Hackernoon: how to make a HN clone in under a minute without writing any code | Hacker News Reader

Hackernoon: how to make a HN clone in under a minute without writing any code

hackernoon.com

16 pointschptung14 comments

I think it's a bit manupulative to use the verb make here, as in "How to make your own pizza without a kitchen? Just go to Dominos".

But nice HN theme they have on their forum-as-a-service.

Totally fair feedback. Our hope was to use the post as a way to explain how our upvote-community-as-a-service actually works using the Hacker News theme as a template.

Please post just under the article title, don't put the site name in it too unless absolutely required for context. (especially not if it's such a generic and low-quality site as hackernoon)

Got it. Thanks for the feedback!

What advantages does this have over a discourse forum or a subreddit?

Hi there!

I'm one of the co-founders of Threadbase, and this question comes up a lot. Discourse is a very good forum software, but it lacks the upvote mechanics from communities like Reddit, Hacker News, or Product Hunt that makes for really sticky communities. We've seen that upvoting allows posters to feel good about "winning" for the day and votes allow lurkers to feel like their contribution is changing the community in the way they want.

As for how Threadbase is different than a subreddit, Reddit is a great content discovery platform that mostly monetizes through ads. Threadbase is made for community owners who want to own their communities. By own, we mean they can customize the look and feel with different pre-built templates, put the community on their domain (no more /r/politics but instead politics.com), and they can either remove ads entirely from their communities or show their own ads with a Google Adsense pixel to monetize their community. We also have more ideas to allow community owners to make more from their communities (e.g. private/registration-only communities, marketplace to sell custom themes, etc.)

Our hope is that communities owners can turn their community side hustles into their full time job.

Hope that answers your question but if you have any other questions, let me know!

I see, thanks!

Interesting. Does your ranking algorithm work like Reddit[0] or HN[1] or is it something different?

[0]: https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...

[1]: https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...

HelloBox is another one - https://www.hellobox.co - that helps you create community sites.

I would like to see an example where this kind of project makes a more complex site.

Hi there - Out of curiosity, what kind of add-ons would you want a forum-as-a-service? Right now, we're working with our users to understand what solutions they need in a no-code product.

Would love to learn more about what you're thinking to see if we could find a solution.

I've always wondering about upvote dynamics I think it would be interesting if they were very configurable. Show comment points or hide them? Should users only get X downvotes per day? Maybe an upvote should give +2 and a downvote -1? Maybe a downvote should be -2 for the downvotee and -1 for the downvoter?

Yeah this is what we're trying to figure out too, but we haven't thought about some of these options. Some of our users brought up that they'd like downvoting added in which helps with moderation, but after that, we could work on allowing an admin to decide the weight of an up or downvote.

Thanks for the feedback!

TL;DR: have our "forum as a service" do it for you.

This is advertising disguised as an article.

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