But something with the simplicity and threadedness of Hacker News or reddit would really be great.
Does anyone have any ideas or experience?
They're both open source and you could alter it so that submissions couldn't be links if you so chose.
reddit is a possibility, because I know Python, but I felt it was quite large-scale. Maybe I should look at the code properly, though. Thanks!
Rolling something from the HN or Reddit codebase sounds like a pretty interesting project, though.
You might also look into whether http://intensedebate.com/ would work for your purposes...it does have threading and voting.
Finally if you or your developer(s) know Python/Django, you could check out the following two Django plugins:
http://code.google.com/p/django-threadedcomments/ http://code.google.com/p/django-voting/
You could pretty easily put together a threaded, votable discussion thread based on these. (In fact, you can find a whole lot of other social networking features in Pinax, which I'd describe as a social networking framework for Django: http://code.google.com/p/django-hotclub/)
Hope some of these suggestions are helpful.
board.vivalavinyl.org board.crewcial.org
Here's the source http://code.google.com/p/pgboard/
It's actually a lot like HN.
If it's an interesting question, it will get voted up, probably.