Comment by nebabyte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nebabyte | Hacker News Reader

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Hey Dan, I was a member in the early beta, am really sad to see Imzy go but really appreciate you guys branching off and making the efforts toward a new site (which I agree definitely still needs to exist).

> We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future

As someone with a headful of ideas hoping to potentially take on this challenge (:P) - any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.

Also, as others asked about - if you guys do manage to open source, that could be a starting point for those who liked Imzy's layout/model (personally as one of the ones who likes aspects of "oldschool" and novel design concepts, I'd go in a diff direction; but the engine could still help me figure out components needed and possibly other scaling/metrics/etc logic)

Thanks for giving it a shot, take care man.

> any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.

I don't think Imzy's scalabilities issue is what did them in. I signed up to see what it was about, and saw a JS bug and reported it, and they not only fixed it super-quick, but also sent me a thank-you sticker. So their team, while imperfect as all teams are, was at least responsive and dedicated.

If I had to guess - and I do - their problems stemmed from their community size not growing as rapidly as it could have, and monetization.

That's the interesting thing - how do you build a community? How do you build a bunch of communities? How do you advertise, how do you tackle moderation successfully, how do you keep people invested, etc.

There's a billion write-ups on writing code, but nowhere near enough on running a meta-community.

Building "a community" is one thing. You don't need a product to build one community. You really just need passion, credibility, and perseverance -- and some combination of a blog, email list, and facebook/slack group as the tool.

Building a bunch of communities (aka facilitating community) is a different beast entirely, and seldom takes off very quickly at all. The best example of facilitating community is Meetup.com.

I've been working on a facilitation of community model called Horizon (http://www.horizonapp.co) which is best thought of as airbnb/couchsurfing with friends, friends of friends, and communities. So, privately, rather than publicly with strangers.

You can either facilitate existing community, or build a community. Trying to do both is a recipe for disaster imho.

I'll give you one piece of advice: beware premature scaling. If you have a headful of ideas, I'd focus on building something people want, not thinking about scale or other technical optimizations.

If you're an engineer like me, we'll often overweight tech choices, rather than the product and user acquisition decisions that matter in a social network.

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