Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaredbrown | Hacker News Reader

I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN community.

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I recently(ish) starting to work on web design after years in desktop product management. A community like this could be terribly helpful.

Excellent, be sure to request an invite and I'll make sure you get one.

Done!

Hah, I'm in the exact same boat and had the same initial reaction.

How did you overcome the "chicken and egg problem" of getting the first batch of people to join?

If it's just link aggregation, you can do it yourself. It's difficult, but possible.

When I was doing newslily (which isn't entirely abandoned, but we've moved on to new projects), we pretty consistently had better quality links than reddit or digg, but doing so took a ton of work on the part of my co-founder and I.

I haven't signed up for OP's service, so I can't say with certainty that it's a link aggregator, but that's what it sounds like. If it is, I suspect that OP is spending a lot of their time searching out quality content.

And if this is the case, good on them. They're probably learning a ton in the process.

It's not so much about searching out the content as it is about choosing what to post. It's easy to find links today with Twitter, etc. But it's hard to predict the ones that will be popular. I rely on my Twitter favorites and several other interesting sources for links. I have definitely learned a lot and know of some great, niche ways to find high quality links now.

I didn't realize how well the invite-only nature of the site would lend itself to attracting an audience. The hope was to merely keep the quality high by making it invite-only, but I have found it's a great incentive to join and to even has a viral edge as people like to give out invites and say they are on Talentopoly in tweets, etc. Also, just being really involved in the site myself everyday making sure that new posts were going up and things other posted were getting commented on. Now that it's starting to take on more of a life of its own I don't have to chime in on everything on the site, though my involvement is still very high throughout the day.

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