Union Square Ventures' new website
usv.com
usv.com
Twitter login and author info, standalone posts (submitted links/stories), and Disqus comments.
It feels broken already, using a strange mix of identity from one communication tool and the interface from another ✝.
What I like is that by connecting to Twitter and using the USV team's accounts as the source you get a great idea of the character and interests of the VC team and fund.
What I dislike is that by opening that up to anyone, the front-page just becomes a mini-HN and the insight into the character of the team is immediately diluted.
I also dislike that they use Twitter identity as the author for a conversation/debate, but then use Disqus as the medium for the debate. This has two effects:
1) It breaks the feel of the audience, people present themselves slightly differently to different groups, for example how many HN profile pages carry identical info on the individual's Twitter page?
2) It splits the debate across Twitter (where some will reply directly to the author) and Disqus.
I also find the blog post placement weird. All of the design hints on the blog posts (the grey squares to the right) make me think that they are stories, just "Hot" stories that are being featured. Not the case though, grey squares are blog posts that are masquerading as submitted stories (the design consistency of the block).
It's a weird experience overall. I liked the effect that was achieved early-on of gaining insight into what the team are following and debating, but it feels confusing. Ultimately I think the best thing to do is just to follow interesting people on Twitter to gain this insight, follow trends and interests.
✝ Should probably be pointed out that Twitter and Disqus are both portfolio companies of USV, and perhaps that's why they chose to do this weird mashup. Makes me wonder about the comedy gold or real opportunities that might be achieved from mashups of other portfolio company offerings. Code academy lessons that start where you left off, every time you get a cab using Hailo?
we once tried to play in a corner of that space as well (focused more on expertise/ context), but it is clearly a chicken & egg situation.
we are thinking about ways we can connect the two together in a tighter way to reduce some of this
as you point out, twitter and disqus are USV portfolio companies and we love using and supporting the products our portfolio companies make
On that... nail on the head.
It would be good if you could add a subtle addition of highlighting the things on the board in that a USV team member has contributed.
I think of VC firms as akin to a curator of interesting companies and opportunities, and that the sum of the portfolio reflects strongly the personal curation of the VCs. It'd be ace to see that shine through this new board.
The only conflict in that is whether you see this board as becoming more than USV, or giving an insight into USV. If the former than you'd be right to hesitate about highlighting the team's contributions, if the latter then do it already.
I think you could benefit more from automatically analyzing links from many sources than to implement a sharing service yourself.
but only time will tell if we are right about that
At least 25% of the time that I've clicked on a comments link, I've had to sit around (after the page has loaded!) waiting for Disqus to load the comments (what I actually came to see). Sometimes they don't even load at all and I have to refresh the page. I completely understand that you guys love supporting your portfolio companies, but it seems like this type of site isn't quite as well suited for Disqus.
Just my two cents. I'm excited to see how you guys improve on this, and other than these issues I think you've done a great job so far.
Honestly, the page looks pretty decent. It seems less of a clone of HN, than just a page where you can comment and vote on links, which frankly, wasn't a concept created by Hacker News.
Voting rigging is the norm, companies flag posts about their competitors, there's zero transparency about moderation or flagging. The community has become a lot more negative, less supportive and less startupy.
There have been a number of attempts to build HN clones/rivals but generally the people creating them have focused on the technology rather than the community which is the important thing. USV is someone who could potentially build a great community and we should applaud them for trying.
what we are trying to do is open up our link sharing to the public so everyone can see what we are thinking about, reading, and discussing
and while doing that, we thought it would be great to let others do the same
i did give PG a preview of this about a month ago in case he was upset about it. he replied to me and did not seem to be
HN is useful to see what is hot. Hot does not mean it is relevant to all of us. If I am raising money, I would be interested in topics tagged to raising money - the fact that you (fred wilson) posted, up voted, commented the topic is a good signal that topic is relevant.
I also like the idea of commenting system that rapgenius and medium deploys. I believe that the idea of seeing the most up voted comment is broken. You might have something to say on a particular sentence in fund raising article- I'm interested to see that. Others may have interesting things to say about other sentences. If USV can pull content online and allow people to comment each sentence, I believe this would really add value to our community.
HN used to have a lot more in-depth "AskHNs" before Quora came along. Quora never tried to compete with HN, but rather it solved the problem that people were using HN for.
Plenty of people who use HN want curated startup content and intelligent discussion and will go wherever that's found.
In any-case more high-quality startup communities are good for everyone (YC, VCs, founders, etc.) so I don't think that competition is likely to be a significant issue for anyone.
in general we're very pro-open source
Who edited the title? You just took a discussion of how this was a clone of HN website and half way through turned into... into what exactly?
The submission was about USV and HN designs being similar, not that USV got new design. You just nuked the context. Seriously, mods, get your shit together.
Considering the conversation was "it's not a HN clone" I think the mods have their shit together.
Unlike HN, you must submit text in the body of a submission. Which is somewhat redundant.
and everyone gets a vote up or down so the best links will rise to the top
it also has the benefit of engendering more of a discussion. i'm more likely to comment on a post if the OP has already commented on it him/herself
but yes this is something we talked about internally
My biggest problem, on first impressions, is that the design gives the most emphasis to the least important part: the submitter. What I love about HN and Reddit is that I can get through someone's 600-word comment and be thoroughly enlightened or angered and not care or even notice that it was authored by tptacek or some long-time lurker with just 50 karma. It's only because I've read HN frequently that I quickly associate tptacek's handle (if I stop to look at the handle) with having karma...otherwise, he's just some other commenter with something very insightful or aggravating to read...HN's design rightfully de-eephasizes the authority given by identity to a comment and submission, letting the content stand for itself. This is the exact opposite the USQ forum's current design, with Twitter handles overpowering everything else, even the already too-large and boldened headlines.
Edit: I don't mind the use of Twitter handles. I think the avatars should be axed, though, and perhaps the handles should be moved to the far right so that the user has to read the headline before being able to notice the submitter name. Yes, I realize this would make it very close to a "HN ripoff" but big deal...copy the best parts of HN.
Disclaimer: I "cloned" HN when making http://lifestyle.io. I didn't have a preexisting community, but a small handful of people find it useful. Is there a lot of overlap in content? Sure. Do I discover stuff I might have missed on HN? Yep.
I just wish I were a better community organizer.
this is about us reading you
Not your fault, we're experiencing a server error. Try again in a moment! Fail-Fred "
face plam thats all I get when I click on comment.
404 was a surprise from Nick.
I don't think USV's case is any different.
we've been using this internally for a while to share and discuss links and we find it very valuable
so if a community doesn't develop around this, it will likely just be a public page where USV posts and discusses links, which in and of itself should be useful to entrepreneurs to see what we are interested in and talking about with each other
Other than connecting people to unique content, I don't really get what's going with the whole redesign and HackerNews-esque feel.
(not mine)