Lesson Learned Running a Side Project for One Month | Hacker News Reader

Lesson Learned Running a Side Project for One Month

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I see a lot of parallels between what you're doing and StackOverflow.

In the formative years of StackOverflow, Joel and Jeff took huge pains to structure the service in such a way that there wasn't a time/money equivalency to participating.

Mostly this took the form of outward public recognition (scores, badges, etc.) and incentives aligned around that. If there's a path forward for Bugrex I think it's probably along those lines.

> In the formative years of StackOverflow, Joel and Jeff took huge pains to structure the service in such a way that there wasn't a time/money equivalency to participating.

There always is, they just choose to pay in terms of company scrip. And they can -- and have -- arbitrarily remove karma from the system. It's great for them, because they convert user time into dollars for StackOverflow.

Thanks, we're hoping to do something in the same lines. However, it's more tricky when it's a chat, as the answer isn't as easy to present to the whole community and gain more karma from.

Any thoughts on that?

If you look at stack overflow you'll see that many answers have a bit of back and forth before the answers are found to elucidate the problem or scope. I think the chat format would be great (and sets you apart) as long as you had some kind of soft rule that to accept an answer someone has to write a summary too.

The parent is right, your value is in the questions already answered, and this would also avoid mentors getting bored of the same question.

Another potential thing to set you apart is to somehow find a better moderation system than SO.

On the subject of SO: I think it's worth considering how (incredibly!) valuable the public record of questions and answers is. Many, many times I don't have to ask a question b/c I can find a comparable one that has already been answered.

I really dislike how Slack is starting to dominate in the Q&A space for specific projects/libraries, b/c it does the entire dev community a disservice to hide knowledge into a myriad of little silos that Google doesn't index.

Long way of saying it would be awesome if BugRex had a searchable/spiderable archive.

We are very much considering opening up the chat logs!

Or everyone could just use IRC. Seems like a waste of man-hours and talent to recreate something we've had for decades.

Thanks for sharing this. I had similar idea a year ago and ended up didn't do anything after much research. I came up with similar information as you went through during the execution. People won't pay for this (very few). The experts don't care about money either. It's a chicken and egg situation that's hard to bootstrap to something larger. Well unless you find a very specific niche (e.g. Q&A for AI algorithm...). Frontend is too crowded already.

I appreciate what these guys are doing. The chat format is faster and discussions can be had in greater depth, relative to the Q&A format. While Q&A has it's own benefits, like being viewed by more people, both are valuable and I appreciate the service you are providing.

Love the shared lessons! Good luck with this!

Thanks!

thanks Per! interesting learnings!

Thanks for sharing!

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