Show HN: Crowdsourced visualization of neighborhoods in cities | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Crowdsourced visualization of neighborhoods in cities

hoodmaps.com

96 pointspieterhg24 comments

It's somewhat currently useful with how broad it is, but would prefer even more specifics.

Like in Chiang Mai where the street food is just to the east of the square wall area, I wanted to mark that as having street food, because that would be useful to the inherent tourist site visitor, but there's just a huge "tourist" zone and this can't be done. "Tourist" is only so helpful to tourists :)

You can add a label that says "street food"

I have been followed the development process of hoodmaps on Twitter since the beginning. I must say impressive

For those who want to see how it was built, he still has a few videos about the early stages of its development on his YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBZRGLzYnns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBUDudoxW18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XBOCY_LdGQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAs5TOozedQ

Yep! I Twitched the development live! I only lost the first episode where I wrote the first lines. I'll re-enact it this week (maybe tomorrow) and upload it too and make it a series.

I did download it if that helps (the video when you started with "test 123"). Will be up in ~2h https://youtu.be/qFoKjhIFGsk

Oh my god thank you! I lost it! How did you get it? Can you tweet me @levelsio?

What's the tech stack used and where is it hosted?

And what are the monetization plans?

HTML, CSS, JS with jQuery, PHP and SQLite on NGINX

This is cool, but I feel areas overlap significantly. For example, I live on the cusp between a rich and a tourist area in London; in reality, the area used to be social housing, so is more affordable than the surrounding area. Furthermore, pretty much all the tourist areas of London have other use cases, whether residential or office buildings. The suburbs will also have light industry too.

I thought the same thing when I first used hoodmaps, but the ability to add labels does a lot to make this less of an issue. You can just label a neighborhood as "Rich people and tourists" or "Tourists and office workers".

Cool idea, but please allow narrower (street-specific) areas. Often the tourist street is right next to a nice authentic street in the same area. The tags are good enough to warn for a tourist trap, but tags seem only coordinate based, not street based. A tag warning for a crap tourist street is unclear whether it's about an area or a street

It does allow that. The zoom level directs the level of detail is shown. That means if a person brushes on a lower level (like a street), it'll show up over the more high level (area) data.

Cool project, especially all the funny comments ppl give => local cultural insights

Where do I see the comments?

He's referring to the white labels/text that you can see on the map for a given city.

May want to reevaluate the color-scheme -- it's currently unusable for colorblind folks. Also it works great on a desktop browser, but was too laggy to use on mobile.

I had this same idea a few years ago - glad to see someone actually make it!

Honestly, I'm not quite understand how is it exactly useful. Though I believe in crowdsourced data - this is distributed approach rather than centralized source that's limit and boring.

How are you conceptualizing "crowdsourced" such that the approach can be anything other than distributed? As I understand the term, that's something of a sine qua non.

While we're on the subject of meanings, I'm more interested in how this is described as a "startup" on its author's Twitter. It's nifty enough, to be sure, although I find the categories rather limited - but how on Earth does it purport ever to make so much as a single thin dime?

I'm OP: it's uncertain but a few monetization models:

1) text ads: charge $500/m per city, sell 20 city ads = $10,000/m 2) sell city prints: charge $100 per poster, sell 5 per day = $15,000/m 3) sell area data and embedding, not sure but B2B data sales could be another $5,000-$20,000/m depending on customers

Obviously I have not validated any of this, that's the fun. Monthly revenue is therefore $45,000, amplified by odds (e.g. 10% chance this works = $4,500/m).

I love the optimism! Here's hoping it plays out to the good.

Somewhat joking, but ads, businesses pay for "nicer" descriptions, hook into yelp to show off local buisnesses, etc.

This is like Urban Dictionary meets Google Maps.

The results are both hilarious and practical. Great work here!

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