Comment by rutierut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rutierut | Hacker News Reader

I am still a very active member of IH, read a lot of the posts and comment often. The thing that bothers me the most is that it is currently shifting from a group of people that are helping out each other to a place for people to share their (success) stories. Don't get me wrong there is currently plenty of both but it's shifting towards a more egocentric vibe.

Someone created a popular thread a while ago (3th most popular post of all time) discussing this precise thing [0]. People with posts asking for help, or just starting out (often not the most exciting content) would get lost in the noise and disappear, I often scroll down the 'new' tab a bit to catch those 0 comments posts but sometimes I am just not in a position to answer these, often due to inexperience/lack of expertise on the subject.

I don't know what the solution for this problem would be, to be honest I don't even really know what is causing the problem, an excess of 'wantrepreneurs', a problem with the audience or if the more successful IH-ers got tired of summing up the ways to monetize your side project, I don't know if a very strict 'FAQ - READ THIS BEFORE POSTING' is going to solve this or if it just needs more of a personal community feel but I do think the quality of IH as a forum is degrading by the month and that I am sad to see it do so. Fortunately there are currently plenty of gold nuggets to find between the plethora of posts that sometimes seem to resemble what is in my Medium feed.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/indie-hacker-etiquette-no...

I'm pretty active on IH as well. Haven't really seen the phenomenon that you're describing yet, but I agree that 'copy paste' fatigue is a bit of a problem - I'm definitely struggling to find the energy to post the same response to what amounts to the same question for the fifth time.

I'd like to see the community split up into different threads/sections (like subreddits). We could have a section for [show IH] posts, a section for self-promoting advice articles, and a section to ask for advice.

What I'd really like to see is a Stack Overflow-style suggestion which pops up before you submit a question, prompting you to check out a few previous threads which might answer your question instead of submitting a new one.

"Subreddits" are coming eventually!

The other phenomenon, of people asking the same question over and over, is an interesting one. Unlike StackOverflow, sometimes the same question (e.g. "How should I improve my landing page?") has a different answer depending on what your business is. That said, it would still be nice to do the SO-suggestion thing, and maybe surface some articles as well as some previous threads on the topic.

Awesome!

> Unlike StackOverflow, sometimes the same question (e.g. "How should I improve my landing page?") has a different answer depending on what your business is.

Definitely. One of my pet peeves is people asking these questions without providing context. Although luckily the IH community is slightly more measured/forgiving in response than on SO ;)

I mean, you're just reinventing webboards here, so sticky threads and user-footers/.sigs are logical features to implement. Footers so people have a place for their own repetitive info, and sticky threads for the site's own repetitive info.

I think that the quick solution to help the current situation is this:

1. Allow sorting threads by the time of creation, so discoverability of threads with no responses is much easier. (you can have default and by creation time sorting, this won't be to complex I assume).

2. Maybe finally add a link to interviews to the navbar? This request is simply ignored for months now. You are running a community and you need to be clear on why you are not willing to get it back (after all, its just adding a link).

3. Provide an actionable roadmap with estimated times of completion? For now, there is quite a lot of promises and plans but tbh, the features requested by members the most are usually ignored/forgotten and it seems there are very little changes to the website (besides products part). The roadmap will help the community to see goals and plans for IH and voice concerns before getting forced to accept new features most people won't like. Even a thread every month explaining what will be done. It will help the community to discuss it.

You can click "Newest" at the top of the forum to see threads by creation date.

I'm planning to rework the nav bar. It's not as easy as simply adding a link, as there are numerous links people want faster access to, not just one. I need to design a navigation system that's scalable and responsive to accommodate what I know will be an ever-growing list. There are also a great many other features and bugs I spend time on that people have been requesting for months, not just navigation, and imo navigation is by far the easiest to work around oneself for anyone seriously inconvenienced at the moment.

I share plans for IH on the forum sometimes. I should do it more often for sure — the monthly thread is a great idea. And of course people in the community are free to make threads with requests/questions, and to send me DMs and emails, which I respond to. However, I'll probably never have a public feature roadmap with date estimates.

Sounds good!

I actually track this (roughly), and the percentage of people asking for help hasn't decreased over time. It increased in January of this year and has stayed relatively steady since.

That said, one thing I may investigate is either removing link-only posts altogether, or limiting them to users who pass some minimum standard. Link-only posts are generally easier to abuse and less useful on IH than they are on a site like HN, where people come to discuss news.

Given what you just said I think that's a great idea!

You last line suggests you value Medium as much as your used to value IH when IH was at its peak.

Am I right here?

Ah no sorry, I meant to insinuate my Medium feed is a list of useless 'inspirational' articles without real value.

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