At first, when you viewed the spreadsheet, you saw a richer interface that:
(1) popped a little message when others started viewing, with their logged-in Google username
(2) offered an expandable chat sidebar
(3) showed each others' active selection-area via different selection colors (correlated with colors in the char sidebar)
The warning was fair but it was actually kind of interesting. I think the best case mixing fairness-of-disclosure and options-to-viewers would be a link to the static doc, but another link on the static doc allowing upgrade to the interactive interface (perhaps with a hint of what you'll see and reveal if doing so).
Dug up from my browser history, this was the original link, which reveals your logged-in Google username to other simultaneous document viewers:
Sites based on the real name of their primary writer are very strong: graham, sivers, yegge, shaw, buchheit, maroon, joel, aaron, pmarca, ejohn, godin. (A message about authenticity, voice, and personal brands?)
Other sites known as the outlet of a single author also do well: catonmat, daringfireball, raganwald, blogmaverick, avc.
While I have no evidence to support this, I would guess this has to do with the editing process. Comparing this list to http://top.searchyc.com/domains, you see a lot of similar results. The difference is that some of them have quite a lot of results (Techcrunch, Wired), but not nearly as high of a average score.
In fact, it looks like the sites hitting the top of the list for average score are ones that are written by a single author, who has several strong opinions (ZedShaw is a good example). Since Hacker News doesn't allow down voting, it seems that by draw up a commotion, and getting people interested in a semi-controversial idea is what wins votes here.
Not surprising really. Anyone blogging under their own name (whether in the URL, or where it's blatantly obvious like Cuban or Fred Wilson) is going to put at least a little more thought into what they post. People blogging for reasons other than selling ads are going to be direct and filter out more of the "crap".
Has anyone done something like this, but grouping by (user, domain), and maybe ordering on something like (number of user submissions / number of user submissions for this domain)?
I'd like to blacklist about half of these domains. Some people might find Techcrunch, *.blogspot.com, AppleInsider, et al worthwhile, but I just don't care for them.
Living in CN where *.blogspot.com is blacklisted, it's really, really troublesome. You'd be surprised how much knowledge and opinion is stored there even if it's frequently a little obnoxious.
