Hacker News Reader

Comment by dougw | Hacker News Reader

I really liked the comment on giving some service away before account creation. In my experience, one of the largest hurdles to user adoption is getting something useful from the site. If a user is able to see the value of the service *before* putting something into it, they are more likely to understand the offering and accepting the reward for 5 minutes worth of forms. There are so many services competing for users attention and everyone of them are fighting for their niche. You have to put something on the table to gain the initial interest to keep the user on a site long enough to make it past the click of the back button. I could not agree more with this point.

This recent story relates: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=824

View on HN

Anyone know what he means by the "No threading etc." comment in: 'It's a tool. The community can grow elsewhere. No threading etc. "del.icio.us sux" is an awful experience I'd rather user's didn't have.'

I think he means that threaded comments encourage flamewars, since they let you respond to responses, instead of to the original article.

When reddit added comments, I think that was one of the complaints. But Digg's awful "@userX..." kludge demonstrates that people will flame no matter what, but if comments are unthreaded, they'll just flame more clumsily and less avoidably.

I've had this discussion several times with one of the early developers of del.icio.us. It is by far one of my favorite web tools, and I think one of the most useful things about it is the way that it encourages a sort of conversation between its users (ie, someone can send a bookmrak to me, which of itself, begins a sort of dialogue between us, or can write a description in the notes taht I know is intended for me). What I find disappointing sometimes is that when this happens there is no way for me respond to them directly about the link (you can send messages to another user, but then you lose a lot of the context). The most obvious answer would be to allow me to comment on other users' bookmarks or "send" them a message back about the bookmark they sent me. The explanation I keep getting when I say this is that they didn't want to distract users or muddy the purpose of the app by turning it into another blogging tool. Ultimately, I think they made the right choice not to add this feature. It keeps it clean and useful while still allowing for self expression within the core of the application. I would probably like Digg a lot more if I weren't so damned distracted by all of the threaded comments that follow each post, most of which are completely useless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com