Y Combinator Hacker News is a teenager going through an emo period. But still rockin.

HN is like a teenager going through an emo period. We all need a haircut and some new music to listen to. And a date.
comment by coglethorpe via news.ycombinator.com

Check out Y Combinator Hacker News if you haven't already. It's a phenomenal social news site that really distills the best intelligent stuff on the web all in one place.

I ditched my daily Google Reader addiction because all the stuff I liked would appear on Hacker News anyway. Its not just tech stuff -- smart ideas from sociology, poli sci, economics, business, science, etc. regularly appear as well.

Unfortunately, here come the social media growing pains for this great site. There are ongoing experiments to try to preserve the overall character of the site.

My 2 cents: People need to learn to shut up if they have nothing valuable to say. I think that at scale, noise will kill the usefulness of a user generated content site faster than anything else. So either people need to change, or the site needs to hide dumb comments / site submissions, and fast.

Living the Dream: Clocky (1 lone designer/entrepreneur) = $2 million revenue in 2008

It's the entrepreneur's dream. Come up with a great idea for a product, build it, and they will come. But for Gauri Nanda, it's true.  Inc Magazine reports that 2008 revenues were projected to be over $2 million. It's an alarm clock that rolls off the table and demands that you find it somewhere in your room when it goes off in the morning. Designed for a class project at MIT's Media Lab, the project was an overnight hit once she sourced online through alibaba.com.

The commercial success of the product was largely launched off of coverage by engadget, gizmodo and boingboing. Pretty amazing what this new attention economy means for entrepreneurs. A compelling story suddenly can build value massively, just for the sheer fact that people surf their RSS readers constantly while at work.

Now that's inspiring. Her next challenge is to figure out how to turn this great success story into an enduring business for Nanda Home, her design firm. I can't wait to hear what's next.


Social software creators must be economists, political scientists, and computer scientists, all at once

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.

via Clay Shirky's essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Three things you have to accept:

  1. You cannot separate technical and social issues.
  2. Members are different from users. "The group within the group that matters most--" your core users = the gardeners of the community.
  3. The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.

And four things to design for:

  1. Identity so that people can be identified consistently.
  2. Give distinction to the inner circle vs members vs noobs.
  3. Segmentation of capabilities. Hacker News does this well through its karma system -- users can only downvote after X number of karma points.
  4. Spare users from scale. If there are too many people, the noise goes up. Let people self-select into groups, or make it hard to join because you only want people who really want to be in.

Some really great lessons learned from Communitree and LambdaMOO too -- old online communities from the BBS days.

I feel blessed to get a chance to continue the ongoing experiment of creating great social software. Thanks for a great roadmap, Clay.