top | item 3844365

Instant share button for Hacker News

31 points| lest | 14 years ago |thechangelog.com

21 comments

order
[+] samirahmed|14 years ago|reply
The white box is misleading. I thought it was a speech box, indicating comments, but it is an upvote indicator. Would be nice to disambiguate with an upward arrow shape. Otherwise looks nifty.
[+] joering2|14 years ago|reply
as much as like this idea, I dont like this idea. I think to true value in HN lays in the fact its not hugely popular in masses. It has its own group of brilliant hackers, programmers, lawyers, writers, etc, that are willing to spend time to read/write BECAUSE there is interesting stuff to read here, and other interesting people are willing to read what they want to write. If everyone jumps on this ship, most likely quality of subscriptions and comments will go down. So the "elite" will swim away...

I think HN, with its current audience and contributors is PERFECT the way it is.

so sorry to burst your bubble :(

[+] aadilr|14 years ago|reply
I second. As well-intentioned as this is, I am firmly against HN becoming the mainstream social platform that it will become if it is to be grouped in the same share boat as Facebook, Twitter, etc. It is perfectly fine for a blog post to link to its corresponding HN discussion, but I feel that the share button approach commodifies the experience.
[+] PStamatiou|14 years ago|reply
I can't find it now, but this HN button thing has come up several times before and pg commented on it saying something similar.
[+] eoghan|14 years ago|reply
I find this idea of trying to maintain a certain "elite" quality quite silly. This sort of growth is a natural phenomenon that happens to valuable sites like HN.

Trying to prevent growth in a certain area (i.e. the less awesome people who you like here) will prevent growth in all areas—e.g. HN buttons could also promote HN to great but new hackers. If you stop these guys from getting involved, you'll cut off the lifeblood of a community whose participants are moving very quickly past the phase where they're excited to be involved in such a community—people get successful, busy, jaded, etc. and not forever passionate enough to bother doing the things that HN needs: reading, commenting, voting. You need new guys to replace the old guys, and both can learn from each other.

If HN is locked down to a degree that its natural growth is stunted, it will die, and probably deservedly so.

[+] RegEx|14 years ago|reply
If you think the value of HN stems from it not being popular with the masses, you're fully capable of making HN 1 unit better by leaving. Oh, wait, this doesn't apply to you, does it?
[+] est|14 years ago|reply
I think it's the instant spam button for Hacker News.