Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in classes where students write papers, because now you can finally "show your work" in writing the way you do in math.

When I posted a comment here a year and a half ago, I felt like each vote was a real, actual smart person praising or agreeing with what I had said. Each point had a lot of meaning, and back then 5 points was considered a pretty good score. Now each point means much less for some reason. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I don't trust each individual person as much. For example, as I write this, the top comment is about someone using a script to submit this article. It's two sentences, and it has received eleven votes. To me, each of those individual votes mean less than they used to.

The net effect of one vote, for the whole culture of hacker news, has gone down significantly. This reduces the total perception of worth for each user, and, more importantly, for each voting action. Back in the beginning, I felt like I had some amount of power, in that if I voted something up it would literally rise in the list. In fact, I felt like I had some sort of responsibility. Now that active, obvious change in story rank rarely happens, so I feel like my vote is somewhat worthless.

I tend to mostly agree that the quality level of submissions and comments has stayed the same during the growth of this site, but the devaluation of karma has led to other cultural changes. There's something comforting about sharing ideas within a small group of people because you feel like you have real influence, and I think I'm starting to lose that feeling here. There are so many new faces that my perception of quality has gone down, even if the actual net level of quality for each item has stayed the same. Seeing many posts with 100+ karma on the front page recently has kind of solidified that feeling for me. Who are these hundreds of people?

  -- Otto von Bismarck.

But I think the author oversimplifying a bit. Sure it's technically easy to sell music online. The stuff that's hard to come by is people's attention.

And while it's true that the Internet lowers distribution barriers, it has also decreased the perceived value of music recordings. Because access has gotten so much easier, people tend to think of music less as something you can own, but rather of something you have access to, be it through MP3s on your hard drive or streaming. We at Popcuts set out to address that. Because we think there's a deeper sense of ownership possible than simply having access to a sound file. And we do think music should have a price tag.

Our site is based on the idea that buyers of a song get a share of the revenue that song makes in the future. So when you buy a song on Popcuts, it's in your interest that that song does well. You might tell your friends about it, but you probably won't seed the file to a BitTorrent site. In addition, we try to reward the behavior that a lot of music fans already show: They know of a hot new band before everyone else, and they want to show it off. </selfpromotion>

Problem: News story is boring.

Solution: Headline "Microsoft Sues Linux", add picture of Steve Ballmer looking mean. Sprinkle with spelling mistakes and "no word yet" unprofessionalisms. Lame.

I laughed because I was sure she was kidding. Turns out she wasn't. I politely declined her offer and walked out the door. She told me I'm making the biggest mistake of my life. I probably spent the next two months being in such a paranoid state that I was pretty much useless as a contributor. It turns out she never did follow through on her threats. But I learned then that even someone with the worst of intentions can't necessarily take someone else's idea and turn it into a reality. That's when I started to relax a bit when it comes to NDAs. But, that said, I still ask contractor programmers to sign them but what I ask them to sign is so amazingly simple that it's more an agreement to respect each other's ideas.

You often talk about releasing early, building something people want, etc. Since you carry a lot of influence, and (I guess) invest in Etherpad, and they've adjusted it to your personal request - do you worry that this effect might give you a distorted view of how well Etherpad specifically, and YC startups generally, are building what people want?