Should it be a bit harder to submit on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Should it be a bit harder to submit on HN?

5 pointsegiva6 comments

Just a quick question/concept: should it be a bit harder to post on HN - thus leading to higher quality links/submissions? In general, the quality of content posted is amazing, but what if a description of minimum character length was needed to post? Average number of posts per user might decline, but there might be more discussion per post, creating more value for the community. Is this a good idea or bad?

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I'm not sure, but I've been thinking about quality for a bit and figure I'd share my thoughts.

Eternal September is named the way it is because in the past online communities only had to deal with influx when students got to college, but now they have to deal with a constant influx. Given this, it seems obvious to me how you go about countering Eternal September: remove the eternal.

This could be done in a few ways, but the core idea is having a period in which registration has a barrier for most of the year and periods in which the barrier is removed for the sake of growth.

There's value in the links, not only in the discussion. I don't see the point in discouraging submissions (except for spam/off-topic submissions).

Yeah, I think you're right - maybe there's a "push and a "pull" effect involved - creating barriers to make submission more difficult might be a "push", but something like flagging or marking spam and off-topic stuff would be more of a "pull" to encourage quality posts? I think pulls (incentives of any sort) are better for communities than pushes (barriers or punishments). Just some random thoughts...

On Maemo News we handle off-topic submissions via ability to downvote posts. And one downvote is worth 5 upvotes.

No.

EDIT:

There should be the ability to be more granular in posting. More topic options, subscribability etc.

I've said it before - and I'll keep saying it - take the best aspects of Reddit and apply them here.

Why can I easily see top, new, threads and comments - but I have to go to my profile to see my submissions? I can't see if there have been replies to my posts etc.

Rather than making it harder to post - lets make what we already have better to use.

If you enable notifo, and have a supported client, you can get instant notifications of replies to your posts.

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