I'd like a reference page for the markup syntax used in comments.

This must be (by far) the most interesting and unusual piece of text I've ever seen on ycombinator.

I agree that the main page of reddit has become pretty lame. However, I think that subreddits are still a good place to visit: http://programming.reddit.com/ or http://joel.reddit.com/.

I think if they had more subreddits it would help but a lot of people do not seem to know about them. I've heard many people complain about the same issue that did not know the existence of these subreddits.

Let's not turn this into digg, shall we?

> people who hate spending money for products

Correction: people who hate spending money for shitty products. Or they hate paying an inflated price. Piracy is competition and should be treated as such.

If you are trying to decide between two things, a good trick is to flip a coin. Assign one choice to heads and the other to tails. You'll find yourself subtly "hoping" for one choice over the other. Decision made.

The point he's making is that the process of aggregating still takes alot of time. The guy simply wants to live his life and spend less time in front of the computer. In that regard this new wave of Web 2.0 is not solving anyone's problems. Online reviews have been around forever, he is aking us to build something new, better, something more useful, in a sense that it won't take you a day of research to buy a new camera, for instance.

Speaking of reviews, I also agree with him that "wisdom of crowds" is overrated. Movie reviews are an excellent example: crowds generally have no freakin taste. Similarly, crowds do not know jack in photography, computers or politics. Dig deep and long enough and you will always disagree with the crowds.

In fact, when someone is unable to conduct his own judgement, asking for the opinion of others is the easiest thing to do,

In that regard Web is 100% focused on helping you with the easiest thing. "Not that helpful" he argues, and I agree.

I understand his point, but I think he supports it poorly. Of course a product that has 1 review is not likely to benefit greatly from that single review. But when I buy a product, or book a hotel, I look at dozens of reviews from other people and I get a good sense of the pros and cons of what I might buy. I can then gauge those perspectives against what is important to me. And I find that overall they are almost all correct -- in aggregate.

Important marketing safety tip: Never compare the language you're trying to advocate to Cobol.

"Our language may be dead, but its ghost will haunt you forever" is not a good slogan, even if it is true.

Thanks for the comments and feedback everyone! We've had a few rough patches over the past 12 hours, but we're up and running again (special thanks to the Dropbox team for their help). As a random aside, it turns out we're getting far more traffic from del.icio.us than TC right now.

I don't think it's a very good comparison. Everyone can "view source" and see the html code used to display the site. They can't get the actual code that creates the app's functionality, in the same way that you can't decompile an MP3 and get the instrumental tracks that make it up.