G+ community doesn't appear to be solving any of the old online community problems. The first question I would ask here is: Who's Hacker News Community is this? Each and every member of the HN can create his or her own HN community on Google+ and that's exactly what Google+ is allowing so far.
You are calling it Official, and that is another set of problem, because then I would ask (assuming you run HN which appears not to be the case): why? Why is there a need for a Google+ community for HN when HN is already a community here?
I find community proliferation like this very entertaining. People learn to identify so well with one community or its content, that they replicate it inside other communities. For example, I was bemused recently to learn that Reddit has an r/4chan. I asked, "Wouldn't you just go to 4chan?" But they found it more moderate, more suited to a Reddit user's taste.
The existence of r/4chan is met with scorn every time I've seen it mentioned on 4chan. People seem to either completely hate Reddit itself, or meekly admit that they follow a few tiny subreddits. Given that (and the response you received to your question), it would seem that r/4chan is composed entirely of people who don't actually browse 4chan! One has to wonder what proportion of these members of the "Hacker News Google+" community actually participate on HN.
The more I think about it, the more strange the existence of these offshoots seems: The average 4chan user hates Reddit, and the average HN user seems to not care much for Google+, either (though I'm not sure if that has more to do with its community or the way Google is currently shoving it into everyone's faces).
> Given that [the existence of r/4chan is met with scorn on 4chan], it would seem that r/4chan is composed entirely of people who don't actually browse 4chan!
Non-sequitur (really a classic syllogistic fallacy if you consider who does the scorning). Peer pressure exists ('meekly admit'). One could even imagine that the kind of 4chan user who might prefer to sometimes express themselves in a more 'moderate' environment such as on Reddit would be the kind least likely to provoke a visceral response by outing themselves as a user of r/4chan.
It's very difficult to know anything about the 'average' member of an online community, especially without surveys.
The HN format is only good at a few things. It can't do things like images, or adding commentary to links (I mean as part of the OP). There are other things it's not so good at, like linking to all of a user's posts and comments, showing real names of users, searching by topic, resharing to people not in the HN crowd, etc.
I agree on both points. Sometimes its just nice to go to one place and have all sort of interesting discussion. Reddit is a very good place for that. On the other hand, community efforts are unnecessarily divided.
It seems natural that these sorts of things would appear, especially around a community like HN. But what's the point? HN is already a community because of HN.
Isn't this like the programmer who wanted to create a standard to unify the n variations only to end up with n+1 variations?
There has been many attempts to produce something to compliment the hacker news site and allow for more unstructured chat. Not sure anything has really stuck though.
It was once said that the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. It seems the same goes for targetted online communities.
This is probably an internal strategy by google to try increase g+ engagement. Create these social groups on g+ that already have strong community behind them. The thinking is that on g+ things like photography, and geek related could become a beachhead community for them and they can use that as the foundation to build up additional communities to drive up engagement.
Ya think? :-) Actually while its clearly an attempt to get more people using G+ on a deeper level, as a replacement for Groups its showing possibilities. I wish the editor in G+ was a bit more full featured. Maybe not full on Buzz but would love to be able to do better hyper links with it.
It is interesting to contrast the feel of that to the feel of this site.
That never really took off in Google Groups, but that didn't really have the social structure around it that Google+ does. I wonder if the second time's a charm for them.
You are calling it Official, and that is another set of problem, because then I would ask (assuming you run HN which appears not to be the case): why? Why is there a need for a Google+ community for HN when HN is already a community here?
Is anyone following the issues?