It depends.
You don't need a First Round Capital Startup News account if all you want is to browse through the stories, sites
and comments submitted by other First Round Capital Startup News users.
But if you want to really get the most out of First Round Capital Startup News, have your own
personal Front Page, submit stories, vote on stories, leave comments, etc.
then yes, you need a First Round Capital Startup News account.
To fully experience First Round Capital Startup News, we invite you to do create an account.
You can always cancel it later at any time.
Click on the
Submit Story link
in the left menu and enter
the URL of the story you'd like to submit. After that,
you'll need to enter a title, a brief descripion of the story
and select the most appropriate category for the story
you're submitting.
Depending on the "theme" (see My Settings), next to the number of votes,
you will see either two small thumbs up/down icons, two up/down arrows or
two text links:
Just click on the one you want, and your vote will be casted.
Once you vote on a story, you can not vote on it again nor change your mind.
What you voted will be reflected by a grey thumb/arrow: it will be pointing
up if you voted "up" or down if you voted..."down" :-)
Simple. If you liked the story/website/etc and it's something you would
recommend, then vote "up". If you didn't like it and it's something
you definitely wouldn't recommend, then vote "down". Anything in between?
You could think of it as "if I had to choose one, which one would it be?" or
simply skip voting and move on to the next story.
You can click on either the "More..." link at the end of the description, or on the
"Comment (x)" link (where X is the number of comments already made).
No. Although your Front Page will only get stories and sites based only on what
your sources think of them, when you engage in a conversation with other First Round Capital Startup News
users, the conversation cannot be broken.
My Front Page
This is supposedly your entry page to First Round Capital Startup News.
It contains four different blocks of information:
Alerts
Here you will receive different alerts, so you know what's been happening since
last time you visited. For example, you could be notified that someone has added
you as a source, or that someone has replied to a comment you've made, etc.
My sources An excerpt of the last news stories and web pages
that reached your front page (more on that later).
Last comments
A quick list of the news stories where you last left a comment. This way, you
don't have to remember what stories were the last you commented, and
can quickly and easily see if there are new comments, follow up on the conversation, etc.
Last voted
Another quick list, this time showing the latest stories you voted. Like with the
last comments block, this allows you to easily monitor how the latest stories you voted
are evolving.
My sources
This is where the most interesting submitted stories, as determined by your sources, will appear.
Not all stories that receive a positive vote by some of your sources may necesarily
appear in this page. Only those that obtain certain ranking or score will. In short,
this is your source for really interesting stuff.
You can, however, from your My Settings page, modify this behavior and, if you like,
set it up so that al stories submitted or voted up by at least one of your sources will
appear in "My sources" page. Bottom line: you're in control, and it's very easy to do.
All sources
If "My sources" was presenting you the most interesting news according to your
sources, here you'll see what the most interesting news are according to all First Round Capital Startup News
users.
All Upcoming
This is where all new stories submitted land, regardless of whether the person who
submitted them is your source or not. Usually, unless you're really curious, or have time to kill,
or really would like to see what anyone is submitting to First Round Capital Startup News,
it's not a section that you would be checking often
Profile
Here you can see and edit your profile info.
You can also see your site stats: How many stories you've submitted, votes you've made,
how many people have looked at your profile, and how many people you've selected as sources,
as well as how many people have selected you as a source (your fans).
Folllowing the "sources" and "fans" links in the Stats box, you can actually see
who those people are, and add/remove them as your sources anytime you want.
Favorites
Here you can see what stories you've marked as "Favorite". That way, in addition to
vote up/down on stories other people send, you can keep a collection of those sites
or stories that you particularly liked.
The main difference between your Favorites and anything else, is that you can modify the title
and description of your favorites, so you can describe them however it makes sense to you. After all, they are
your favorites. Note however that when you actually go to the story page in First Round Capital Startup News,
the original title and description are preserved.
Stories
This option will show you three different sub-options:
Submitted
A list in reverse chronological order of all the stories you've submitted.
Voted
A list in reverse chronological order of all the stories you've voted on.
Comments
A list in reverse chronological order of all the comments you've left.
In this page, you are also notified anytime someone posts a reply to any of
your comments. That way, you don't have to be sitting on a story page and
reloading it countless times to see if someone replies to you. Just come to
your Comments page and if someone does reply to you, you will see the
alert message with a link to the story page. Extremely useful especially if you've left
several comments on different stories.
Network
Here you will also see three different options:
sources
A list of all users you have selected as your sources.
Fans
A list of all users who have selected you as their source.
Like-minded
A list of the First Round Capital Startup News users who seem to have the closest similar interests to yours.
You can use this list for example to add any of them as sources.
My Settings
Here you configure how you want First Round Capital Startup News to work for you. From the criteria
First Round Capital Startup News follows to build your personal Front Page, to the look and appearance of
First Round Capital Startup News itself.
The User Ranking measures your degree of "First Round Capital Startup News-ness"
somehow. By voting, submitting stories, posting and ranking comments, etc.
you'll be doing things that may give you a better ranking. Of course,
sending 30 comments a day or submitting 10 stories a day pointlessly is not
going to do it for you.
Other things affect your ranking of course, but without getting into great detail,
if you use First Round Capital Startup News and are a good sport, your ranking will go up.
Remember however that in First Round Capital Startup News, the influence of a user when it comes
to get stories in other user's front pages is determined
by those who select him as a source, not by the user ranking. When you
submit a story, when you vote, etc. you are treated the same as everyone else,
regardless of ranking.
So, what's the point of having a ranking then? Well, 99% of what makes First Round Capital Startup News is
the people who use it, and let's just say that we like
to know who those people are. Why? Because as time goes by, it will matter.
First Round Capital Startup News also maintains two different rankings: one global and one that resets the first of every month.
In fact, somehow we try to give the monthly ranking a bit more exposure than the global ranking.
This means that the very first day of each month, we all are equally ranked :-)
By the way, both rankings are updated only once every 24 hours, usually between 12-1am Pacific time.
So if you're interested in seeing whether someone's position in the ranking has gone up or down,
you really only need to visit the page once a day.
This might happen especially as long as the number of users isn't very large, and even more
at the beginning of the month when the monthly ranking is reset.
First Round Capital Startup News uses an internal "point" system to determine a user's position in the user ranking,
where the user doesn't always get rewarded (or penalized) only depending on what she or he does.
For example, a user accrues points when someone else assigns that user as their source.
And since I used the "selected as a source" example, it may be worth mentioning that
a user won't gain nor lose points by being assigned as a source, then deassigned, then
reassigned again, etc. If someone assigns you as a source, you'll get X points, and
if later that person doesn't want you as a source anymore, you'll lose the same number
of points you were given in the first place. And if too many people assign you as their
source, the amount of points you get may decrease every time, depending also on a number
of factors.
Most of the ranking rules are made that
way, not to claim that it's impossible to game or trick it (it is not impossible), but to avoid making it at least too trivial to do so.
The short answer is no, at least not yet. However, if enough users give it
a thumbs down and almost nobody gives it a thumbs up,
the story will eventually dissapear from everyone's view.
Yes, they do, but they count just as any other source's votes. No more, no less.
You could say that First Round Capital Startup News assumes that your opinion is as valuable to you as
any of your sources opinions.
No. If you don't like a story or site, why should it still make it to your front page?
On the other hand, if you give thumbs down to a story that is already in your Front Page,
for now it will still remain in your Front Page until new stories push it down, however
very soon this will change so that stories you voted down do not show up in your
Front page.
Not exactly.
Depending on how busy our servers are, First Round Capital Startup News calculates what new stories should go to your
Front Page every once in a while, but never exceeding 60 minutes. Of course, whether it
updates your Front page every 5, 10 or 60 minutes, it always takes into account whatever
happened ever since the last update.
Therefore, whether you check your Front Page via web or via RSS, usually you don't need to
reload/update your Front Page more than once an hour in order to see whether there are new
stories in your Front Page.
The number of votes and comments on a particular story are updated in real time.
Once a story makes it to your Front Page, it can only be pushed down by newer
stories, but not removed, regardless of whether you add/remove sources or modify your
settings.
For example, say today you add 3 new people as sources. These people's votes cause
some stories to apear in your Front Page. Then, for whatever reason,
you decide to remove them as sources. Those stories previously promoted to
your Front Page will stay there until new stories "push them down".
Once a story makes it to your Front Page, it'll stay there.
The only case where a story can be removed from your Front Page is if you
give it thumbs down (read the previous FAQ 19).
It all depends how you've configured your "My sources" page includes... settings.
For example, if you've configured that option as:
All stories... Submitted by any of my sources
The only new stories you'll get in your Front Page will be stories submitted by your sources.
If you have instead (or also):
All stories... Voted by at least one of my sources
Then all it takes is for one of your sources to give a story a thumbs up to make it to
your Front Page, regardless of who submitted the story. It's very straight-forward, really.
Things get a bit more fuzzy if you select Promoted stories instead of All stories,
because now the promotion algorithm comes into play.
What this algorithm does is to look at how
your sources (plus "sources of your sources" if you selected that option) have been voting on a story,
then, depending how they voted plus a number of other factors, a story may or may not be promoted to your
Front Page, regardless of whether the story was submitted by one of your sources or not.
On this first implementation of our FAQ we tried to cover the basic
questions about using First Round Capital Startup News. As we write a more comprehensive FAQ and
Help pages, should you have any questions, please
contact us.
(or by
the text "Fav!", depending on what theme you're using).
