davidkatz

Getting people to care about something is hard, what else is new. If you build a genuinely great product, distribution will be a lot less of a problem. Many users will tell their friends, journalists will be receptive.

If you build a 'meh' product, yep, you're going to have a hard time.

'Hang out with people that are similar to you' is a good value proposition. It's a need that many people have that's not met well on the web today. On it's own though, it lacks credibility.

My first reaction would be: 'Meh, whatever. A hundred products already tried to get me to hang out with people like, and I'm using none of them'.

Perhaps it would be useful to consider the problem.

The web is full of places where you can interact with people around topics of interest. Reddit, Facebook Groups, countless chat products, and a sea of specialised communities from Chess servers to HN.

The biggest problem left unsolved in this space is: how do you get people to form real relationships online. Relationships that spill over beyond the site in which it originated and give you a chance for genuine friendship.

If Evemi lets me have more superficial interactions with people around topics of interest, it's probably not going to go very far. If it does have the chance to get me to form genuine relationships, I'd need to know how it does that before giving any credence to 'Hang out with people that are similar to you'.

Just my 2 cents.

This is indeed a serious problem. An interesting startup that is trying to address it is http://www.mathalicious.com/. They give math teachers lesson plans which tie math to things that students care about - 'is Kobe Bryant a better shooter than LeBron James?'. Things like that.

From my own experience, I was pretty bored with Math in high school. Through a series of coincidences I started reading some popular physics books, which led me to study Physics and re-discover Math as an incredible tool.

From my experience, most people will never visit a second page on your site, or even scroll down to read more text. The best thing you can do is hit people right in the face with a strong value proposition. In your case 'Follow the things you love' seems to abstract, it doesn't really do anything to communicate the product to me.

Imo, this is not representative. You should try to do a better job explaining what your product is, and that's it. Very little people will care about 6 month roadmaps, and asking you for revenue projections is plain silly.

As long as new technology emerges, new opportunities will emerge with it. There's also reason to believe that technological change is accelerating, leading to ever more possible great ideas.

Your 'perhaps in a decade or so there will be no more great ideas' reminds me of many failed predictions about the saturation of technology.

At least the homepage doesn't seem that restrictive to me. It looks like it was designed to communicate something about Quibb and get me to apply. I just think it does that very well.

Sounds like a good direction, like most things it probably needs to be tested in the wild. I'm not sure that it addresses the heart of the problem though, which might be this: as communities get larger, quality drops.

This is a hard problem to solve, and all I can do is offer some ideas. One idea might be to have a hierarchy of influence, where some users have more power than others, and users get promoted automatically according to their activity.

Off the top of my head, here's one possible way this could work:

Say you have three member tiers - reader, contributor and editor, and let's further say that the power of each tier differs in order of magnitude. readers can grant items 1 point, contributors 10 points, and administrators 100 points.

If members at a higher tier than you consistently upvote stuff after you upvote it, at some point you get promoted. In the same way, if they downvote stuff after you upvote it you get demoted.

I'd be interested if HN or Reddit ever experimented with something like this.

One other important thought - you'll probably never be able to completely automate a great community. Or put another way - everything else being equal, a community that is also actively curated by someone with great taste is probably going to be better.

I think the point was that the quality of both meat and hosting products varies greatly but is not easily understood by consumers. When consumers don't understand what makes something good, you're left with no choice but to compete on price, driving quality down even further. In the end you could get a market where most offerings suck, very little people are aware of it, and almost everyone is worse off.

I do however agree that the article provided very little insight.

Quibb seems interesting, but from your homepage it's hard for me to get a sense of value. May I ask why you don't let me see your content?

The direction seems fruitful, but there was very little to learn in this article. More insight into what is actually wrong with hosting providers would have made this a lot better.

I now feel about Hacker News round about how I felt with TechCrunch a few months before I stopped reading it completely. I'm mainly here because of inertia, and because there is still great content from time to time and I don't want to miss it.

My attention is very much up for the taking. The moment something better comes along, I'd be the first to switch.

I wish PG put more love into HN. It used to be amazing, now it's just nice. At least, that's my opinion.

There's a serious discussion here which seems ignored. It is: "what are the pros and cons of government forced 'terms of life'". Without that discussion, it seems to me that most of the complaints in the article remain a curiosity.

I appreciate the amount of thought you've put into this, but let me try to raise a question.

Matter is a pretty well defined thing. 'Experiential Stuff' on the other hand, seems to be less defined. If it means human or human-like experiences, I think we can all agree that moss most probably doesn't have that. If it means something else, then anyone claiming that moss has it should first define what it is.

If I said (for example) that moss is gerclectic, I would first have to define what gerclectic means. Absent of a definition, I actually said nothing.

If 'Experiential' does not mean human or human like experiences, what does it mean?

It's an amicable world view, but everything we know about the world suggests that moss does not have anything that resembles an experience, and that applying words such as 'happiness' to moss is utterly meaningless.

Interesting. Over the years, I've often played with the idea of letting someone invest in 'me' vs. my businesses. Here's why: if I take investment for a company, I have a conflict of interest with my investor. He/she wants the company to succeed, I want me to succeed and that could happen outside the company.

My style of doing business is very diversified. At any point I'm trying two or three different things, and retaining flexibility is an absolute priority. I need to be able to ditch business A and focus on business B whenever I see fir. This pretty much rules out regular investments because it leaves me too committed for my own good.

Another thought: I'd like to use such a platform as both a backer and a mentor. I'd like to back people who are an order of magnitude less successful than me, and get backing from people who are an order of magnitude more successful than me.

UPDATE: grammar correction

Interesting. Although I tend to agree, it's worth considering one possible difference between cutlery and computing devices: cutlery may have very little usage overlap, and computing devices may have considerable usage overlap.

I actually use my notebook and tablet for reading (even the same content!), I actually use all devices for facebook, I actually use my phone and tablet for gaming, and so forth.

For some tasks, one device type is clearly superior to all others (notebook for typing, tablet for sketching). For many tasks though, clear superiority is hard to establish, or is heavily context dependent.

Ultimately, Steve had it right - for the iPad to succeed, it had to be clearly better for some important things. Strong separation of uses is not required.

Does anyone know the story from Gruber's side?

I understand, and you raise important questions. We think about these things quite often, and we're very much prepared to feel our way to a product that works. The big question for us is - is online professional activity valuable for a large enough group of employers and candidates? We think the answer is yes, but we can't be sure until we (or someone else) builds a successful business around it.

Glad you like our style!

When you say "there's so much noise in social channels and generally you find many people there who look rather for attention than real long-sighted achievements and it's hard to recognize the real gems in that noise.", could that not make room for a company that aims to do just that - recognize the real gems?

Thanks for the edit :)

Agree 100%. Our approach is "if a candidate has some data online, we'll help you make better sense of it. If they don't, there's nothing we can tell you."

Right. Our current goals is to help employers with their existing candidates. I have a question - would you like to be able to get a profile on skills? If so, what would you do with it?

Thanks!

We definitely need to make that clearer. Right now, we're focussing on letting companies make better sense of the candidates they already have. Can you tell me your thoughts on that?

We know, and that sucks. Let me ask you a question though - developers who can't put their code online, will some of them not engage online otherwise? Say, consume professional content on twitter, post on HN, or answer questions on Stack Overflow?

Our goal is to look at any kind of professional activity online, not only code. What do you think?

We know, and we're working hard at that problem. Here's two thoughts:

(1) It's not our goal to make candidates like you look bad, not at all. When candidates have professional stuff online, we think employers should be interested in getting a good view of it. That's all we try to do. We wouldn't give you a bad score - we'd give you no score at all. Essentially, we're telling employers: "we can't know anything about this candidate, you should look at other stuff".

(2) I checked out your HN profile, and you have a ton of comments up. So, you do interact professionally online, at least in some way. I'm curious to hear your thoughts - say you applied for a job, and we did our best (algorithmic) job to make your HN footprint interesting to employers - what would that do for your attractiveness as a candidate?

I get you. A lot of developers don't take their work online at all. But there are probably a hundred thousands developers who do take at least some parts of their work online.

Perhaps speaking more practically, the market for developers is segmented. Not all companies want to hire all developers, and some companies specifically look for developers who do take their work online. It's those companies we want to help right now.

Take us for example. We just hired Yuval Adam (http://y3xz.com/) for a project, and his online activity had a huge part in raising our interest.

Check out his site. It's essentially a collection of links to professionally relevant online content. Sure, these are no guarantees. If you were hiring a developer though, wouldn't your interest be raised?

Perhaps I can try to convince you of our long term vision: developers increasingly take their work online, which results in a mountain of professional data. A lot of it is meaningless, but some of it can be woven into interesting stories.

We're still trying to find the best approach to this, but in essence, our mission is making sense of this data. Some of this will have nothing to do with popularity - say, we might give you a concise overview of someone's code or professional thoughts. Other metrics will use social activity only as a rough validation. For example, if someone has 20 watchers on GitHub, they're definitely not a celebrity, but they have crossed a very meaningful threshold of "someone cares about this person's work".

Does that sound like a good direction to you?

Hey! I'm David, the other co-founder of Skills. We're been mulling over our scoring for a while, and at this point we don't consider it a fundamental part of the product. Within the next few weeks, we'll be canning 'passion' and 'respect' and replacing it with something much simpler. In the future, we might drop scoring all together.

Our mission it to extract the most meaningful data from someone's professional activity online, and we're currently exploring how to best do that. If you're a job seeker, it's our goal to show employers the best version of you.

Question: do you think your current activity online can make you look good to employers? If so, what would you most like to show them?

Thanks!

I'd probably disagree, and I'll try give you two points to support my position:

POINT ONE

45 years ago, right at the end of the six day war, when Israel took control over the West Bank, the UN security council passed resolution 242, which required:

(i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

At the time, as far as I know, Arab states lobbied heavily to include the world 'all' before 'territories' in point (i), and the wording was not accepted by the Security Council. Furthermore, point (ii) can be (and often has been) read to mean that Israel has serious and legitimate concerns which need to be addressed, and that any withdrawal should only happen within a peace agreement which deals with these legitimate concerns. After all, 20 years earlier, Israel's neighbors tried to destroy it, although Israel claimed sovereignty over solely those territories deemed acceptable by the UN partition plan of 1947.

I think another important point is, that the ambiguity in language of the resolution is by design. You could imagine a much clearer resolution, a resolution with unequivocally deems the occupation illegal and calls for immediate withdrawal. Something which would read like a judge's ideas on what needs to be done, for example, with money a thief robbed from a bank ("give it back right now, no ifs buts and whens").

POINT TWO

Even the resolution you quote, 446, as far as I can tell, does not deal with the illegality of an Israeli military presence in the territories, but with the illegality of the treatment of civillian populations. Check out this part of 446:

2. [The resolution] Strongly deplores the failure of Israel to abide by Security Council resolutions 237, 252 and 298...

Now think about this. Twelve years had passed since the 1967 war, and Israel had still not withdrawn from the territories. The above part of the resolution, very conspicuously, is missing a reference to resolution 242, which I discussed above. The UN security council then, twelve years after the 1967 war, with Israel still present in the West Bank, could not agree that 242 was violated, and, as far as I know, has not deemed 242 violated since. If I'm right on this point, it would seem to strongly support the view that 242 (and the UN security council since then) did not, and does not deem Israeli military presence in the entire West Bank illegal, and does not support the view that Israel needs to unilaterally withdraw to 1967 lines, but rather, that Israel still has legitimate concerns which need to be addressed, and rights to at least part of the territory.

Your thoughts?

Sorry, but I can't see any actual response to my questions here, just further hate mongering.

Israel does not claim Gaza. It withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005, and gave full control over to the Palestinian Authority. Israeli NGOs even invested tens of millions of dollars in boosting the Palestinian economy after the withdrawal.

Either way, it's probably going to be very hard to have a reasoned discussion, so I'll just stop here.