have a limited choice to choose from.
But personally I'm hoping they can make them a bit less rough and more of that smooth "Hummmm" you associate with luxury cars.
Have you seen The Dilemma? About two guys (tech founder and business founder) working on a system for giving traditional muscle car sound to electric cars. (And some romantic comedy type stuff too.) When I saw it I thought - that idea would really fly. Whilst silent cars may be great for the majority (especially those living near busy roads), there is still a sizeable group that will pay extra for a great engine/exhaust note combo. See also recent criticism about the sound of the new hybrid Formula 1 engines, including from world champ Sebastian Vettel "sound like sh*t". There's a definite market there, but obviously depends on the electric car market itself.
Amenities near by with baby facilities, possibly with user ratings.
All of my recently baby-ied friends complain about finding places to go, especially groups of recent mothers meeting up in the middle of the day.
I guess it would take a while before people were chasing details like kids menus.
If anybody is interested in working on something like this let me know :)
- Mobile App - Timed Deals for local businesses. Company registers their deal and how many they wish to offer. A potential customer who follows certain types of products may get the promotion, The catch is, Promotion only last 30 seconds(max) and you have to buy it right then.
Anyone wants to help me with any of these I'd love the help.
I made a tool to do selection screen recordings that record the system audio. Makes it really easy to record clips from youtube/netflix etc: https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter
I am working on a simple website to host the clips as well. cuts.io (live again soon). I want that as a hassle free alternative to youtube, for short clips!
The site is running now. Here is an example of a clip I made with the tool from Netflix. All the clips on the site feature Ted Mosby.
Example: http://cuts.io/c/gJl6x_L2o
Then, the ability to secure those boxes (and boxes you drop off in colo) against tampering short of powering them off.
(tech details: Intel TXT, TCG TPM, cheap HSMs, Intel SGX, etc.)
I have been looking at how to do cheap ($20-50 slow USB connected (essentially smartcard), $500-1000 PCIe) HSMs. If you do shared-computation with a host (with or without SGX/TXT), you can get pretty decent performance with quite modest HSM hardware.
Those provide NSA-type protection -- in that attacking a single instance isn't guaranteed, and takes time, so a system with key rotation or k of n split across locations is going to provide pretty reasonable security.
Private Core is definitely the most interesting TXT-based solution today; if you built an IaaS provider with that tech plus live video monitoring, alarms, etc., you could probably offer quite reasonable security assurances to people. (i.e. the tools to defeat it require physical access, and if no one can gain physical access to a rack once the rack is put into production...)
I agree that if you're paranoid about the NSA it probably doesn't make too much sense to have faith in the Intel PKI. When you say pretty decent performance for your HSM, do you mean less than 10 % for real world apps?
I'm currently assuming a threat model where an attacker doesn't have physical access however, and looking more into how to use hardware to bootstrap a minimal TCB that doesn't require OS or application rewrites but still gives good performance. Even if only for specific use cases.
http://privatecore.com/vcage/
Not sure if any IaaS providers are offering services based on it yet, though.
https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute
But nobody cared. Perhaps I was doing it wrong or I have not do many/any promotion. Anybody wants to take this idea and solve it for us I will really appreciate it.
https://openhatch.org/ is this for open source software in general
[1]: https://bitnami.com/
Edit: As I've said in the past when posting ideas on HN, if you think this is worth doing, please run with it! I make no claim on "owning" the idea, and all I ask is that if it makes you a billionaire, you commission of bust of me to install in your parlor. (Bronze or marble only, please.)
Taking jokes, just one subset of such emails, as an example: For you, a particular joke may be a waste, but having the team culture be such that it is open to jokes, may provide benefits beyond each individual joke.
Still, great idea, and maybe the objections I raise could be overcome just by the right wording.
Some of the 'send to all' emails were pretty important, so I had to read them, but a lot of them added nothing, and were sent to 400'000 people. I think each inappropriate global send to all cost $1000+, assuming people disgarded it pretty quickly.
+Low estimate, assuming it takes 1 second to disgard the email, everyone reads it, and gets paid minimum wage.
- A variation: to have emails you want to send go in a pending pool moderated by a team of trusted confidants, to avoid sending out email that is a waste of time.
I agree trusted confidants is an improvement, but probably not enough on its own.
http://ideas.ozonebit.com/
Check it out!
I think one of the reasons why no one's ever done this is that with traditional email, it's impossible for the sender to know how many people one email has reached, or will reach. But I think Threadable (recent YC startup) could actually do this.
Are you kidding? That's the whole point!
Presumably, the boss allowing it in the first place is a signal that they're interested in this feedback from their employees.
The second problem is that there are managers who do send out de facto spam and probably could use the feedback.
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Ah the old days.....
Was there a time when this was actually true?
1. Non-optional delivery/read receipts Various clients have these, but it would be nice if these were universally supported and could be made non optional. This is useful so that when I don't get a response and have to go hound someone, my first question doesn't always have to be "Hey, did you get that E-mail??"
Speaking of responses...
2. Response required flag Be able to mark an E-mail as requiring a response from a specific recipient. Such E-mails could be presented differently in the recipient's client, highlighted or called out in a different color. Client software could generate a TODO list out of them, issue reminders if the E-mail has been un-replied-to for more than some configurable period of time, etc. The longer the message is ignored, the more annoying the presentation might be. This highlighting could be silenced by either a. replying to the E-mail, or b. clicking an "ignore" button (which also sends notice of the ignore action back to the sender). The sender could also cancel the flag after the message is sent.
3. Response required by date As an enhancement to the above, instead of a flag, a date/time by which a response is needed. This could allow the recipient's client software to display these E-mails in a sane priority order.
With these metrics it could then work out which members of the company send out the least well received emails. There are certainly some people where I work who have a very low interesting email ratio. These people would be prompted to sort this out.
One risk would be the employee that just sends out jokes would of course appear to be highly effective. Some algorithms would be needed to filter out work vs play emails.
To creep employees out, these metrics could be readily available to management and used in their performance reviews as part of all the other data obtained about them!
That would make total sense as a sideline for somebody like mailchimp.
This in itself could be a nice plugin for your mail. You need 3 values to be able to calculate it:
* Number of employees the mail will be sent to (hard with aliases, easier with Outlook PDLs)
* Average fully burdened cost of employees (managers should know this, or you can default to something like $120K)
* Estimated time to read (based on wordcount and an average reading speed)
From there you can get the "hours wasted reading this mail" and "cost of this email".
EDIT: You could go above and beyond and use an open rate percentage to more accurately determine the cost, but that's not something an email client could record, it'd be server side.
Also, I'd like to be able to play it while I'm on a train. Pre-fech 30min of music to play when I'm underground and I have no internet connection.
If there is a hacker (London-based ideally) that want to work on that idea give me a shout on lukasz.madon at gmail.
https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/spotify-ios-sdk/
http://songza.com/
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/songza/id453111583?mt=8
We need to figure out how to defeat the internet echo chamber effect.
Notice how often, when a community gets started between a small group of people(such as early Reddit or HN), it's a place of intelligent, productive discussion, where people measure what they say instead of just spouting extreme rhetoric?
Yet, once these communities grow, you inevitably see the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem, where it seems like the point of discussion is more to get the most approval instead of trying to argue a point, and where anyone with a disagreeing opinion feels unwelcome even if they're willing to put a lot of effort into their response?
I haven't quite figured out how to solve it, but I really want to. I've been a part of several online communities like that now, and it always ends up the same way. Once it gets big enough, finding good conversation gets very rare.
I think more generally, if I understand what you mean correctly, that that is really nothing more than water-cooler talk. Talk meant to be pleasant rather than investigative.
I also think with that said, it's really only a property of small communities because once it reaches a certain size, the amount of substantive things to discuss and hash out doesn't scale with the number of users.
At first it sounds like this would exaggerate the echo chamber effect, but I think it would do the exact opposite. There's no reason to downvote or upvote things because you agree or disagree, downvotes only affect what you see in the future and no one else sees them. And instead of different ideologies being pushed away into different communities, they all exist in the same place, occasionally interacting with each other and mixing.
The only way out I see is a paid forum, so that the site can hire full time mods. I'd like to build something like this one day, but its such a herculean task that I figured I'd need at least a year of runway to make it work.
Spam and trolls would still be punished and one would still have the benefits of having the most favored comments at the top.
And I just refuse to believe we've figured out everything there is to know about community engineering.
This is an interesting space to me. I hope to write more about it in the future. I think I have done one blog post (on my current personal blog) on the topic of moderation but I have been a moderator a few times and have done some A/B testing of different approaches. But I still struggle with how to talk about it to other people, who often think I am just full of hot air.
It's not just the echo chamber. It's the spam, the repost/duplicates and the following discussion, the trolls, the downvoting-for-disagreeing, gaming-the-system-for-'karma', the caring-about-karma, the offtopic-but-'funny'-jokes, paid-posters, etc.
The fact that every site fails when it becomes sufficiently popular says that good conversation is hard, and harder still while maintaining anonymity - and even then, exorcising anonymity doesn't seem to have helped the quality of Youtube comments.
There are various measures like hiding comment scores or capping karma that help but there's no site out there that combines them all.
At the same time people evolve and communities evolve. Sometimes you move away from the community, sometimes they move away from you. Either way, you can end up feeling like an outsider in a group you once considered yourself to be part of the 'in' crowd.
Because a large part of anyone's current point of view is driven by past experience, communities often segment by age but sometimes segment by politics or world events (the mechanism is that people take away different things from the same experience, it "changes" them in different ways, and that puts into further out or closer to other members of the community.
The internet "echo chamber effect" as you call it is defeated by visiting multiple communities and watching and noting the differences. That your favorite 'hang out' on the Internet has become distasteful to you can no more be "fixed" than you can will your favorite eatery or bar to exist for all time.
Things change, people change, places change. Keep moving and an open mind.
Although, the counter point is that people in general are less likely to produce discussion. Or, that a lack there of of easily digested posts invokes discussion.
I think that there are two different kinds of interaction in social media: growth oriented interaction (show and tell) and approval/support oriented interaction (counselor sessions).
Show and tell takes more work. You have to teach your community members something to be successful. But it is also more enriching because it encourages meaningful comments that explore and expand on the ideas shown to the group.
Support group posts are much easier. Just relate your story, grievance, or thought. Meaningful comments are harder to come by because they tend to be simple messages of support or derision or a comment that could be their own support group post -- people will tend to go ahead and collect points with a second post rather than 'hijacking a thread'.
I believe the reason support group posts begin to dominate even in social forums that start off as member enrichment oriented is because they are easier and everyone harbors them. Through sheer numbers one strikes a chord and gets voted up. Then another, then another. They are easy to craft so the raw number of posts begins to guarantee that the forum will become dominated by support group posts. At the same time, it becomes harder and harder to teach the group something new: the circlejerk effect.
The only solution to this I've seen so far is making it harder for "ordinary people" to discover the community, as HN tries to do it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence
Alternatively, make it public what everyone voted up on. That way everyone is open to criticism for what they voted on, and like people do on Facebook, they'll try to curate their upvotes so that they look sophisticated. Hopefully that will modify their upvoting behaviour.
EDIT: Context for those who come after: Some other commenter said he downvoted my comment because he posted something similar. I assumed he said that to illustrate a flaw in my proposal and that he did not _actually_ downvote me. Since I can't find the comment that is similar (he's deleted what he's said), I'm leaving it up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7542140
> also demoted if their contributions are not good enough.
If there is a user that gains karma by karmawhoring with the quick jokes and whatnot he/she would simply be demoted by the rest of the high-users.
Or something to that effect.
One of the solutions I wanted to try was to partition the user base on a similar way that posts are filtered to you. That is based on the up votes you give. Now I'm not sure if it happens here but at least on Reddit you have it on your customised first page.
I believe that it isn't the user base that gets worse but that it gets much more diversified and people entrench themselves in groups and the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem arises.
Think of it as user and posts clustering, the secret sauce would be how those clusters interact, I don't have a tentative answer for that. This idea would top current aggregators by valuing discussion and intervenients in the same way that posts are valued.
I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a few moments to spare!
Code: http://code.fraction.io Beta: http://beta.fraction.io
There are two kinds of users, regular ones and "elders" of sorts. First few were established years ago and they can vote on others to become "higher tier" users as well. How much votes you need depends of how many people can vote.
The registration is not automatic, but you fill out a form with an open-ended question and selected users (mentioned above) can vote to approve the registration.
The system has threaded discussions where every post is equal. So you create a post and it can become a new "topic" (or forum, or however you want to call it). These can be nested of course. Whether something is a comment, topic, list of topics, blog, ... depends entirely on the template used to view that entry. You can manage privileges (rwx) to these subtrees (or any single node in the tree).