Ask HN: A new kind of forum | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A new kind of forum

8 pointsmds10114 comments

As a member of a lot of forums, I have repeatedly observed that nearly all forum software suffers from following issues:

1. Poor discoverability of interesting discussion threads.

2. Large number of duplicate threads covering the same discussion.

3. Linear discussion threads without heirarchy, making it difficult to follow discussions.

4. Annoying and detracting user signatures.

In order to solve these problems, I propose a new kind of forum wth the following features:

1. HN style voting for bringing interesting discussions to the top.

2. Stack Overflow style similar topic search to prevent multiple threads for the same topic.

3. Heirarchical threaded discussions.

4. No user signatures/minimal 1 line text only signatures.

5. Hosted service.

6. Mobile optimized version.

Basically this would be a hosted HN/reddit clone without the link aggregation bit.

Does this idea hold merit? Would forum owners/moderators be willing to jump to such a forum?

This is a difficult thing. In 2012/2013, forums are ubiquitous. If you're going to write a new forum software, you then have to make a choice:

1) Do you only target "people who don't have a forum yet but want to start one"?

2) Or do you make an upgrade/migration path from vBulletin/etc so that you can let existing forums move to your software?

If you go with #1, that's a long, long slog IMO. If you go with #2, you have an instant market of 100,000,000 forums.

The subject being discussed makes some difference though. A search functionality in a programming related forum is fundamental, while it probably isn't in a music one for example.

I've been running a music forum since 2001 (millions of posts) and I'm not sure an implementation of this type would suit... but these are all good concepts overall.

Forums are all about community, full of people, who don't care about super-duper-yet-another-uber-pro-framework.js features

exactly. Yup, totally agree. The core people who visit the community could care less about searching for something.

And the casual visitors don't need to search a ton because they came to a specific forum thread through a Google search.

Yeah, I agree that it's the communit that makes the forum, but I have talked to quite a few members on different forums serving different niche areas and a lot of them have agreed that a reddit-esque way of presenting discussions would be better. Also, it was mostly the people who spent a lot of time on the forums that usually supported this idea.

Also, shouldn't cleaning up the presentation and making it easy to follow discussion threads heirarchically increase user engagement?

That makes no sense to me. The forum owner/founder had to choose a forum in the beginning, right? If the forum owner chose poorly, then it makes for a frustrating experience thus only the most under-served niches/people will participate. Ultimately the community starts somehow and, to me, the forum software is a critical piece. It should be fluid, fast, and not get in posters' way.

It sounds like a great idea and I would love to be on your testing team in the future. My email is on my profile, add me to your beta mailing list :)

Thanks. This is still just an idea in my head. I'm just in the 'gauging interest' phase now. I'll let you know if/when something is available for testing.

I think a lot would hinge on cost, especially for the larger forums. What is your idea here to monetize?

I was thinking of pricing based on pageviews/month.

As a forum owner, to me "pageviews/month" is a pretty scary metric. "You mean I'll have to pay more if Google wants to index me?" What about bandwidth/mth? That seems more palatable to me.

1) What's your MVP ?

2) What would your average customer look like ?

1. I haven't given it much thought, but MVP should be a barebones forum much without any communities, user pages, private messaging etc. basically an MVP would look like the Ask HN page.

2. The average customer would be the same as that for any other hosted forum i.e. someone without the technical chops to run a forum software themselves, but having the passion to run the community.

I think you need to dig down further on the customer question. Are your users going to be say small community clubs with 20 members using it for chatter, or fan boards with hundreds of thousands of users, or companies using it internally.

What does the ROI look like from the user perspective, are your users going to recoup costs through sell subscriptions to member only forums, run advertising, or are they going to be funded via patronage ?

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