Something I suggested elsewhere in an Offer HN-related thread that appears to have died a death was the idea of creating an offer section next to the jobs section at the top, where people can offer their services.

It would be good then if a condition of accepting a service is that you should (not that it'd be enforced, it'd just be good etiquette) post your own offer.

That seems to allow the front page to get back to lumps of ice, Angelgate and other important stuff, encourage the philanthropic behaviour and gives people a place to put it.

I appreciate this could be perceived as a step towards a 'multi-section reddit-style thingummajig' but I think this is a reasonable exception. Certainly offers with sufficient gravity could make the front page by setting a threshold.

It sounds like a bit of work, but what do you think?

This isn't new internet behavior. It happens on Reddit, the Something Awful forums, basically any online community.

For sure. Do they run their course because posts like this one encourage them to run their course, or would they fade away by themselves anyway? :-)

My worry is, this one is a good idea in the wrong place. This is basically a strong variation on reddit's AMA, which has taken a solid hold there and isn't going anywhere. Since HN doesn't support sub-forums, there is a risk that we could be "stuck with" this for a while, if it has the durability of AMA but no sub-forum/site to hide in.

Another possible danger is that the community will lash back against it because of the noise, even though it's a good idea, and so we'll lose a good idea. I really do think that if someone made a special site for this (which wouldn't take that long to code up), it might be something of lasting value.

They die on their own. The only thing posts like this do are discourage helpful people. It causes them to see the community as hostile, and they take their helpfulness elsewhere.

These people aren't -just- posting these offers. They also contribute to the site in other ways. Their loss -is- a loss to the community.

Gently nudging them into something more helpful is great, but flat telling them to go away is very bad.

I don't think another website would work. There have been several efforts to make off-shoot niche websites based on one aspect of HN, and I think it's precisely because they focus on a single niche that they are so quickly forgotten.

The fact that HN offers so many different things is what makes it so compelling (addictive, even): new knowledge, interesting discussion, a sense of community, a place to find people for real life meetups. And now a means to find and offer free services.

It's that combination of things that compels people to come back day after day. You can't just slice off a minor aspect of HN and expect people to pay attention.

Maybe it's interesting to you since HN is your baby and it's fun to watch people use your creation in unexpected ways, but for us, it's lowering the value/utility.

Repl to the rescue: http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless

    (defop offerless req
      (offerlesspage (get-user req)))

    (newscache offerlesspage user 90
      (listpage user (msec)
                ranked-stories*
                [and (>= (realscore _) front-threshold*)
                     (cansee user _)
                     (no (begins _!title "Offer "))
                     _]
                nil nil "offerless"))

Could we also have http://news.ycombinator.com/offers ? It would be nice if we could see all the Offer HN threads in one page.

Ok, works now.

It will be great if you could add them here too: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

On a similar note, I wonder if there are other filters which are not listed there?

For now they'll only last this server invocation, because I merely pasted the code into the repl. Let's see if we still need them in a week.

Fair enough. Thanks Paul :)

One thing that I've found entertaining in my short time on this site is the surprising number of semi-hidden features. It's almost like the In-N-Out of tech sites. And now I know where to find the secret menu :). Thanks!

Wait, In-n-Out has a secret menu? What have I been missing!?

Animal style fries, for starters.

I think this could be a shorter course to the problem described by loginx above

>>My only concern is really that in the short/medium term, this could lead to a large influx of freeloaders from other communities, who may have no interest in "paying it forward", but mostly in dropping by for a quick freebie, while not contributing anything.<<

Hehe. Super.

Now that's what I call applied technology :)

I think this is technically an 'Offer HN: Less Offers'

that's pretty cool. I know it would be a little crazy to implement but having the ability to build some special pages like this would be cool on a user level. Unless it's already there and I haven't seen it (Maybe something as simple as filters?).

Nice. Is this something you'd like to simply run its course? Given the nature of it, it would seem the better thing to do would be to split Ask and Offer into distinct pages, and offer both up on the header.

This kind of social programming interests me.

Have you written about interacting with the community on that level?

Gizmodo does something like this but with all content. Every post has tags and you can filter the stream by excluding certain tags (or only looking at certain tags). It's very nice. Maybe that could be done as a long term solution for all future problems like this.

I find it interesting that you are saying its lowering the value/utility of the community here, but in one of these "Offer HN" threads you requested help not too long ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839595

I think all in all thats pretty disingenuous .