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Why Paul? Why Did You Change It?
There are things in life that baffle me. Some examples:
- How the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004
- Why the British drive on the left
- Why Rachel Stevens won't date me
And today I add a new one. Why Paul Graham changed his Y Combinator Startup News to "Hacker News." If this was football, I would pull out the "WTF" Yellow Card.
I called Y Combinator Startup News a better Digg in April. Today, they have changed focus and are now a Hacker News rating system. Paul Graham defines this as, "The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Considering that Y Combinator is all about the startup, this makes no sense. They have a couple other updates to the app as well. First, they will be looking for trolls on the comments for each post which is a good move.
Second, they have some new algorithm as Paul defined, "We're going to have a group of human editors who train the system in what counts as a good story. Each user's voting power will then be scaled based on whether they vote for good stories or bad ones. This should protect us against the arrival of users who vote up dumb stories. The worse stuff a user upvotes, the less effect their future votes will have. And vice versa: someone who consistently recommends interesting stories will be rewarded with a louder voice."
Maybe if enough of us speak up, they will leave the content area as-is. It will be interesting to watch what stories are considered "Hacker News."
For your own good. There was a very unhealthy startup cult forming around news.yc.
If you were bored with Start Up News than why switch to “Hacker News”? Surely you get your fill from Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us and the various life hack/hack-a-day blogs?
Hacker news better summarizes what the site is about. Start-up news would require articles and thoughts on business and running one rather than what language to code a site in or how to find other hackers.
I’m with you on the switch, and submitted this to Digg. Maybe Paul will listen to the masses ;)
Thanks - I hope we can get it to the front page :)
Hopefully we can fill the gap and we’d love any feedback on how we can improve.
Thanks, Eric
http://www.buildv1.com
British drive on the left so they could handle their sword with they right hand.
With so many user generated news aggregators out there, it’s getting really hard to differentiate yourself. I think that’s all this is, someone trying to find a way to be different enough from the rest.
I’m going to check out buildv1 - from the comments. Allen, Maybe there is a gap to fill.
That’s the reason everybody used to drive on the left until the french Revolution made it unhealthy. The reason the British still drive on the left is we won the battle of Waterloo. The real mystery is why the US took up the strange European practice of driving on the right.