When I attended the Startup School in 2007, I had to apply. I was sure I wasn't going to get in, but I did, and when I got there I understood that the application wasn't elitist, it was because the venue was pretty fixed in size... and the quality of the event was much different due to this (relatively light) filter you'd applied.
I think hacker news would be much different if you applied a similar filter.
If everyone here were someone sincerely interested in doing a startup, who believed that it was moral to make money by improving people's lives, and believed that technological innovation was a good way to do it, then I think the site would be much different.
The early quality has turned HN into a popular source for a certain segment of news. But that has diluted it as an effective community.
Occasionally there's been talk of doing another site along these lines, but the right kind of filter wasn't obvious.
I think that it is clear what the right kind of filter is-- an application form like the Startup School one.
I don't know what your intentions are for HN going forward, if you have any interest in making significant changes or not. After Nirvana (my open source web platform project) is released, and my startups MVP is done, I intend to write software for a community of startup founders and see if we can make a go of it.
But you have a much bigger following. I think if you liked this idea, picking a hundred or so of the commenters you liked the best from the site would enable rapid evaluation of such applications (especially if the applications were relatively short). However, it might be too easy to game such a system.
But that's where my thoughts are. I always like to try and propose a solution when I see a problem, even if I am not sure my solution will work.
I think hacker news would be much different if you applied a similar filter.
If everyone here were someone sincerely interested in doing a startup, who believed that it was moral to make money by improving people's lives, and believed that technological innovation was a good way to do it, then I think the site would be much different.
The early quality has turned HN into a popular source for a certain segment of news. But that has diluted it as an effective community.
Occasionally there's been talk of doing another site along these lines, but the right kind of filter wasn't obvious.
I think that it is clear what the right kind of filter is-- an application form like the Startup School one.
I don't know what your intentions are for HN going forward, if you have any interest in making significant changes or not. After Nirvana (my open source web platform project) is released, and my startups MVP is done, I intend to write software for a community of startup founders and see if we can make a go of it.
But you have a much bigger following. I think if you liked this idea, picking a hundred or so of the commenters you liked the best from the site would enable rapid evaluation of such applications (especially if the applications were relatively short). However, it might be too easy to game such a system.
But that's where my thoughts are. I always like to try and propose a solution when I see a problem, even if I am not sure my solution will work.