Brad Feld created a Hacker News-esque site, Startup Revolution
hub.startuprev.com
hub.startuprev.com
- The thumbnails add nothing useful
- Fewer headlines are visible without scrolling
- Insipid 'social' functions showing me everything going on down the right pane
I read Reddit and HN, but I read them for different reasons. I'm not looking for a Reese's-esque solution, I would like my chocolate and peanut butter decidedly separate.
To build a Hacker News competitor you need to build a community of equal value, not some 'rewards'. The reward here comes from having intelligent people read my comments and write intelligent responses. Build that and it'll be worth checking out.
And, making it look like a pink version of Digg circa 2007 isn't enticing me at all. I do not need avatars, lots of whitespace, fancy fonts, etc. And it has precisely the horrible thing Digg had: two clicks to read a story (one click to get to same lame summary of a story, another to read it).
Hacker News is all about respecting what Shannon told us so long ago about noisy channels.
More seriously, I think the tone of the comments on HN is not supposed to be binary: we don't aim for solely critical or supportive feedback. We try to improve things by offering suggestions. That my comment made it to the top means my suggestions were widely viewed as useful, or at least my criticism was accurate.
The magnitude of the negative sentiment isn't really important. It's the fact that, if the creator values HN's input, he should accept suggestions more-or-less from the top down, and weight them appropriately. If he scrolls to the bottom to see some generic 'Good work man, way to hustle', he doesn't really get it, does he?
Should I be familiar with him?
The site looks great, though, although the white-to-pink contrast is pretty bad. The more HN alternatives, the better.
Although, they did do a crap job at emphasizing 'LOCAL' on the site besides using the once in the sidebar description.
"SocialEngine is rapidly evolving as an amazing tool for building and managing communities." - Brad Feld, feld.com
Huh. Now that I know he's involved at some level, but this isn't disclosed with his quote, it makes me question the credibility of the entire site.
SR (gotta refer to it by an acronym you know) is powered by SE. If it could handle HNish load, that would speak volumes about Social Engine, no?
Obviously there's a commercial interest (even if it doesn't drive decisions, it's still there)
It's not like the community even cares about "pretty" design, they want functional design, and HN is approximately as good as it will get. The things to fix about HN are the non-reversible actions, annoying link-timeout due to continuations (hint: don't use Arc, probably...), etc.
- We've toned down the colors. Look better? - Sounds like you guys feel that the right-side gutter isn't serving a good purpose? Should we just ditch that? - We are going to tone down the BigDoor plugin.
This is still, at its core, an experiment. It definitely isn't perfect yet - the underlying platform is only 2 months old - so your feedback is really helping us... please keep it coming!
But content is what matters, and the content seems alright.
Thanks, Mom!
1. The about me field and uploaded image input reset themselves whenever your form is invalid.
2. When signing up with Twitter, the form doesn't register that your image is already set via Twitter and forces the user to upload one locally.
Sounds like they are going to concentrate on what I would characterize as fluff stories. I realize those are important to a lot of people, but some day I would really like to discover a friendly hacker community where the focus is on, well, hacking and making things.
By the way, the name reminded me of the uploaded lobsters from Stross’ Accelerando.
Not quite what I'm used to.