It's not entirely clear to me that news.yc would be a better place without all the submissions and comments that get only one or two upvotes. For example, I'm still convinced that idiagram's wicked problem solving visualization was one of the intellectually interesting (and beautiful) news.yc submissions ever, even though I'm apparently the only one who voted for it:<p><a href="http://www.idiagram.com/CP/cpprocess.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.idiagram.com/CP/cpprocess.html</a><p>Looking through my own submissions I see that the more intellectual stuff I've posted, while it's done well, has never gotten as many votes as the pithy one-liners.
Interesting. I post lots of things that I find obscure and don't expect others to upmod.<p>I think part of the reason that news.yc is interesting is that there are a number of non-overlapping interest areas within a tight niche. Think about that. Diversity within a narrow field. I like that.
Thanks for posting this interesting data set, but after thinking about it for some time, I don't think this data offers any insights into yc.news. The leader to user ratio is too high, which skews all the numbers so that nothing really meaningful can be extracted. It's also hard to spot any trends from the point system alone - user identity, time of post relative to other news, and the controversy of the post content can play important factors in the post's point value, and all of these don't necessarily have any correlation with the user who posted it. I think in order to figure out something about the community, someone will have to get their hands dirty and actually look at post content.
Also, pg could probably run this on the complete data set, which might better illustrate what's happening with the more prolific members of the community.
Fantastic! A digitally generated picture is worth 2^10 words!<p>You've certainly embodied the philosophy of Edward Tufte:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8193666-1218533?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%22edward+tufte%22&x=0&y=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8193666-1218533?url...</a><p>There must be many cofactors that are hard to capture in an analysis like this. There's the "binaryness" of making it to the front page. There's also "time of day". A very interesting submission posted at a time when those who would be interested are not online may never gain enough traction to make it to the first page. A time-of-day analysis would certainly be interesting.
This kind of topic worries me because from my experience when a community starts worrying about "cohesion", "trolls" and like, this is usually the first sign of it's fall down.<p>The real problem is what most of us would call a fall down today, that will be called tommorow (and interpreted as) a rise up from other people (thus the extreme difficulty to create efficient moderating systems based on quantitative data). You know your community is irreversibly "corrupted" when this kind of people becomes the majority, and this usually happen surprisingly quickly with the faster growth of visitors.<p>For some reason I have some hope for HN because of PG being behind it, he kinda knows what he wants and certainly knows what he doesn't want. Still, this might be one of the thoughest challenge he'll be faced with if HN keeps growing. I've known no community that escaped this syndrom yet.
As a relatively newer member here, it would be interesting to know how these numbers came about over time; i.e, did the more prolific members start out with a bang, or did they gradually build up steam to reach where they are now?