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Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried a site like this except with additional exclusivity? Can't vote unless logged in, can't log in unless invited? Or can't vote unless 'approved', or something similar?

Would it work better? It seems like the problem is that you get too many political submissions and polemic comments which get the votes but aren't "hacker news" in the sense of what that used to mean.

I've been here apparently 4.2 years (no idea how), and the only thing I really notice that's different is the marked uptick in political discussions as well as the more confrontational nature of commenters. Is that bad? I dunno.

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MetaFilter has successfully used the "pay $5 for an account" model as a means to balance access against exclusivity. It may not be a tech site but considering it's still basically just an open access group blog (with a few bells and whistles) the model seems to have served it quite well.

Agree. The $5 lifetime fee was all it took to keep Metafilter from being diluted after reaching critical mass. Simple and effective.

It has been tried. Exclusivity could arguably make things worse, since it leads to elitism and doesn't necessarily ensure the quality of content is better.

I suppose that depends on what you're looking for. For example, for quite a few years my friends and I had an invite-only forum where we hung out, posted interesting links, etc. All told, about 30 of us at the peak. It was great, while it lasted.

A group of like-minded individuals could, and have many times, do something similar. Besides the problems you listed, you also have the one we eventually ran into: stuff gets stale after awhile. You have very few new members coming in, and various rifts appear in your community where people butted heads.

I'd also like to add that while as a community we do tend to be on the elitist side, we also tend to have a strong "info should be free" side, which may conflict with closed societies like this.

I think to really succeed here, we need to keep it public, but also keep the people who have already proven to be distasteful out. That was easier back in the day when people only had one email address if they were extremely lucky. Far harder today without requiring some sort of personally identifiable information, not to mention some way of validating it.

> while it lasted.

What happened to it? Why did it die?

I've had a similar forum many years ago but haven't been able to replicate the experience since.

I believe the biggest reason for it dying was that a schism appeared in our community. A few people had a public argument, sides were taken, words were spoken, feelings were hurt, etc. We had some people leave, and despite some attempts here or there, we had no new members to fill the gaps.

Another possibility is this place was created back before sites like Facebook, twitter, etc. Once social media came to prominence, some of us started communicating via other methods and we didn't check the forum as much as we used to. When your userbase is that small, it doesn't take much of a disruption to kill it.

Ah, yeah that's obviously a problem.

Maybe some kind of "top 10" of HN as voted on by the "elite" - no extra, private comment area, no special form of communication, no nothing except the additional ability to contribute a vote towards a "top 10".

I'm also not really even sure such a thing is necessary. I still love HN for it's content and conversations.

https://lobste.rs is the "invite-only HN".

Does anyone have an invite to it? It looks interesting (my email is in my profile). Thanks!

As an experiment, I'd like to see a HackerNews or reddit-like site where the older accounts get more voting power. (Actually, there's no reason you couldn't just put a weighted voting system into place parallel with the old system, and just offer different views.)

I don't think it would work, but I'm interested to see how it would fail. It would probably lead to all sorts of weird gaming of the system ("Ebay auction for reddit account #12") and unintended consequences. But those would also be an interesting outcome of the experiment.

I'd prefer a solution that weighted votes on the basis of the quality of the voters' own contributions.

A simple method might be to just build on the "avg. karma" calculation that HN already does, and use that as the value of your upvotes. Have an average karma score of 3? Your upvote adds three points to the score of the post.

This is based on the assumption that people whose own contributions are high-quality are also more likely to appreciate high-quality contributions posted by others. Using cumulative karma or seniority as a basis for vote weighting would make quantity - of posts or time - equivalent to quality, and might dilute things a bit.

The drawback here is that any system of vote-weighting, when coupled with using voting to indicate agreement or disagreement, might encourage a greater level of groupthink, and leave less room for discussion of controversial topics.

How do you know that HN isn't using a weighted voting system? Ever since points were taken out of the UI there could have been an algo added between arrow-clicking and vote-registering.

https://lobste.rs is what you're talking about. Invite-only, hardcore relevance in topic submissions.

http://monocle.io/ - expressly set out to be a HN with a different community vibe.

If they did, would you know about it?

That's the thing about invite-only systems, everyone assumes they're among the ones who would be invited...

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