Show HN: I made an HN for the financial industry
boredbanker.com
boredbanker.com
Good examples of communities that have managed to maintain quality well are /r/askhistorians and lobste.rs. Ask Historians managed to do it by ruling with an iron fist. Lobste.rs by heavily curating which members are able to join. Another interesting example of retaining long term quality is visible in private torrent sites- many of which employ both an invite system and strict rules.
Finally, what made Hacker News so good ~4 years ago was it was originally populated by people within the industry with decades of experience. You yourself said this was for the financial industry-- trying to pick up early adopters here makes about as much sense as trying to pick up adopters for a medical industry community on an economist forum.
[1] /r/trueaskreddit, /r/truereddit/, /r/truerreddit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
I'm honestly too young to have an experience with this myself, and don't expect finding out the best new sites to be easy or quick, but what tips from your experience can you offer?
These sites typically allow anyone to write financial articles, trading recommendations etc. and get paid for page views. There is little to no verification of the content, let alone diligence on the credibility of the authors, and the quality of the discussion is extremely poor.
Unfortunately, given the volume of content they can produce through crowd sourcing, they are also extremely popular. Examples include Forbes, Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool.
EDIT: Assuming your question was in relation to financial news.
I'm not familiar with the author - is he/she someone baller enough in the finance world to draw quality discussion? Are people going to break away from WallStreetOasis and minesweeper for this? Is there useful industry-relevant information? (My impression from friends who've gone into finance is that technical skills matter for jack shit as long as you're competent, and relationships, positioning, and sounding like you know what you're talking about rule the day. Is that something you can vaguely convince yourself you're getting better at at while wasting office time on a finance hacker news clone?)
Unrelated, I've always thought it would be fun to hem up a corpus of SeekingAlpha articles, use some rudimentary NLP to look for clear short-term bullishness or bearishness on some specific security, and see if you can either (a)find anyone who's demonstrably worth reading and following (and maybe trading based on them), or (b) more likely point out that everyone is full if s, most of them are convinced of their own s, and in the end it's all clickbait with charts and important-sounding finance words.
there is strong evidence that chasing managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records is actually harmful to your portfolio health [1]
[1] http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/guest/BP-130108-Track-...
In finance I expect this will be much more aggressively pursued because AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.
Is there something specific about finance that makes AdSense more valuable besides traffic? And if you already have traffic, seeding it in a brand new forum doesn't seem like a good way to get a big boost. From what I understand, there is a reason why high traffic blogs like Instapundit are supported more by Amazon affiliate type programs than AdSense revenue. AdSense will make you a bit of money, but I don't really know of anyone who uses it as their primary income.
I think that's a problem with the invite only way: it can be too exclusive to build enough critical mass to create a community in the first place. It's easy to argue that there is no noise if there is close to no signal.
I had a similar idea (inspired by Slashdot) about ten years ago but, like so many of my great ideas (e.g. time travel, teleportation), I never got around to implementing it.
A site like BoredBanker.com will almost certainly be targeted by wannabes, trolls and banker-haters. If you don't keep them off the site, real bankers will be turned off by the low SNR and abuse.
If it were my site, I would put in place a mechanism to filter them out at registration. People registering with the site would be required to supply an email address. Anyone who could provide a Bloomberg account (i.e. an email address @bloomberg.net) or an email address at a domain on a whitelist of known financial institutions (e.g. morganstanley.com, citi.com, gs.com, etc.) would automatically be accepted (and potentially given downvoting rights straight away) and so would anyone they invited/recommended/vouched for.
Anyone else would either (a) go into a queue for approval or (b) be given "on probation" access. If (a), someone would need to review the applications (presumably by checking the domain name of the applicant's email address (and, if appropriate, adding that domain to the whitelist) and/or reviewing their LinkedIn profile. If (b), there could be a feedback mechanism that would automatically hellban the user if they received enough downvotes (or were flagged by a moderator), or promote them to "approved" if they received enough upvotes.
You could also allow "approved" users to hide comments from "on probation" users (similar to how Slashdot used to - may still do, for all I know - allow you to set a minimum karma limit).
That way, you make it really easy for legitimate finance professionals to join, while putting hurdles in place to make life difficult for the trolls and Occupy-ists. And you also generate a bit of scarcity-desirability through the invite mechanism.
Of course, as soon as it becomes successful/popular, you'll probably find that the site gets flagged for filtering out by the web proxy filters the banks use. :-/
Initially there is the bleeding edge, and then there is the long noisy end.
For what it's worth, I think the answer to site quality isn't pre-filtering users; it's having a simple process to nuke bad users. Lobste.rs put a big bet on pre-filtering; it hasn't worked out. I'm not surprised; one thing I look for on great HN threads is the random first-party (owner of company, primary author of package, &c) commenter who joins just to comment on that story, which is something that can't happen in the pre-filter model.
Such a 'qualification club' is inline with my own view of the type of exclusivity sought after by sterotyped or caricature B-school personalities.
Correct, not supported today, but feasible with business development.
However, I do believe easy score verification could be part of an overall strategy to increase the GMAT business. The thinking is that if society started using indicators of intelligence for various reasons (e.g. entry into an exclusive online forum, government civil servants employment, running for Congress...) the indicator of intelligence that is preferred by society could sell more tests. GMAT could create an advantage in the marketplace by being the easiest score to electronically verify.
I scored a 720 on the GMAT. I do not think you should make any assumptions about my performance in a government position from that test result. All that the 720 indicates is that I am a skilled test taker.
When I first signed up for SumZero, the application process was pretty extensive. It involved a phone call with Divya or one of the other co-founders to check you out and make sure you weren't just some wannabe, that you actually worked at an investment fund.
I actually think was critical early on to make sure the membership base was high quality and acted as a self-reinforcing mechanism to continue to attract good members.
The attraction of the system is that, if you keep an eye out for clever attacks against the model (i.e., something like security fixes), and if certification activity by "good" users is essentially sane, then such a site needs no ongoing moderation by the site owners.
[1]: http://svn.dprg.org/viewvc/mod_virgule/trunk/
[3]: The codebase hasn't been touched, and there's a form of attack that, while it is known how to solve it, has not been fixed on the main site; also the UI has some cruft and doesn't support an HN-like leaderboard view - the codebase is fairly simple, though, and lots of people have hacked on it over the years.
why do you think HN is successful? did they limit registrations to @yahoo.com, @redhat.com, @microsoft.com, @google.com, @venturecapitalisthere.com? is that why the SN ratio is high?
and besides, doesn't bloomberg already have forums and chat for this exclusive bank crowd already? what is the point of recreating that on the web if someone like me can't see it?
edit: Probably too much time spent on hn
Maybe 'Broker News' or 'Teller News'?
I actually like the idea of this site. I spent a few years consulting in financial services and always found the world fascinating. I could see myself browsing it on a regular basis.
As a member of your target audience, I'd suggest focusing on the discussion side since that's where you likely to be able to add value. Finance professionals already have content professionally curated and ranked by the various paid news services - Reuters, Bloomberg TOP, READ (ranked by views) etc., but there is no discussion there.
And thats a big shame, because I was recently lamenting the lack of Slashdot/reddit/HN for the finance industry.
Kinda like how you forget your wife's phone number.. I know I should know it but I always click her name in the address book :)
EDIT: I am currently considering changing the domain (and the title)
BoredBanker is an excellent name - memorable, amusing & not overly long. There's already enough dry, grey, "serious" content associated with this industry - having an offbeat and slightly subversive name will be part of your appeal.
People who tell you they won't use the site because of the name are being disingenuous - if the quality of news & discussion is good enough they'll come.
Plus broad audience, I have only met a few bankers that are not bored with their jobs...
Has links to some nice articles btw
My first reactions to: "Hacker News" = "Whoa, hackers! This is what hackers read!" "Bored hacker" = "What kind of hacker is bored? I want to go where the cool up-to-date hackers are." "Bored programmer" = "Man, fuck those guys."
If you know of a small group of people (ideally in the financial/money industry) who'd be interested in this, get them to use it amongst each other to trade stories during the day.
I still believe there's a market for this. It just needs to start in the hands of small group of people who'll constantly use it throughout the day to communicate with each other about business-related stories.
If you get people to consistently submit good stories, readers will follow, and then some time after, albeit slowly, commenters.
If you'd like to add a full-text search feature, Searchify.com would be happy to power it for free, to get you started. It's a pretty simple search API, and it gives you lots of control over ranking results (you can combine upvotes with text relevancy, for example). I'm the founder, feel free to contact me chris at searchify.com.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattyork.b...
It is also open sourced here:
https://github.com/MatthewYork/BankerNews
An iOS version will be available soon. Great work! I love finance, so I hope the site does well.
http://www.thewholestreet.com/
For a more academic bent, Quantivity on Twitter provides curated academic quant research:
A quick poll of 20 people on Bloomberg chat indicate that no one else had ever heard of it.
No wonder it didn't do well:) If your target audience has never heard of you, your going to have a hard time getting going:)
You can't simply download the news.yc, make a new colour header, give it a name, and then set it off into the net.
I think you need to distinguish yourself and really just use news.yc as a base to build on.
Source code is here: https://github.com/manmal/hn-android
Would you be ok with me porting it to BoredBanker? It seems that you copied HN's DOM pretty closely, so that might be a technical no-brainer?
They have a very mature software stack that relies on a complex point system to automate curation. HN is much more of a one-man show
Great execution though. I wanted to do something like this, but now I'm glad I didn't because you've done a bang-up job. As a finance person I will definitely contribute.
We have something similar at Theneeds, in the Money area [1]. I'd happy to talk more if you'd like.
good work though. whether or not its useful it works and its finished, and those two things are worth a lot. :)
And, whatever did happen to nickb? Is anyone still in contact with him? Is he doing okay?
It always comes down to community.
Charge 0.01 mBTC per comment (to limit spam).
Charge 0.01 mBTC per vote, pay a portion to the commenter.
Integrate tipping.
Also, is it illegal to copy the HN design?
Ah ok, they produce debt, that sounds industrious.