rrpadhy's comments

I am curious to know the server configuration, architecture and the number of hits it is getting.

If someone does offer a new software architecture, and hosting, would people be open to move hackernews there?

I see that submitted and threads are also not allowed.

What is a safe limit to crawl this data, if I have to absolutely need that data? 30 mins between users? 1 hour between users?

Thanks.

Community moderation is quite a nice concept. Slashdot has indeed implemented it quite intelligently.

Yes ... But if the software arch does not decouple the front-end and back-end, then there are essentially no APIs.

An API approach is the best approach. Later it can always be opened to public.

How important is meeting new people on a discussion platform?

How often do you like to follow/friend/private message interesting people you may find on a particular discussion?

lol .... yeah

I guess I got too immersed in thinking about discussions only. :D

Yes. Another feature which is tough to design, such that it is not over annoying and yet solves the purpose. :)

While going through this discussion, I realized HN does not have any form of notification system.

How important is notification for an effective discussion platform?

Effective moderation is always a pain. The biggest curse of moderation is the inability to keep everyone happy. However, it is a necessary evil, which can not be avoided as well.

This point does give me an idea on how to handle the moderation a bit better though. Let me polish the idea, before telling more about it.

As said earlier, identities is quite important to many users. Quora has done it quite well.

However, with the anonymous feature to ask question, I have seen a rapid degradation of the quality of questions coming on Quora. I am not the only one who has felt this way. We can find a lot of people complaining about the quality of questions of late.

I have the exact same views.

In one of the discussion on building the structure, I was amazed to find that people do not think in terms of API.

As for me, I have always thought of having 3 different layers/servers independent of each other. Front-end, Back-end and Database

I am not a big fan of peer to peer system, but will give it a look.

Food is an absolute must. Unfortunately, HN does not have that. :(

BTW, what do you generally like in food discussions? Is it good pics of food dishes, or recipes or something else?

Helpful points here.. - Replies to multiple posts - Easy linking to last comment/post

As about moot, lets see if that happens?

Point taken.

We are already having thoughts on the automation of tagging, grouping or categorization of comments. However, before we start working on it, we are validating on how important or necessary this feature would be.

What if, we spend a few days making an awesome automation to do what you mentioned, but no one really gives a st about it. :)

Completely agree. I had read this someplace, and I go by this statement.

"A good design is something which takes care of both extreme users, and not just a center large portion."

The user feature of a website should be such that, they should feel to interact either as real identity (gets them social karma) or as an anonymous user (without any concerns)

Yes. HN or forums do have this advantage and it has solved the issue of troll to a large extent.

Quora on the other hand, has this feature of being able to ask or answer questions as anonymous, and this has resulted in an avalanche of stupid questions and unrelated answers.

We are somewhere in between, while we like to give a real identity like Quora has, we also believe, anonymity is an important feature to have, for many different reasons.

Have not really liked 4chan, but I will give it a re-look now.

We are having a few things in mind. One of them being applying categories or tags to comments, along with the nested comments.

We believe, each discussion essentially has multiple parallel threads running, and each thread should have its own structure.

The other thought is about users able to post as anonymous, but with certain restrictions.

Absolutely.

The original idea for a better discussion platform came after using fb group for 2.5 years and feeling the pain. We had started the Bangalore Startups group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/blrstartups/)...

Although we keep getting new users fairly well, control and structuring discussions is completely missing..

What do you feel about anonymous user handle? Is it a must? Or discussion platform should not have anonymous users, as it leads to trolling.