Ask HN: a 4chan for Hackers and Startups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: a 4chan for Hackers and Startups?

5 pointsJarred11 comments

Firstly, I'm not referring to a /b/ for Hackers/Startups, or at least the content that community produces.

What I'm suggesting is a rapidly-changing community for hackers and startups. Something where almost everytime you hit refresh new content made by other hackers and startups appear. This news site has this, but it's really more about the news (Content generated elsewhere).

I check Hacker News several times a day, sometimes more than once an hour. This is one of the few kinds of communities I enjoy being around. What I don't like is that it's boring a lot of the time. Actually having conversations with people here other than comments never really happens. Not only is it boring for lack of conversation but boring because there isn't enough going on.

What do you guys think?

View on HN

People have conversations with other HNers, they just tend to do it in person. There're several meetups I know of involving HNers; I've met a few of the prominent names on the site.

There're two problems with a rapid-fire, conversational site for hackers:

1.) Good, thought-provoking work takes a long time to produce. If you read a blog-post that, say, features useful benchmarks between popular web frameworks, it probably took dozens of hours to produce. There are very few people willing to spend that time for 15 minutes of fame, certainly many fewer than are willing to post quick memes on an imageboard. Fewer people generating content + content takes longer to generate = a much slower update rate.

2.) Conversation is interesting for the people involved, but it's boring for bystanders. Most lurkers here are attracted because they might learn something; if it just becomes an exchange of social pleasantries (or not ;-)) and memes between an established clique, it'd probably mean the long-term death of the site.

I agree, good stuff isn't made quickly. But good conversations tend to lead to good stuff. In other words, the community wouldn't be for regurgitating pictures made by other people. It would be having for having good conversation with the right kind of people.

So maybe these conversations could be limited to only a certain group of people, like say 5 people who are contributing to it then nobody else sees it. If the conversation ends, and the person who started the conversation isn't satisfied they restart the conversation and it will be hidden from everyone who saw it. But this is just one possible way of doing it, there are probably better ways than this.

I guess it would be kind of like a meeting place for hackers and startups. That could turn into something along the lines of a dating site, but for meeting co-founders.

I think there just happens enough here :) If you're doing other things at the same time, a fast community just moves too fast.

I agree on the other thing though. This is not really a place where interesting conversations develop. Generally, after a few comments, a thread dies and fades away because it falls off the front page.

It would be nice if it had some heuristic to keep threads that still have active discussion higher up.

However, wouldn't a faster community make this even worse?

I disagree. I'm not saying faster as in faster growing. I mean a more active community. Instead of having a 100's of people submitting per day, have 10-30 people actively engaging in discussions with other people of like-minded interests.

What I really like about 4chan is the sheer volume of content. Everytime you refresh the page there's new discussions going on. People are just talking to people interested in listening.

If we can group together just hackers and startups to have a place to go for their questions, meeting people, and talking to people of mutual interest, in an active and engaging way, I think it would be a fun place to be.

I'm working on exactly this area at Sparkmuse. We're trying to build -the- startup community including all of the related disciplines (hackers, designers, marketers, etc). Although obvious, 4chan has an enormous community which is why they have so much activity. Successfully growing a community to that scale is immensely difficult.

Our community is based on a mission to help tech entrepreneurs succeed. That includes giving feedback on ideas, helping cofounders meet, providing discussion areas, and hooking founders up with good deals. If that is something you find interesting, I'm actively looking for people to join up with us and make it a reality.

I think that good founders will make a good product. The question everyone always hears though is "Where can I find a co-founder?", I'm having that question myself and it sounds like you are too. If that question sounds like something that'd be interesting to answer feel free to give me a call (925)-200-8843, and I mean right now.

"Something where almost everytime you hit refresh new content made by other hackers and startups appear."

I think you just described Github. Follow your favorite hackers/startups and that's exactly what your news feed would be. Also see Forrst and Dribble for design work.

I didn't really mean code though. I meant content as in it could be anything. That stuff could be code but it might just be a question, or the individual asking for advice on their startup. I'm not a frequent user of Github but it looks to be just for code.

http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/ ?

irc?

Is that much "new content... everytime you hit refresh" distraction a good idea?

If you need this much second-to-second stimulation, can't you just join dozens of chat channels and 'follow' thousands of Twitterers?

Well I have ADD, that's probably a reason why I want something like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com