The more a community grows, the more susceptible it is to PR attacks to manipulate its content. With just 100 fake ids, any attacker can bring to the front page any news they want, even astroturfing becomes easy, downvote everything you don't like and upvote your agenda.
ie. one thing is to call Ubuntu's latest release a disaster, another one to call it just different from previous releases or just point out the differences and let every reader decide.
Linkbaiting should be banned, sensationalism should be banned, highly biased news should be banned, hype should be banned.
Once groupon (just to name one of many) appeared more than ten times a day in the front page, now their PR machine has slowed down to a halt. Yes, they pay PR agencies to launch torpedoes at every news outlet, we all know that. But without proper monitoring it can become tiresome to the reader.
Moderation is key, news should be moderated according to every forum's interest, in our case tech news and entrepreneurship.
I hope someday PG understands that to avoid the fate of slashdot, digg, TC, etc he must enforce stricter rules for quality content, even if he has to pay a couple of editors to maintain the front page and the comments clean. And no, HN is not untouchable, it may fade into oblivion too.
Unless he is in bed with some PR agencies (like TC) in that case, everything I said is moot.
Moderation to represent the interests of the users is moderation done by the users. If you and everyone upvote appropriate content (including on the new page) it will eventually reflect what people find interesting. It is about the users do, not just about what PG does. HN has always been about finding the right mechanisms so that the right balance in content is reached. What has changed is the number and the kind of people on the site, it has changed what type of submission is upvoted, it has also made the number of submissions increase, making it more difficult for the interesting ones to come through.
ie. one thing is to call Ubuntu's latest release a disaster, another one to call it just different from previous releases or just point out the differences and let every reader decide.
Linkbaiting should be banned, sensationalism should be banned, highly biased news should be banned, hype should be banned.
Once groupon (just to name one of many) appeared more than ten times a day in the front page, now their PR machine has slowed down to a halt. Yes, they pay PR agencies to launch torpedoes at every news outlet, we all know that. But without proper monitoring it can become tiresome to the reader.
Moderation is key, news should be moderated according to every forum's interest, in our case tech news and entrepreneurship.
I hope someday PG understands that to avoid the fate of slashdot, digg, TC, etc he must enforce stricter rules for quality content, even if he has to pay a couple of editors to maintain the front page and the comments clean. And no, HN is not untouchable, it may fade into oblivion too.
Unless he is in bed with some PR agencies (like TC) in that case, everything I said is moot.