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Ask HN: Did “Idea Sunday” HN Discussion Die?
62 points by andersonmvd on Nov 16, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments
The "Idea Sunday" HN thread described as "A small HN experiment. Every Sunday, a thread will be started to share product ideas. Why? Because many people have ideas they will simply not have the time to implement, and many need product ideas to work on." by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601 (223 days ago) seems to be dead.

Is there any replacement for that thread? Any website? Or shall we reactivate this thread?

Thank you in advance,



dang killed it because he didn't like it. (I'll go look for the source)

edit: source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693262

> Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes on top of it, this experiment has officially jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you all not to post any more of them. Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that we don't kill as duplicates. (That's for the obvious reason of preventing karma sweepstakes and race conditions.) Should we make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it quite a bit. I think the answer is no. Experiments are worth trying, but this one has gone on for a month now and I don't think it has cleared the bar [1]. Something about having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. The threads seem to me to have gotten less interesting as they've become more regular. I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who disagree. But our job is to optimize HN for quality and I don't think the quality is high enough here. Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938


Hum. All that I'm looking for is a kind of large backlog that I could filter to find ideas that will improve the world that demands people, development, etc. These ideas could just come up with a description, motivation and expected results - when someone could help, he subscribes and notify the watchers.

Maybe a recurring thread (Idea Sunday) is not the best option for that as dang said (please, who disagree make your point). It seems that the better idea is to come up with a platform to bring these ideas to life, but a faster way than building from scratch would be nicer. Again, if you (who is reading it now) have any ideas, them will be appreciated.

I'll check out the links you sent below. Thanks for answering.


Here's another ideas site you might find useful: http://www.ideaswatch.com/


TL;DR: It threatened YC's business model.


I upvoted you because I don't like that criticism of YC seems to get an instant downvote on HN, however, I disagree with you and think that the reasons put forward for stopping the ideas threads are fair and valid, even if one can hold a different opinion.


There's a difference between a criticism of YC and a kneejerk YC-is-a-conspiracy comment.

One could argue that the Idea Sunday threads would be good for YC: good ideas would lead to good startups which YC could later fund. But there weren't any good ideas.


I suppose that depends on what YCombinator considers valuable about HN.

While I understand the desire to optimize a site like this for 'quality', I don't believe it would be fair to gauge the merit of threads like those (the idea threads or the screenshot threads) based on how much of the content generated might be of value to YCombinator, or even (as dang might put it) their intellectual gravity or novelty.

The act of presenting ideas and discussing them is a creative act which adds value to the community, albeit perhaps not to YC's brand identity as a nexus for brilliant thought-leaders and innovation. Not everyone here expects, or even desires, to ever interact with YCombinator outside of this forum.


You can bring any idea discussion over to Ideas on Techendo: https://ideas.techendo.com/


I never really understood why someone would downvote me for offering up something I built for this community.


No worries, I upvoted you to balance it lol. Thanks for helping.


I guess people could try doing it in /r/startups where (I think) the mods are more laissez-faire.


That's because /r/startups doesn't optimize for quality.

Look at the front page (http://www.reddit.com/r/startups). Most of the ideas ("Apps like Quora but in real time?") are not particularly insightful. And no, these are not ideas with the people-thought-Twitter-was-a-bad-idea defense.


Reddit's front page algorithm optimizes for an ill-defined 'freshness', which is... not nearly as good as it could be.

As far as the "Apps like Quora but in real time?" post, it's a terrible title, but actually Google thinks there's some merit to the idea (if you actually read the post), and is trying to execute with Google Helpouts: https://helpouts.google.com/

Additionally, it's sitting there with one single point, which it started with, which is hardly a ringing endorsement by /r/startups.

I mean, you can see a similarly low quality of posts here by browsing new: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

The quality on the top posts for the day on /r/startups vs the front page is generally higher, too: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/top/?sort=top&t=day


Sure, it wasn't meant as a dig at HN moderation, just a helpful suggestion.


http://www.halfbakery.com/ is a better replacement for Idea Sunday.


Doesn't seems to be very safe (http://www.halfbakery.com/?username=123&password=456&login=l...), but sure has some ideas. Thanks.


Yikes; I will not be registering there but I like the idea of the website.


I think dang, the moderator of this forum decided that we should stop doing those, if i remember correctly.

But there's this:

http://firespotting.com/


I made a post for todays Sunday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614657




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