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Comment by Nacraile | Hacker News Reader

Totally random, unsolicited, off-topic feedback: this project seems cool and I suspect I might well be interested in using it, and I just bounced because I couldn't figure out how to explore it a bit without signing up. Basically exactly the same thing as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870

This is probably a weird irrational hangup, but I tend to assign a fair amount of weight to account creation, and am in general extremely unlikely to register for anything before I am certain that I actually want it. I lurked HN and reddit for, like, a year each before I finally was compelled to create accounts due to people being wrong on the internet. I am unlikely to join your community if I can't lurk anonymously for a while first.

I have no idea whether this makes me strange, of if there is a substantial chunk of the population who acts similarly.

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I also was interested to see what's going on; it sounded intriguing to me. "I want to see what some of the projects are. Maybe I can find a side project to work on!"

Then when I saw that I wasn't going to get squat without giving first via signing up, closed it. I only wanted to take a minute or two here in between tasks, and signing up is a commitment to me.

Sounds irrational, arguably, but here's my rationale: My email box is currently flooded by dozens of emails from countless little things I've signed up for at some time in the past under similar situations. Periodically, I go clear them all out and try to unsubscribe, but it's like pulling weeds-- a project that never ends.

Mentally I was prepared to give the site a minute or two, but the requirement to sign up before I can even see what's up is a deal breaker to me-- I wasn't planning to spend that kind of time.

Then I make a liar out of myself by coming here and typing for several minutes. In any case, I love the idea, and I bet a lot of other people are, like myself, looking to connect with other people that want to give and take on various kinds of projects.

Thank you, this is great. Posting cold to people who don't know the site is not normal for us. We were trying to create a "club of doers" experience - we do everything we can to help the doers who are using the site with their projects so that they share it with other doers they respect and invite others. However I saw several posts that really ask for the problems we are solving, and felt compelled to offer the site as a resource. We really want to make the landing page experience as clear as possible. I am taking notes. feedback@doerhub.com is also red constantly (I also work until 5 am most nights to implement the updates). Please, write me if you are open to seeing the next iteration of the page as well. Ping me if we can assist you in any ways as well. You guys are doing us a huge favor!

This is going to be even more true for me in the future, and I was already pretty intolerant in this respect. I just used LastPass to get a list of all the passwords I should change after Heartbleed, and the list is terrifying - I can't believe how many things I've had to sign up for. My bar for getting any sort of credentials from me has just gone way up.

Does the GitHub connect help? We're thinking of adding Linkedin and Facebook as an option. Would those help?

I think that's trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem is that the closed, unbrowsable site makes it impossible for us visitors to tell whether it has any relevance to us at all, so we bounce right away. The front page has only very vague, general information and an unreadably small screenshot, instead of the actual projects and people which would solve the problem completely.

I think what the front page needs instead of what it has (or as well but right up the top) is a list of active, interesting projects like you posted here, and a link to browse all public projects.

You guys have sold me. Will put that up asap and update everyone.

Love the concept. I'll also add my own remarks:

-I agree with the parent remark. You can't even give someone a link to a project.

-The Purchase and Ownership sections of the EULA are a bit odd.

-Discoverability of projects is poor.

-Interest tags seem a bit random. I want to add programming to my profile. What do I pick? programming? web dev? X language?

We have fuzzy matching and graph and weigh relationships between terms so if you do Perl it will tie up to programming. Get as specific as you need to be, we do the rest and get better every day.

"You can't even give someone a link to a project." You can actually give links to projects that want to have a public link. The ones I've shared above have enabled public links to their projects for sharing - they show prominently on the project page. A project creator can also chose not to have a public link for project they want to just share with doerhub people and not with the outside.

Really appreciate the feedback. (you can also email us at feedback@doerhub.com ) We're thinking about doing that and will ask users as well. The primary reason is because we are making it personal - if you show are great at Perl and want to know more about Marketing we are trying to show you people and projects who know more about the latter and are looking for help in the former. For an early outside prototype (cheaply hosted so traffic crash is likely) you can see here: http://peoplesearch-doerhub.herokuapp.com/viz/ . We want to make people luckier by default, instead of just browsing a growing number of projects in unrelated areas.

I think that being able to browse a little - some kind of search function, perhaps - before signing up would be great.

We'll add an option for project leaders who want their projects explicitly promoted outside of DoerHub to be able to chose to be featured. We keep the quality of the network really high, so some want to stay inside. There are actually entire universities using DoerHub for cross-discipline projects, and some of them want to stay in a closed environment.

It would be really nice to have a "Explore" feature similar to github, where you can see projects, and maybe be able to search for tags. A big call to action button on the main page linking to the explore area would really allow people to look at projects and see how the site is getting used.

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