Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News for writers?
HackerNews is a community of skilled professionals engaging politely with each other. It’s great for entrepreneurs and technical people.
Is there somewhere similar for writers? Especially fiction writers?
Is there somewhere similar for writers? Especially fiction writers?
Not even in work?
I was part of a long creative writing course (about 9 months), and our class of 20 formed a bond of helping each other A LOT. Sharing tips, beta reading, posting about prizes, open calls for literary magazines, etc.
In this class, we decided to start inviting published authors to share tips for beginners. We got mostly positive responses. Professional writers would spend about 2 hours with us (online) sharing tips and answering questions. All of them were very transparent about how they write and gave useful tips on how to get published. They said things that would be impossible to learn without talking to a professional author.
So I call you a cynic, as you asked me to, and a wrong one at that.
One is that while there are a lot of things that people will share with you (they often want to share their expertise/craft and be good humans), there are a number of things they won’t share with you.
Two is that when you are starting out you are in a position where almost all information from an experienced artisan is helpful. That can mean you may easily miss what they are not telling you.
This is not to say they are misleading you or hold ill will because the information they withhold from the conversation would not be useful to you anyway, as you are not in a position to use it or be a threat to them.
Also, the mentioned example seems very implausible. What makes an author unique is not what source they used for inspiration. Two writers will get the exact same “19th century travel journal” and write to completely different stories inspired by it. In different genres most likely.
I am saying that if you went in asking certain direct questions about the author’s work you wouldn’t get the same reception.
I agree with your point about the outcome of discovering a journal in a broad sense but think reading parent’s example accurately requires a lot of context of being in the industry, presence at the right events, and knowledge of the zeitgeist. There is still competition.
Also, the existence of secrets among humans due to competition seems to be a moot point. Bringing the discussion to the original point, if said competition prevents the existence of a writers' HN, I believe that is completely false. HN is good for entrepreneurs. The fact that they don't share their sales leads here doesn't matter at all for the existence and quality of HN.
Hiding the right secrets in an early company is critical, whether they are technological that you are hiding from competitors or business plan endgames that you are hiding from customers (but perhaps you aren’t aware of them and only the VC sees it). There is a big difference between some person thinking they have a great idea but won’t tell anyone, and determining where you draw the line on sharing product, go-to-market, etc. People who raise enough money have the “that’s the secret part” point of the conversation. The conversation goes better if they communicate that in a way most people don’t notice, though, and so at that point they frequently redirect, deflect or defer.
I think we see the audience of HN differently — from my perception it is predominantly aspirational entrepreneurs, not actual entrepreneurs that make up the majority of engagement here. While no doubt the percentage of entrepreneurs is higher here than just about anywhere else, entrepreneurs have less time and there are just far fewer of them. What I believe is predominant here though, whether entrepreneur or not, is engineer/developer roles.
Regarding your point on competition I think we understand the two cultures of engineers and writers differently. Writing has less constraint, and in my experience that means it is more reliant on ego expression. It can be humbling but a person can also make a great career being a terrible writer. Engineers make things that function. If you are a terrible engineer, your work will rapidly disappoint probably a lot of people, and either you improve, you hide somewhere adjacent, or you leave the profession.
I think HN works for a variety of reasons including the general humility of engineers, the general lack of desire for the spotlight, and the frequency of dramatic and immediate improvement of workflows due to new tools. I don’t know which of these and other reasons are critical but I am skeptical writing has enough of them. Maybe with a new generation of writers.
What I was referring to specifically was inspiration and knowledge of niche events that become the details that bring prose / art alive. These immediately lose their effect if they are reused which is why my friends who are professional writers dedicate an enormous amount of time to research in the hope that these details may jump out to them.
In a lot of contemporary art, a curator's view of work is often hung around a particular piece of research and that must be unique to warrant the attention of the public - my original point was that that research just can't be shared until the work is revealed.
However, maybe to your point, there is a lot of value in a more technical literary HN which encourages meta discussion on the process of writing rather than the content.
Cynics would rather be wrong.
It sounds like a great project for someone who wants to spend the time and energy moderating a forum, slack, discord or what have you. The issue will be gatekeeping "real" and aspiring authors from people who just want a way to @ their favorite author about something. It would potentially be a great place to get advice if people took the time to direct new writers.
As an aside - the podcast Writing Excuses is a great place for new authors to find hours of advice from established authors in several different genres. The show regularly rotates in new guest authors, keeping the topics fresh despite being on their 15th season. Of course like any entrepreneur they have something to sell - their books and writing workshops - but for all that their advice is sincere and useful. https://writingexcuses.com And there is allegedly a discussion forum somewhere on the site although I've never sought it out.
I think the recipe for a good, interests based community is limited moderation, small scale, and a non-profit orientation. Because even once great communities on reddit have been poisoned by their massive growth and ad driven leadership combined with heavy handed, political moderation.
Oddly enough, I have found /lit/ on 4chan to be one of the best communities for discussing books and writing. They are more grounded and passionate than most of the other Chans and while you'll still find the occasional edgy post or nonsense, the censorship free and open community has some brilliant minds engaging there.
Discord has potential, but the constant flow of information and the reliance on typically heavy handed moderation make it just a faster version of popular writing subreddits.
I wish someone could make a cheap and easy shell to quickly make "hacker news" like clones that people could run for given interests, to create communities like this one geared towards other interests.
I think of HN as standing out for having more comprehensive guidelines than most communities, a user base that respects and voluntarily enforces those guidelines, and formal moderation that allows few exceptions to slip through.
We’re lucky that they’re good guidelines and that we have a community that broadly appreciates them, but “limited” is not a term I’d use for the moderation here.
>I wish someone could make a cheap and easy shell to quickly make "hacker news" like clones that people could run for given interests, to create communities like this one geared towards other interests...
or...
https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
>Anarki comes bundled with News, a Hacker News style app...Are you sure about this? One of the biggest publishing houses is being sued by the DOJ to stop a merger. Publishing houses have recently started splitting advances into thirds and quarters over 2-3 years. There's an unprecedented quitting of agents, leaving many authors afloat with no rep. Barnes & Noble recently and suddenly changed how they market hardcover childrens literature which will likely sink debut authors.
This was all subjects within the last 2/3 weeks btw.
This is functionally not the case with engineering schools. Are there any experienced CS or CpE majors working as journalists for major mainstream media organizations? There may be, I honestly don’t know, but they are at least rather hard to find.
Hacker news exists and has value in part because what we had before were predominantly press releases and wikis run by often a single person. Writers with very few exceptions didn’t have the depth of practical experience necessary to provide insights and context, while technology needing commentary was rapidly emerging.
A lot of the early would-be peers such as slashdot and ars got absorbed by media companies and now they are not the same. It helps that HN does not have to make money, and from what I have seen is extremely well moderated.
The original point of issue was the claim that industry-specific news pertaining to writers isn't needed. Whether or not computer scientists are writers has nothing to do with the incorrect claim, which I've given examples to portray its incorrectness.
You have given an example of people in a specific subfield wanting to spread awards around, unless you’re referring to something else. I’m not denying the reality of that. That is very different from what we are discussing as well.
You think it will work, I’m skeptical it will work. That’s ok.
I think you are speculating on a place of ignorance about a community you're not a part of and assume you can simply deduce the state of a community anyways, even when your priors are completely wrong.
As I said earlier, I think our definitions are different. Yours is a very broad take on a news site. Mine is more of a direct analog to HN.
You are correct I am not a part of the science fiction writing community. The fact that I am not in no way precludes me from having valid positions on the viability of a community model translation from one community to another based on a more broadly informed macro perspective. It might even be the more accurate perspective as members tend to be biased toward their communities.
To my knowledge, coverage of the journalism industry isn't a huge part of the news cycle, certainly not as much as coverage of the software industry is!
Anyway, there's plenty of stuff on HN that isn't about software development: in the top 10 front page articles right now, there's a news story about an Albanian cyberattack, a link to WikiHouse, a warning about a potential privacy breach on virtual meeting software, product announcements for YC Summer 2022, etc.
It's more "stuff that may be of interest to people in the software industry", and I have no trouble imagining how you could fill a link aggregator with "stuff that may be of interest to writers".
It could be that a wave of similar sites will emerge for a bunch of niche topics and it just so happens that hackers were on the internet first. That hypothesis matches the data too.
And for general use of the English language, there's: https://english.stackexchange.com
The codadict split was largely in part of (and I am intentionally being very vague here as if you dig it gets ugly and that doesn't need to be discussed here) a disagreement on the additional policies that moderators need to follow, religious laws ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat ), SE management at the time, and the broad SE community consensus. To put it lightly, it is a mess. If you want to find an external source, Jon Ericson's one sided retrospective is a starting point.
It resulted in one of the more popular moderators leaving, joining a site/project in development and having a pull on the related communities to shift there.
A corrollary community of writers would be wonderful, though I do think it would likely require the backing of an institution parallel to Ycombinator.
Fortunately, there are many organizations that offer community for writers; most major cities have writing centers such as Richard Hugo House in Seattle, or The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. If you're looking to connect with such a community, these types of places are wonderful resources, though they tend to be offline focused.
I showed her HN, and the level of discourse that happens here, and she was really surprised at the level of discourse that happens here.
If nothing else, maybe someone with some motivation sees an opportunity to create such a community. May or may not involve cloning dang.
While I would love to join a community (I used to use writing.com a ton) of HN but for fiction writers not startup owners plus us hangers on, I don't know if that can be done without a good moderation team.
I'd invest a few dollars into the "clone dang" kickstarter. At the very least he should consider writing a book on fostering communities through tasteful moderation.
It's for SFF writers, and it skews towards trad pub. There are (easy to meet) membership requirements: You need to have earned some money as an author, or have been published somewhere pro-ish.
I've been a member for many years. It's a useful community.
I don't know if YC keep this site running purely out of love or if it's a calculated ploy to make money, but if HN is profitable for YC then it's in a very indirect and hard-to-quantify way - e.g. YC startups using HN as a recruitment platform. Dang doesn't have money-hungry VCs breathing down his neck telling him to maximize "engagement" - the day that happens will be the day HN devolves into an unreadable, unusable pile of garbage, like what happened to Reddit.
There aren't many communities like HN because there aren't many organizations that have the resources to run a site like this without running it into the ground because they have dollar signs in their eyes. The few that do exist are probably small forums focused on a super-niche topic or hobby, but if I knew of them I wouldn't post them here because I wouldn't want to spoil the secret.
If anything HN feels like it has a lighter touch with moderation than most other places online, and I have never seen them outright censor certain political views or show any sort of favoritism towards any one company or group. I think much of that comes from having a small, passionate community that can manage the task of behaving and debating in good faith.
If someone could figure out the method for crafting communities like HN for other interests... that person would be a treasure to the internet.
Forums are also still a thing, and many have thriving close-knit and heavily-moderated communities for people of a common field or interest.
There's also a really good erotica forum which I won't link in public here, but they have a complex application process. The people who get through are mostly respectful, incredibly intelligent and creative, and have quite a bit of ambition. They motivated me to start learning proper writing techniques like outlining and rhe whole Aristotle stuff.
Also I find that screenwriting groups are very mature. The novelist groups tends to want fame and something else, but screenwriters are more interested in what makes a truly good story.
Stop giving things name like this.
The reason HN works is because we are all in the same area and somewhat experts (or trying to be). The problem is that NO OTHER community is online nearly 100% of the time. So there is no writer HN, no science HN, the only thing that comes close is Reddit or 4chan because those are kids, who are also online 24/7.
Real people are in the real world, only techies and kids live online.
The problem facing a dedicated HN-for-X site is that X-experts, spend most of their time doing X instead of talking about doing X with people-aspiring-to-do-X.
I mean Steven King is mostly writing books and when he gives advice he scales it by writing it down (or having it video recorded).
I like that these are not behind some sort of paywall like a "Masterclass" or something.
He also runs an award winning podcast [3] since 2008, which brings forwards famous authors and gets them to share advice on writing.
It's not quite the cozy one-on-one forum style discussion amongst peers that you were wishing for, but if OP is looking for some guidance.
Btw, have you look at the screenwriter's subreddit [4]? I feel they have a much tighter focus on the "writing" aspect, than other general writing related subreddits or forums.
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[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSH_xM-KC3Zv-79sVZTTj...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSH_xM-KC3ZtjKTR2z8rP...
One that I can share is econjobrumors.com, but I also have to strongly warn about it. It's a forum for econ PhD students and academics to discuss the academic job market, but unfortunately, due to its no-sign-up anonymous posting feature and looser moderation policy than HN, it's been taken over to some extent by right-wing trolls - it's even made the news at one point about how it might drive minorities and women out of the profession, that's how bad it was (is?). But last time I checked (a few years ago) it was still very active and even used by young academics from other disciplines (especially math) to discuss their job market, and I saw several "Is there an EJMR for Y?" posts, indicative that there were useful signals for people on the academic job market between all the noise.
I think it attracts hobbyists who refuse to take any advice. It's like how some grandmas refuse to use timers when cooking pasta. These groups are full of people who are always challenging the norm. They spend more time criticizing Stephen King and R.A. Salvatore's writing over making any meaningful output.
I believe the main purpose for these groups is emotional support to becoming a professional. Which can often be in contrast to wanting to improve. So they can be very hostile to constructive criticism.
r/screenwriting is probably an exception. I think people who know about screenwriting are already very capable writers. More talk about how to solve specific work problems, or request career advice past 10 years. Less on trying to get your foot into the industry.
It's still no HN, closer to r/androiddev. In HN you have people talking about quitting FAANG. I believe in a top tier screenwriting group, you'll have more discussions on how to survive Hollywood, things like salaries at Disney, and such.
In other words, most writing spaces are just like HN. Take your pick.