The Defenders of HN, like much of what's said in the channel is tongue in cheek.

And for the record, and I think this goes for any of the regulars in there, sure, if somebody mentions an article that I like and points it out in there, I'll vote it up. If somebody mentions an article that's crap, I won't. I do the same on HN by subscribing to the RSS feeds (via searchyc) of a handful of HN users that I find consistently post stuff I want to read.

As I see it, #startups is a channel which has very smart people involved in the startups community including many people working for YC companies. As the channel is realtime we have the great opportunity to point others to interesting stories before they will go to hackernews and see what's new themselves. Certainly not all people will just up vote articles blindly without seeing if it's actually a good article. Just like I think swombat's response was good, I gave him an up vote. If you sticked around in our channel longer you would know that we often joke about taking money and "giving free upvotes". Hiding in the channel anonymously and posting the logs on this channel is exactly why people get annoyed with the content you submit which in turn results in calling names (which I should also apologize for) in an informal semi-private setting..

The people in the channel submit interesting and relevant articles on regular base and I think those submissions are one of the main reasons I visit this site on a daily base. The channel is certainly part of the solution and not the problem. We submit good content, why worry about the way it happens?

This discussion was started in the open and I'd prefer to keep it in the open. I don't like 'backchannels', what I have to say can stand the light of day.

> As I see it, #startups is a channel which has very smart people involved in the startups community including many people working for YC companies.

Nobody denies that.

> As the channel is realtime we have the great opportunity to point others to interesting stories before they will go to hackernews and see what's new themselves.

Which is fine up to a point, and that's where our disagreement probably begins.

> Certainly not all people will just up vote articles blindly without seeing if it's actually a good article.

But some do, and it is more than enough to make a noticeable difference, and not always for the better.

If it were always for the better that would be one thing but plenty of times the upvotes are based on 'who' and not on 'what'.

Invariably the biggest effort to 'upvote' centers around self posts by the people from #startups, even when their stuff is pretty lame.

It rarely happens that the power of #startups is used to 'rescue' a really good post from falling of the new page without upvotes, but it does occasionally happen.

> Just like I think swombat's response was good, I gave him an up vote.

That's fine with me. But let's be fair here, there has been enough 'anti jacquesm' sentiment on #startups to fill a couple of buckets with. The reason why I decided to post that bit of log is simply because I'm being told to my face I'm making this up while it's happening right under my nose.

For the record, I started hanging out in #startups after receiving several emails with a bunch of stuff that was said behind my back, so I got curious what you guys are up to, this was right after some weird emails to my address regarding HN and I figured maybe that's where the source lies.

> If you sticked around in our channel longer you would know that we often joke about taking money and "giving free upvotes".

You joke about it, and at the same time there is plenty of it happening. If everybody on HN would hang out in #startups it would be a different thing, elsewhere in this thread someone claims that

> The folks on #startups are the HN community.

but that would be off by at least two orders of magnitude.

> Hiding in the channel anonymously and posting the logs on this channel is exactly why people get annoyed with the content you submit which in turn results in calling names (which I should also apologize for) in an informal semi-private setting..

I think you have the order confused here, I first received a bunch of logs by email which suggested that there was a fairly concerted effort to downvote my stuff, no matter whether it was on topic or not. This has happened to more than one person on HN, so my feeling at the time was that #startups is not only used to promote content but also to squelch certain individuals.

I'm not sure about the latter, but given some of the stuff said in #startups and the resulting votes on those comments I would conclude that the accent is on upvotes but that group-downvotes definitely do happen if only occasionally.

If you have absolutely never ganged up on someone in a group setting then of course this does not apply to you.

> The people in the channel submit interesting and relevant articles on regular base and I think those submissions are one of the main reasons I visit this site on a daily base.

There is plenty of stuff submitted by others, that do not hang out in #startups that sinks without a trace, if you wanted to upvote interesting stuff then you could do that by basically scanning the new page every couple of hours.

#startups is for the most part limiting the bundling of upvotes to a relatively small group of people.

There are two positive effects from the group there, the one is flagging spam, the other is to upvote interesting articles, but as I said elsewhere that is the beginning of an arms race that eventually will spiral out of control.

I can probably muster plenty of upvotes because of the people on HN that I know or have met but I would never ever dream of doing that.

I once mailed someone about something I wrote and it was immediately interpreted as 'oh, I'll vote your stuff up', I never did that again.

> the channel is certainly part of the solution and not the problem. We submit good content, why worry about the way it happens?

I'm not sure that I'm able to explain this well enough, but let me try:

When a society forms, around a theme or some set of common interests the idea is that the 'one man one vote' principle will guide that society to stay on the rails.

If a small group of people, even with the best of intentions starts to control a dis-proportionally large part of the conversation we are well under way to 'stage 2', which will culminate in people using voting rings, botnets and all kinds of other strategies to drown out each other in the battle for control of the homepage.

Already there is substantial code in the HN core to deal with that sort of thing.

You are accelerating that process, and possibly the decline.

I think this falls under 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'.

That's an easy statement to make. How do you know that your well-intentioned crusade doesn't cause more harm than good?

Historically, I've found that self-righteous crusades cause a lot more problems than they solve.

and. crucially. nobody forces anyone in the channel to upvote or post anything. I only ever upvote links posted in #startups if I think they're interesting, which is exactly the same criteria I use on any HN link.

Also, apologies for the "fuck jacquesm", but I do get annoyed by puritanism and other moral crusades.

But I think you're going about it in the exact opposite way, you are starting an 'arms race', which will eventually runaway with voting blocks controlling what gets posted on HN.

That site is called 'Digg' I believe.

The first group of guys that gets away with it will engender the second and the third, after all, if it's ok that you do it why would it not be ok for other groups to do it?

I've seen first hand how effective it is what you are doing but I simply disagree with it, even if it is content that I like.

To pretend that I'm 'making it up' is disingenuous, especially since you - of all people - are most aware that it is very real.

No need to apologize, I'm not made of sugar, I just like to know what rules we're playing by.

Essentially you're saying HN is fair game and you can gang together your votes in order to gain effective control of the site to maintain a certain character, and I would like us all to retain our individuality in order to do exactly the same.

So we disagree - strongly - about the means but definitely not about the goal.

You are trying to create a solution by staging a 'behind the scenes coup' I would like a solution that creates a level playing field for everybody.

Translation: "What you're doing works, but I disagree with it based on abstract principles, even though I like the results."

You are trying to create a solution by staging a 'behind the scenes coup' I would like a solution that creates a level playing field for everybody.

We already have a level playing field: it's called "Google". The point of a site like HN is not to create some kind of abstractly idealist "level playing field", but to provide content that people (me included) want to read.

Ultimately, you could disagree with what we do on the basis of "fairness" - but actually our system is more fair. There are many cases where someone brought up an excellent link that was from a site never before posted on HN, and/or posted by an unknown user. We're actually achieving the aim of fairness even more. Remember, this is an open channel, everyone (you included) is welcome to show up and be a part of it. There's no "karma check" at the front door. Hell, some people on #startups don't even have HN users.

Unlike the digg cabal that you compare us to, joining this channel requires only that you fire up your IRC client and join freenode#startups. And no one is under any obligation to vote up anything. Hardly a voting ring, I'd say.

I see us as an optimisation mechanism to help great content get to the front page - there's nothing dodgy about it at all. Which is why, unlike your earlier suggestion, I am not "mad because you pointed out our little group". I think it's bad form in general to post stuff from an IRC channel onto a public forum, but I'm not made of sugar either.

In fact, I'd say, please do join us there (and this applies to anyone reading this). We're a friendly bunch and very welcoming, and a lot of the most active HN users hang out there. Find us here:

chat.freenode.net:6667

Channel: #startups

That's what they want you to think.

Which I'm fine with. I've been much more disappointed with newbie contributions than anything I've noticed from the #startups crew. I don't want democracy here, I want quality.