YC.News Experiment: 630 Karma points in 31 Days - Lessons Learned
So, I signed up for YC.News 31 days ago with the goal of increasing my team's chances of getting an interview for YCombinator's Summer Founders Program. Once we were turned down for an interview, I decided to keep contributing to YC.News since I found it so valuable as a community. It's been an interesting month, and last night I finally passed Daniel Ha as the #1 karma leader on the site. I don't expect that lead to last very long (Sam Odio is coming up fast), so I figured this would be a good time to write about my experience and what I've learned from my involvement.
Microcosm
YC.News is an interesting microcosm where contributors are rewarded with karma points by other users when their submission or comment is deemed valuable. In that sense, each karma-motivated contributor is like a startup trying to provide what people want. The market reward for pleasing users is money, while the YC.News reward is karma, contacts, and a little recognition.
Tactics
The obvious goal is to provide submissions and comments that are valuable to a large portion of the YC.News community.
The way to do this is also pretty obvious:
- Observe the articles that are most popular and submit similar stories
- Experiment by submitting stories that are of personal interest
- Add insightful detailed comments
When I would come across a good article on a blog that was new to me, I would add it to Google Reader. Those blogs added up pretty quickly. I also used Technorati's RSS feeds of custom searches to find interesting stories. "ycombinator", "y combinator", "startups", "entrepreneurship", etc are good terms to monitor. Pretty soon I never even had to leave my RSS reader to find good stories to submit.
Also helpful is to submit articles when the most users are using the site, otherwise your new submissions could get buried on the 'new' page before folks even get a chance to see them.
Trends
The stories I submitted earlier in the month seemed to have gotten more traction than the stories I've submitted over the last week or so. I'm not sure if that is because the community dynamic is changing, but that would be my guess since the quality of my submissions seems to have remained static. As the month has progressed, it has taken more and more submissions to find a story that would become popular (15+ karma).
I've also found that I relate less and less to some of the popular stories. For example, the #1 story as I write this is "MBAs Go Contrarian on Google" which is an article (if you can call it that) of one and a half sentences that to me is pretty dull. That article has a karma of 12 while some of the really interesting stories I submitted today like "Video: Seven Steps to Easy Rails Deployment on EC2" are decaying in the 'new' section with only a default karma of 1.
Sure, it would be easy to 'game' the system and bump articles to the front page where they would get more traction, but of course that would defile the experiment and also hammer my real-life karma ;)
Value
I have learned a great deal from many of the articles and comments on YC.News and I've tried to be generous in adding karma points to those submissions of greatest value to me personally.
A huge benefit is the many super-talented guys that I've gotten to know directly or indirectly through the site. When you're not in a university setting, being able to make good contacts like this is invaluable.
It's also been a good experience to learn first-hand what it is to be an active contributor in a social-user-contribution site. Before this, I didn't really understand how compelling and addictive it could be to be in a tight community of your peers online (I've never had a myspace/facebook/whatever account).
Drawbacks
Though I tried to only participate in YC.News on my breaks, I found myself getting sucked in to working on YC.News for much longer than I anticipated. I'd be in denial if I didn't admit that it slowed down my own development efforts - both in writing my own articles and in coding on my own project. I'm glad that I did the experiment, but it was more costly time-wise than I anticipated.
Conclusion
Great experience and though I plan to still participate in YC.News, this experiment is over and I'll turn my focus more exclusively to finishing my product and readying for launch. I hope that once I launch my own service (don't worry it's not a social networking site), there will be a strong interactive user base that I can be heavily involved in. I think that will be the most fun and the smugmug and scribd guys are an excellent example of that.
Update: I'm now an active Facebook user :)
03 May 2007 Matt Jaynes
Very interesting experience feedback.
Y.news as reddit are very addicting because news are rolling away very fast. So to get a chance to catch links or info pertinent for us, which is not necessarily the best ranked, one has to keep following news publication to supplement the startup news sieve put in place by votes.
My conclusion is that there is room for improvement by finding new ways to allow users to increase signal over noise ratio for the info they seek and to minimize cost to get it.
The reason why I continue reading reddit and Y.news is because I do find gold gems in them from time to time. I am quite sure there is room for improvement, the thing is to find out how this can be done.