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Comment by hubraumhugo | Hacker News Reader

I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.

Isn't game development already discussed here?

I actually built a side project that categorizes front page articles so I can filter for topics. Here's an example for recent gamedev content: https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/d57360e8-1eb1-4800-a711-f0d5...

View on HN

Gamedev is discussed here but honestly not very often if you enjoy it more then the more popular HN topics.

The thing is HN doesn't even have a tag system so you can't "see gamedev posts only".

So far the most active community seems to be gamedev.net, but I feel it's in a long decline.

+1 for tags. As HN has grown, the topics here have become so broad that it might be months before a particular topic you are interested in like gamedev makes it to the front page. It would be awesome to click a tag and only see submissions about that topic. Or better yet, unclick a tag and filter out submissions about that topic. I'm so sick of AI this and LLM that and DeepFoo and ChatBar, it would be so nice to just delete that noise in my own view of HN's front page.

Theres some sort of something quite special about HN and I suspect it's the lack of anything special.

I think we don't see the special, as I never see anything untoward on HN, and since I know the general population has some... Colorful people; the key here has to be the moderation team, and the front page mechanism (algo, manual, whatever it is)

I think it's just the "Ways to make a living in business"[0]:

> Be First, Be Smarter or Cheat

A lot of the most popular communities were simply first. Most others cheated. There's very, very few communities I can think of that were truly smarter and successful as a result.

The 'Unreal community' has enough relevant content that it'd take a lifetime to go through it all. I'm sure the same is true of Unity.

Maybe not the more general stuff you might be after, but those forums+ deserve a mention.

Are you telling me you don’t want to read constant updates on the state of AI and how it will obviously find AGI tomorrow so please give us a trillion dollars today?

For better or worse at least it's not "uber for X" posts of a half decade ago

New startup idea. Just get some big names to sign on like sama or whoever and then only ever state “we are the uber of AI”. Then wait for the spice to flow.

n-gate would have said "OpenAI, business model - Uber for laundering pirated content"

For me, "HN for X" sounds like a "Reddit channel with a sense of grandeur".

Starting one is easy, but maintaining both quality and popularity is hard - here, HN is a rare exception.

Also I thank that moderating a popular forum is dang hard.

I see what you did there, well played! :o)

So the secret to "hn for X" is "dang for X"

Now we need to make dang as a service.

Idk if dang was in charge back in the day, but I remember HN used to shut off sign-ups whenever Reddit went down (very frequently like 10 years ago) so they didn’t get a flood of users looking for a low-effort Reddit like experience. Those are the kinds of things I’d never think about but are also what has kept HN so great. Genuinely glad this bit of internet has been so well maintained over the years.

> For me, "HN for X" sounds like a "Reddit channel with a sense of grandeur".

it's a bit sad seeing such a derisive comment about self-hosting on HN

It’s not about self hosting, it’s about how community building is hard.

the post clearly implies that opting for independent hosting instead of creating a subreddit (the admittedly easier route, for community building as well as technologically) for a niche forum indicates a "sense of grandeur"

You might be kind of young, so there was this time when "Facebook for health" and "amazon for X" were used as legitimate pitch items as a way to frame the potential of whatever CRUD app someone was selling as a billion dollar visionary idea. It was very tiring. The modern equivalent is something like a "DALL-E 0llamma MLA is all you need" post about a random arvix article about ML

What if such feeling is justified? Everything else equal, I'd rather have a community not belong to Reddit, and I'd be horrified if HN somehow "migrated" to being a sub, the difference between communities is enormous.

That's not how I read it at all.. It's the "HN for..." part that is the sense of grandeur.. Not the idea of self-hosting vs. using Reddit or Discord.

HN has been around for 15 years, it has earned its place as a quality community through time and much effort (i.e. moderation).

So to call yourself "HN for..." as a brand new thing is like opening up a brand new coffee shop in your town and saying "we're the next Starbucks"...

Building a community focused on something isn't hard, you grab a few people you know with shared interest, and they grab and invite their friends. Small game development communities everywhere thrive, I've never been a part of one that wasn't doing well.

Building a large community not focused on anything is much harder.

Dead subreddits, dead forums and abandoned meetups might disagree with that assessment. Building a community is far from easy and there's a lot of effort involved to keep it going as an organizer or moderator. Setting it up initially is easy, keeping it going for many years is hard.

I've set up, moderated forums, irc servers and organized a regular meetup for many years and I've seen that all the time.

Well you said it yourself. the beginning and short term is easy.

maintaing is very, very, hard. As a website, you fight for attention against decades of algorithms, SEOS, trillions of dollars of ad revenue, and you still gotta be picky to not pick up trolls. IRL, you're fighting for time in a person's schedule to travel and incentivizing them to keep coming in person while people are more overworked and less compensated than ever. Even the most benevolent, well mattered communities that attract high quality participants will decay naturally. So maintaning is a never ending, thankless job.

Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?

I mean that referring to "HN for X" is like (more than a decade ago) "Facebook for X".

I consider HN a clean exception to most (all?) online communities in which I have been participaing; in all other cases, the quality tanked, they became ghost towns, or they just changed from their original goal.

Sure, there are many wonderful forums and special interest groups, and it is good that new ones have been created. Just HN is not something you start at, it is something you become.

> might have more to do with your vantage point

It has everything to do with the simple fact that HN was launched in '07, when Reddit wasn't that mainstream.

And it hasn't really changed since '07 (and I say this in a very positive way).

Yes, honestly i think this is the largest contribution to HNs successful place in its niche. Every other website turned from articles to images to infinite scroll politics and gifs. They all did that because it sells more ads. HN has never made a design change that prioritizes anything over articles. And even when it does conform to the greater trends of most people reading comments over articles (increasing bubblifiation of popular beliefs) the comments are much huge quality here because we're all the kind of people who like a site with articles, and thus more people actually read the articles, and the feedback does not include the internet ubiquitous "social credit score" seen on numerical stats around every comment on nearly every other website.

and yet, because social networks degrade in quality over time (popularity brings about the riff raff), it's essential to start net social networks to maintain quality discourse.

> Isn't game development already discussed here?

I'd say not really. Not in the detail that this site aims for. At least on the front page.

That site aims for it, but the front page goes back a month or more. That's not a level of detail or activity that will compel people to go there regularly?

I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.

I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).

Neither am I. Doesn't mean HN works as a go to for game development information. Or for web development. Or for embedded development.

HN is more of a collection of high level interesting facts about everything techy.

I guess we've had different experiences on here then.

I've had really in-depth and fascinating conversations (or simply lurked the comments when I have nothing to contribute) on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others..

While the feed itself might be generalist, the people who choose to dig into specific topics on here are often experts (sometimes very notable ones) in their field, and it can lead to very enlightening and educational discussions.

> on all kinds of game dev topics, or web dev, or others

Exactly. Every day another topic. Great for keeping yourself informed and running into the occasional insider insight that will help you 2 years down the road.

Not enough for a domain you're really interested in, whichever that is.

I see your point.. I guess again we have different experiences, perhaps depending on how often we come to the site or how much content we're looking for.

I can barely keep up with the topics I'm interested in on here, I don't know that I could handle more... :-)

Invite system tends to do wonder for the quality of discussion, tho.

Only if you actually get enough people in the door..

Plus sometimes invite systems mean you just get the "usual suspects", friends-of-friends, etc...

It definitely has value in keeping out the spammers and trolls though, I agree there.

I suppose it depends on how you want to handle moderation in the long run.

Any dev based forum needs full markdown support where you can type ```javascript.

//js code here.

```

And it formats as js, say. Formatting stuff on here, reddit, and other sites that support only partial markdown is painful for me.

Q.E.D.

My first check on any "HN for X" is: does it look and feel almost the same. If not I get frustrated because apparently I’ve been promised something else.

I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.

The other half of the chicken and egg is that hn is “hn for devs but actually just for techy people to cover all sorts of stuff” whether that’s the intent or not.

By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.

> I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.

With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.

You're kind of describing an RSS reader, or del.icio.us...

Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.

This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.

The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!

Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.

It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said. I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.

Some of these HN for X do manage to break free. I like jgc's Two Stop Bits retro "HN", which is a very small community, but active:

https://twostopbits.com/news

It looks like 70% of the posts there are from bmonkey325 and most threads have no replies. I wouldn't call it active.

I had an idea last week for a dutch version of HN, only to realize that dutch people already use HN

Pretty much the only country in the world where every single person speaks perfect English.

>Isn't game development already discussed here?

ofc sometimes game dev is discussed here, but imo I don't see it enough here that I wouldn't want a hackernews just for gamedev.

also very useful side project

For example, SDL 3 was officially released last week, which I think is significant. It was posted on HN, but it didn't get enough votes to be visible to me.

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