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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Ravelry is a fantastic social network. It has a load of innovations worth copying. Two examples:

- On Rav anyone can create a new discussion forum, and the creators are responsible for moderating it. It allows the community to continue to grow and embrace a wider range of people who could not otherwise coexist.

- Rav has a like button for ages. It also have agree, love, and disagree, IIRC. Disagree might be mistake. It generates quite a bit of heat. If you've ever had your HN posts downvoted without comment you'll know how annoying it is.

It's worth signing up even if you don't knit just to check out the tech.

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There are a LOT more buttons than that, and I enjoy how descriptive they are. There is educational, interesting, funny, agree, disagree, and love for each post.

I have to say I really appreciate Ravelry having so many options for voting. I used to post a lot in one of the tech forums on Ravelry, especially in reply to one person that kept posting information that was secondhand and wildly inaccurate. Unfortunately, she would have her own groupies (for lack of a better term) that would vote her comment as educational/agree/love. I would also have people that backed me up in the same way. If you didn't have any disagrees (for which I had far less than she did) you wouldn't be able to easily tell who to listen to. Nor is a straightforward up/down type voting system the best in a discussion.

I think that system is fabulous especially for forums and discussion mediums (see also: slashdot). Not so much for something like reddit or twitter where only one or two options is probably the only sane option to provide for many reasons.

I knew I'd forgotten a bunch of the buttons... You just reminded me about the "your ears are burning" feature -- if your name is mentioned in a thread you get a message about it, so you can jump in and see what people are talking about.

The coder (Casey) has a blog: http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/

also of interest, the tech behind the site: http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2010/03/24/ravelry-runs-on-201...

My fiancee knits a ton and loves Ravelry, so naturally I had to read through the dev blog a while back. Has anyone seen anything fun done with the API?

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