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Hey everyone,

I started Village because I couldn't find a place online with reasonable, civil discussion about my city, Toronto.

On Reddit, r/toronto could be a bit harsh and was pretty heavy with downvoting. Local blogs had comments sections that were mean and insulting.

Village is an experiment. It's a place that- while honest about the challenges my city faces- tries to celebrate and share what's awesome about Toronto too. It's a place for reasonable and civil discussion. It's a place to discover awesome and interesting things in Toronto.

I custom wrote the software for Village but I feel like the software for creating a social news website is pretty trivial at this point. If you want, it only takes 5 minutes to set one up using Telescope. The hard part is cultivating a community.

But in the same way that you can’t design a users experience (because it implies a sense of control over what a user will experience), you also can’t design a community. Instead, you can only hope to cultivate a community.

That's what I'm hoping to do with Village :)

PS - If you're interested, you can read more about my thoughts on how to cultivate community here: http://www.itsonvillage.com/design-tips

Great design and software. Any plans to open-source the code?

Thank you! I hadn't really thought about it because I don't see the code as being anything great (maybe that's just me being hard on myself though). From a code standpoint, it's really standing on the backs of some great gems (three in particular: acts_as_votable, acts_as_tree, cancancan).

And the algorithm is Reddit's open sourced algorithm. A ruby version can be found here: https://gist.github.com/jrochkind/2636355

No code is perfect and I'm sure there could be many other sort of niche communities that can benefit and help you build this into a greater platform.

AOL had a service called Patch, this is more than just about the place, it pools all news local to the community. Is that what you are trying to achieve with Village?

I liked design and domain name. Good luck!

Thank you!

Yes, I remember Patch. I was always rooting for it. Village is similar: for example, in addition to posting links, users can create photos, maps and essays (sort of similar to the self-publishing of Patch). In some ways, Village is sort of a mix between Patch and Hacker News.

Patch still exists. Are you talking about it in past tense because it isn't good anymore?

Err. I thought it had been closed- but you're right, it still exists. Earlier this year AOL sold it to Hale Global (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230414940...), maybe that's where I got confused.

Good idea! I'd be interested to see this "coming to a city near me!"

As a west coaster it been too long since ive heard anything but Rob Ford news come out of TO :)

Haha :) ... Luckily our mayor elections are a month away, so hopefully you won't be hearing too much more.

Thanks!

Show HN: Village – Hacker News for people who care about their cities