[HH] Hardware Hacking sub-reddit

[Tom Metro]

Mark Komarinski wrote:
> Having user-driven content and editorial control is generally a
> recipe for disaster. ...tyranny of the majority.

If the end-product you are trying to produce is the weekly top-10
stories, then it seems there should be multiple ways to address this.
(None of which are necessarily supported by Reddit.)

You can let the main-queue devolve into chaos and fill up with silly
comments, as long as the interesting stories bubble up. The comments
won't get used in the weekly summary. (Though I suppose if the trolls
get bad enough, the helpful people leave.)

If the article ranking ceases to work, then you can do things like
granting karma points to helpful users, who then have the power to rank
articles. (You might have two ranking scales. One a "people's choice"
that anyone can vote in, and the other an "editor's choice" where the
editor and those with enough karma points can vote in.)

(Stack Exchange and Slashdot are example of a couple of sites where
users earn greater capabilities in exchange for greater participation or
ranking by peers. Does Reddit have the equivalent?)

Basically the task breaks down to 3 steps:
1. content acquisition;
2. ranking for newsworthiness;
3. summarizing.

Even one person can fairly easily fill a queue with articles, though
content acquisition still benefits from crowdsourcing.

Ranking is by far the sweet-spot for crowdsourcing, and if your social
news site isn't doing a good job at that, then it needs redesign.

Summarizing seems to be the most elusive part, and I think that's
largely because no one has tried to build a site to accomplish that. As
far as I've seen, Slashdot does this best, and accomplishes it by having
the editor or the content contributor write the summary. They've
crowdsourced it in that sense, but it now means that 1. if you don't
feel like writing a summary, that's now a barrier to submitting the
content, and 2. if a reader can write a better summary, there is no
mechanism to accept it.

(Presumably, for popular articles, the editors get to pick among
multiple submitters, and thus pick the best summary. For a popular site
like Slashdot, the barriers to submission probably acts as a helpful
filter for the editors.)


> For a small community that won't be too bad, but as it grows (and it
> likely will), you'll start seeing problems.

It looks like the firmware sub-reddit is several years old and pretty
dead, so it could be a very long time before the trolls show up.


> I'd recommend a /.-like setup where you have multiple editors, some
> recommendations from users on what gets posted, and a good comment
> moderation system.

I like reading Slashdot via RSS due to the aforementioned good
summaries. I only click-through usually if I want to get to the source
content. Rarely do I want to see the discussion comments, because the
signal to noise ratio is low, and they end up being a time sink.
(Slashdot does have some useful tools to address this, such as setting
the quality threshold on the comments you want shown.)

The above is to say that I'm not a regular user of the Slashdot web UI.

I think the requirement that submitters include summaries will add
barriers to article submission (fatal for a tiny community), and I don't
think it provides any mechanism for article ranking.

It's also worth noting that I'm not necessarily seeking a tool that
facilitates web-based discussion of the stories, which is the one thing
that Slashdot excels at.

My objective is to leverage crowdsourcing to produce an
information-dense, weekly summary that can be viewed on the web, mailing
list, and RSS.

As this is assisting a community already built around a mailing list, my
preference is that the discussion happen on the list, rather than being
splintered, but I'm OK if an off-the-shelf solution permits web-based
discussion as well.


> Alternately, could you team up with an existing
> site like hackaday.com and have your content added there?

My recollection of hackaday.com is that they publish D-I-Y projects -
right? That would be more narrow in scope that what I'm thinking of.
Stories like "$25 Raspberry Pi finally goes on sale" (just published on
Ars) are in scope as well.

Of course there may be other hardware hacking news sites that have the
right scope and a well curated feed of news, which simply could be
co-opted, and republished to the list. Know of such a site?


Jon Evans wrote:
> /r/hardwarehacking is available! 

I noticed that.


> I would subscribe to that (and post things if I find any)

Good to know.

In the mean time, I'm going to submit a bunch of links to the firmware
sub-reddit to see what happens.

Thanks to both of you for the feedback.

 -Tom