First of all: thanks for writing the post. I was one of the people who asked you to, and I'm glad you took the request seriously. It's much easier to see now what you're up to.
Now: I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. What makes HN HN is not, by and large, a function of the software, but rather, a function of the people who happen to hang out here-- who were attracted by something other than the software.
So, if you wanted to get an HN-like-community gathered around, say, knitting, you'd need some way to get a large enough community of knitters together together to get the ball rolling to create traction (i.e, the chicken-and-egg problem.) The easiest way to do this would be to have the active, committed involvement of the-Paul-Graham-of-Knitters, whoever that might be.
For an object lesson in how this works, take a look at StackOverflow. They were able to get immediate traction because the pump was primed by readers of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Note that they have not yet been able to gain similar traction in any other vertical, and have a lot of VC money working on it.
That being said: what is the salient difference between "A Hacker News For The Rest Of The World" and "Reddit"? What can I do with your software that I can't with Reddit? Follow up question: is this advantage significant enough to make up for the enormous head start they have in terms of users?
EDIT (I clicked before I was really finished, oops):
Finally: "a hacker news of the rest of the world" is not, in my mind, a pretty solid elevator pitch. HN is not a business, and generates no revenue. And, the people who hang out here are not at all like "the rest of the world" in many ways-- in fact, some of us take pride in being outliers. So, I'm not really sure that the notion is solid. If you got traction, I can't begin to imagine how you'd keep the trolls out, or keep the conversation focused in each of the "interest networks".
Finding the 'Paul-Graham-of-Knitters' for each community is exactly how I was thinking of approaching this. Getting those people to buy in to the concept will be a challenge, indeed - but not impossible.
With Reddit, the difference is in how customizable it is. You can hit "Politics" and get a list of posts loosely related to politics. But you can't get a feed specifically for "New York Politics" or better, "New York Republicans".
I may be wrong, but HN could be a business if PG wanted it to be.
We all take pride in being outliers, I agree. However would you agree that even HN has it's share of trolls? How does HN keep them out?
I believe there are people out there who take topics (of the non-technical variety) seriously enough to fight for the maintenance of their community. Hopefully I'm right!
Finding the 'Paul-Graham-of-Knitters' for each community is exactly how I was thinking of approaching this. Getting those people to buy in to the concept will be a challenge
Indeed. And you are competing with the likes of StackOverflow and their millions.
With Reddit, the difference is in how customizable it is. You can hit "Politics" and get a list of posts loosely related to politics. But you can't get a feed specifically for "New York Politics" or better, "New York Republicans".
Folks can create sub-reddits as detailed as they want. Some get enough traction to survive, some don't. I still don't see how your site would be different.
I may be wrong, but HN could be a business if PG wanted it to be.
And how would you monetize it? I don't see an obvious business model.
However would you agree that even HN has it's share of trolls? How does HN keep them out?
HN has trolls, despite the fact that and PG spends a lot of time trying to cultivate the commnity. There are (all too often) posts complaining that "HN is turning into Reddit"-- which ought give one pause.
I believe there are people out there who take topics (of the non-technical variety) seriously enough to fight for the maintenance of their community.
I imagine there are. And I imagine that in a large number of cases, they've already done so. I imagine there is at least one Knitter's forum successfully meeting the needs of a large chunk of the Knitter's community. I'm not really sure there is an untapped market out there.
I don't mean to sound so negative-- but there's a difference between an application and a startup. You've written some software; I'm not sure there is a viable business model behind it, especially in competition with Reddit.
Re: differences - I would say Reddit is 1) disorganized and 2) has its focus primarily on front-page. I don't know many people who know how or have to time to dig through all the sub-reddits offered to maybe find something they like. This structure does work for many of us, and that's cool. I think it can be improved upon, though.
Same with your argument about untapped markets. I'm sure Hackers had a preferred method of communicating pre-HN (IRC?), but something better and more structured came along and displaced it.
Re: HN business model - paid job board, paid newsletter, hacker conferences, hacker news apparel, regular old google ads, etc. there would be many paths to take if this was a for-profit endeavor.
The Reddit comparison is critical: I don't understand why I would want to go to your empty site, when Reddit has a full one that is largely identical. So far, the only concrete difference that I see is that you emphasize the list of subreddits.
I like the filter UI, but I'm not sure how much of a differentiator for the service they are from subreddits.
You sound like you might be on the way to a key differentiator from Reddit with the idea of actively courting respected people within respective communities to curate their corner of the site, but the tough problem isn't so much finding the right curators as persuading them you offer something better than the skinned vBulletin or phpBBS with thousands of members they're already running...
A "Hacker News of New York Politics" wouldn't stand out for UI or precise filters though, it would stand out because or a relative lack of people battering each other over the head with slogans and Bloomberg and Giuliani popping in to offer their opinion every now and then. The former is achievable through aggressive moderation; the latter is a tough ask.
Off topic, but still: While HN is not a business on it's own, I would be very surprised to learn that the mind-share for, and applications to, YCombinator generated by HN doesn't comfortably out-weight PGs investment in it.
It seems like what you're doing is Reddit + some small changes. Wouldn't it be best to just fork Reddit's code base? (Unless you want to keep your code closed source, of course.)
Just tell me how this is different from http://www.reddit.com and please convince any of us here that this is better than reddit for the premise in your post.
[edit]
Sorry I found that my comment is very similar to michael's (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2343485)
I guess the point is very clear, if it is not different from Reddit, (think how Facebook is different from myspace), then the only deterministic factor is the niche user-base which makes it viral.
No Facebook login? I know you're probably still working on things, but that seems kind of big. I know there are pros and cons to using a universal login (specifically marrying yourself to FB), but because you've pitched this as "for the rest of the world," I don't see much sense in it not being an option.
24 hour time isn't necessarily confusing, but not UX friendly.
I tried to add an event and received Rails' "We're sorry..." just btw.
I really like the city-centric reddit idea. But that already kinda exists...on reddit.
I dunno—it's so much the people that make HN what it is...it's hard.
Nice endeavor! I especially appreciate the clean design.
You shouldn't really worry about the Reddit comparison, as there are many more potential users in the world than there are redditors. On top of that, you are free to pivot as you like, while Reddit's users won't let it change.
I've written my own HN copy for Hebrew-speaking Hackers (http://bitorama.com), and I'd be very interested to read how things go for you. Best of luck!
Whatsupedia doesn't work properly even in full screen on my monitor (at 1366x768) - by which I mean the "use these to view a more specific community" image pointing to the sidebar never becomes fully visible. Minor design flaw, but irritates me. Pressing the "add to favorites" arrow (which doesn't exactly communicate what it is visually save through the tooltip) presents a message telling me to login; it should instead send me to a login/register page. The directory button uses the standard symbol for home, which is confusing. Under "recent posts," pressing the link for the second page reloads the entire page (requiring me to scroll back to the bottom); either reloading just the recent posts box or using an anchor to push my browser back to the bottom of the page after it finishes reloading would be better.
I like the design a lot (good job!), but I think you should work on the navigation.
It's needlessly confusing and doesn't feel right even after one understands how it works. I was about to suggest how to improve it technically (move everything into a sidebar-tree), but then realized that imho you should just scrap the hierarchical "community" concept altogether.
Why not adopt a tagging approach like Quora? That way stories can belong to multiple "communities" (tags) and users can filter according to their interests.
I think quora invented something very powerful here, a forum based on the same principle could very well become the next reddit.
this is a weekend project (over x-mas actually) that has a similar motivation: Dynamically creating communities and discussion in a manner that treats topics as first class, as opposed to following people (reddit/HN vs twitter), with the hope that quality pervades http://hashpost.com
For now it's mostly cat gifs and youtube videos, but it's topic generation is dynamic by simply adding #tag to your posts.
Now: I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. What makes HN HN is not, by and large, a function of the software, but rather, a function of the people who happen to hang out here-- who were attracted by something other than the software.
So, if you wanted to get an HN-like-community gathered around, say, knitting, you'd need some way to get a large enough community of knitters together together to get the ball rolling to create traction (i.e, the chicken-and-egg problem.) The easiest way to do this would be to have the active, committed involvement of the-Paul-Graham-of-Knitters, whoever that might be.
For an object lesson in how this works, take a look at StackOverflow. They were able to get immediate traction because the pump was primed by readers of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Note that they have not yet been able to gain similar traction in any other vertical, and have a lot of VC money working on it.
That being said: what is the salient difference between "A Hacker News For The Rest Of The World" and "Reddit"? What can I do with your software that I can't with Reddit? Follow up question: is this advantage significant enough to make up for the enormous head start they have in terms of users?
EDIT (I clicked before I was really finished, oops):
Finally: "a hacker news of the rest of the world" is not, in my mind, a pretty solid elevator pitch. HN is not a business, and generates no revenue. And, the people who hang out here are not at all like "the rest of the world" in many ways-- in fact, some of us take pride in being outliers. So, I'm not really sure that the notion is solid. If you got traction, I can't begin to imagine how you'd keep the trolls out, or keep the conversation focused in each of the "interest networks".
Still, I wish you luck.