8 ms·

Open Hunt is shutting down

83 points by tortilla 11y ago

CM30 11y ago
Already? Why? Community building is a long term thing, not something you get through in a few months or so. I mean yeah, it won't be Product Hunt 2.0 right off the bat, but you need to give it more time than this.
- orliesaurus 11y ago
  I agree, lobste.rs (which is like, for those who don't know, a more focused version of hackernews) didn't give up after a couple of months and look where they are now! healthy community of highly tech focused news & commentary.
  - harlanlewis 11y ago
    The ~23 items on the lobste.rs home page have a total of 18 comments.
    - nailer 11y ago
      Generally things that clone existing things don't replace them. lobte.rs is too close to HN in the same way OpenHunt is too close to PH.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      It's really too bad. I spent a couple minutes checking Lobste.rs out again after reading this comment, and that site is very nicely done.
      - sandGorgon 11y ago
        the site is fairly opinionated - for example i wanted to contribute a pull for adding an oauth provider to lobsters. If you think about how lobsters works and their moderation log [1] and invite audit [2], it seems almost beautifully designed for "hacker" identity. But jcs doesnt want it. [1] https://lobste.rs/moderations https://lobste.rs/moderations [2] https://lobste.rs/u https://lobste.rs/u
    - ShinyCyril 11y ago
      For those interested, I started compiling a list of HN-style news aggregators: https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x. I really love this sort of format for niche communities, but many of them lack sufficient exposure!
  - alain94040 11y ago
    Here's one [legally crazy] idea: there are some known great commenters here on HN. They write thoughtful comments. I'd think they would be open to having their good comments reposted on another high-quality community. So, could lobste.rs ask a few top HN commenters for the permission to cross-post their comments from HN? Legally, it would be fine: lobster.rs would get a license, the original poster does own copyright. It's also "clean", if it's done in a manual, selective way. And boom, you get higher quality comments "for free". Would that be completely unfair to HN?
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      It doesn't work unless everyone moves over, and then you basically have a mirrored copy of HN. Imagine that I was one of those cross-posted commenters, and you were not. The comment, as it would show up on lobsters.rs, would start "It doesn't work unless everyone moves over." Uh...what doesn't work? Moves over to where? My comment makes zero sense without the thread context...which is the case with most of my comments. Check out /threads?user=<username> or /newcomments - you can sometimes find interesting discussions that way, but by themselves, the comments are useless.
- jonas21 11y ago
  If you disagree with their decision, you're welcome to volunteer to take OpenHunt over yourself. It sounds like they'd be happy to find someone who would be willing to do so.
  - CM30 11y ago
    If I didn't have various community websites that I need to spend more time working on, I'd actually do that. But for now, it needs someone who's got the time to run it, market it, add content, etc, and I'm not that person. Maybe they could try selling it or something? Or seeing if someone from an admin or promotion site would be willing to take it over?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mrharrison 11y ago
  I agree this at least a one-year commitment. Please, somebody start this back up again. I also don't have the time, otherwise I would.
- Reedx 11y ago
  It had a great start[1], but died off quickly[2]. If that strong launch and big influx of users fell off (almost entirely it seems), what chance does it have of slowly reversing itself? Momentum is vital for stuff like this. No one wants to contribute to an echo chamber. It's not very realistic that it'd regain momentum without major changes or a big sustained push from somewhere. That said, it's not impossible that it could revive, but it's really unlikely. And once such a drop off has occurred, it's hard to stay motivated. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465
bt3 11y ago
As CM30 suggested, the "going away" message is awfully vague. Calling the site an "experiment" might be an interesting way to forgo actual considerations like upkeep costs, but the fact remains that this "experiment" ended too early and without much reason. At first, it seems at though Product Hunt legal went after them, but the fact they're offering to hand off the domain and the codebase itself suggests otherwise.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  Yeah, should have used shutdownify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229
  - bt3 11y ago
    Oh the irony of a shutdown-service shutting down.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      That was satire, in case it isn't clear.
- jacquesc 11y ago
  Nope, we didn't have any legal issues. Product Hunt was actually pretty supportive (and listed us https://www.producthunt.com/tech/open-hunt https://www.producthunt.com/tech/open-hunt).
imaginenore 11y ago
I can't imagine that running that thing was expensive or time consuming. I would just leave it running.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  There can be a lot of value in moving on.
jarnix 11y ago
Anyone would like to keep the service running? I could help finance/code/etc, let's keep it up!!
- jeffheng 11y ago
  @jarnix: I'll join you. What's your contact?
- joeblau 11y ago
  I'm curious as to what your motivations are to keep this up and running?
wuliwong 11y ago
I think the big product miss with OpenHunt was not showing the comments. The lack of conversation reduced it to just a list of links. I think a similar offering or even an updated re-release of this code with a visible discussion could be great. Thanks to jacquesc for giving it a great try and being so gracious to leave it open for someone else!
- jacquesc 11y ago
  Thanks! I agree about the lack of public comments being a big mistake. We should have just thrown Disqus in there to get it started. We tried to do a weird, more complicated feedback feature and it didn't really work out.
  - jfoster 11y ago
    Actually, as someone who had the same product on both OpenHunt and featured on Product Hunt, I found the OpenHunt feedback very interesting. Perhaps a more open commenting feature would've been better across general users, but you didn't completely miss the mark!
    - wuliwong 11y ago
      Sorry for the super late response, I forgot about my comment. I wonder if another option would just to have things communicated a little more clearly to the commenter. Maybe some way to view all the comments you've sent, even allow you to edit them. Also, if they person receiving the comments had the option of responding, might be cool too?
- Huhty 11y ago
  Need to spend some more time and effort getting the word out. The one and only time I heard about it was here on HN (and at the same time it was listed on PH). And I spend a lot of time reading up on business/entrepreneurship.
jacquesc 11y ago
If someone wants to take over OpenHunt, email us at support@openhunt.co The code and production database is available (with all the users and projects), so you'd be able pick it up right where it left off. I was going to write up a post-mortem but haven't gotten to it yet. Anthony Franco's comment on HN was pretty spot on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729 Would like to reiterate (as I said on the original launch threads on HN), OpenHunt had no animosity towards ProductHunt. The community (including me) had some critiques against how PH was being run, but instead of constantly complaining about things, we launched an experiment to see if things would be better with an open source community. It didn't work out this go around, but I'm hopeful another team can do better.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  >Anthony Franco's comment was pretty spot on Respectfully, I believe the content issue tells only a small part of the story (or is even more a symptom). The far greater challenge was that there was no notion that the audience included influencers, as does ProductHunt's audience. That single fact creates the value of ProductHunt. It contributes to the belief that what's being posted there actually matters, which then keeps the content providers (submitters) and consumers coming back.
- joshdickson 11y ago
  I tried sending you an email, but it bounced.
  - factorialboy 11y ago
    Same here
- peckrob 11y ago
  Let me provide you with a little bit of feedback for your future projects. You had a great launch that showed a lot of interest from the community. I still think there's room in the ecosystem for an open competitor to PH's closed model. But what did you do to capture that initial surge of visitors and bring them back? What were your plans to keep user engagement strong? Here's an example: When you posted this on HN 78 days ago, I asked if you had a daily summary email [0] like Product Hunt did. This is primarily how I interact with Product Hunt. An informal survey of my coworkers shows the same thing. We all read the daily email. It keeps us coming back to PH. This, IMHO, essential feature that Product Hunt had Open Hunt lacked on launch day. For some reason I think you may have added it later, and I seem to recall I may have signed up for it. But looking through my emails I never received a single email from Open Hunt and, after awhile, I forgot it existed at all. Until today, when you announced you were shutting it down. Engage your users. Capture visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back and engaging with your product, or they'll forget it exists. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614
jacquesc 11y ago
Here's the traffic chart if anyone's interested :) http://cl.ly/0A3K3U0V1V0e http://cl.ly/0A3K3U0V1V0e
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Interesting. A good barometer of the amount of traffic a front-page HN submission receives is about 100 pageviews/point. OpenHunt, with 1000+ points when it launched, only received about 15 pageviews per point. (and that's not even counting the traffic it received from Product Hunt proper, which is likely less significant.) Maybe I have to recalibrate that particular heuristic.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    I'd like to hear more about this. Is the 100 an observation from personal posts or analysis from some dataset?
    - minimaxir 11y ago
      More of an observation of those who have discussed traffic resulting from HN, and from my own analytics when my posts hit the front page.
  - rory096 11y ago
    Seems likely that the heuristic would stop holding true at the high end of the vote total distribution. As a post that directly called on the HN community to take action a high percentage of readers went back and upvoted. But with 1000 points it spent the whole day on the top of the front page, so you run into the limit of the total audience reading HN in the first place.
  - soared 11y ago
    There is a similar metric for Reddit, but it really depends on the subreddit. I generally get 5 users per point on a link in a comment. Direct link I get ~20 users per point though.
- 11y ago
phantom_oracle 11y ago
It would be interesting to have a service where you can put these types of projects into a moratorium, so that they stay in a somewhat passively-active mode to see if any other interested parties would like to take it over, instead of killing it off instantly.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tedmiston 11y ago
In the spirit of openness, I have 7 invites for comment access on Product Hunt. I offer them to anyone who was active on Open Hunt or would be active on PH given the ability to comment. To avoid making noise here, please email or tweet me [both in profile] something with "HN Product Hunt" instead of commenting. I will update with a comment once they're all accounted for.
dragonlayout 11y ago
yes,is good to know.
jiten_bansal 11y ago
Contact me at support@betapage.co

83 points by tortilla 11y ago

CM30 11y ago

Already? Why? Community building is a long term thing, not something you get through in a few months or so. I mean yeah, it won't be Product Hunt 2.0 right off the bat, but you need to give it more time than this.

orliesaurus 11y ago
I agree, lobste.rs (which is like, for those who don't know, a more focused version of hackernews) didn't give up after a couple of months and look where they are now! healthy community of highly tech focused news & commentary.
- harlanlewis 11y ago
  The ~23 items on the lobste.rs home page have a total of 18 comments.
  - nailer 11y ago
    Generally things that clone existing things don't replace them. lobte.rs is too close to HN in the same way OpenHunt is too close to PH.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    It's really too bad. I spent a couple minutes checking Lobste.rs out again after reading this comment, and that site is very nicely done.
    - sandGorgon 11y ago
      the site is fairly opinionated - for example i wanted to contribute a pull for adding an oauth provider to lobsters. If you think about how lobsters works and their moderation log [1] and invite audit [2], it seems almost beautifully designed for "hacker" identity. But jcs doesnt want it. [1] https://lobste.rs/moderations https://lobste.rs/moderations [2] https://lobste.rs/u https://lobste.rs/u
  - ShinyCyril 11y ago
    For those interested, I started compiling a list of HN-style news aggregators: https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x. I really love this sort of format for niche communities, but many of them lack sufficient exposure!
- alain94040 11y ago
  Here's one [legally crazy] idea: there are some known great commenters here on HN. They write thoughtful comments. I'd think they would be open to having their good comments reposted on another high-quality community. So, could lobste.rs ask a few top HN commenters for the permission to cross-post their comments from HN? Legally, it would be fine: lobster.rs would get a license, the original poster does own copyright. It's also "clean", if it's done in a manual, selective way. And boom, you get higher quality comments "for free". Would that be completely unfair to HN?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    It doesn't work unless everyone moves over, and then you basically have a mirrored copy of HN. Imagine that I was one of those cross-posted commenters, and you were not. The comment, as it would show up on lobsters.rs, would start "It doesn't work unless everyone moves over." Uh...what doesn't work? Moves over to where? My comment makes zero sense without the thread context...which is the case with most of my comments. Check out /threads?user=<username> or /newcomments - you can sometimes find interesting discussions that way, but by themselves, the comments are useless.
jonas21 11y ago
If you disagree with their decision, you're welcome to volunteer to take OpenHunt over yourself. It sounds like they'd be happy to find someone who would be willing to do so.
- CM30 11y ago
  If I didn't have various community websites that I need to spend more time working on, I'd actually do that. But for now, it needs someone who's got the time to run it, market it, add content, etc, and I'm not that person. Maybe they could try selling it or something? Or seeing if someone from an admin or promotion site would be willing to take it over?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mrharrison 11y ago
I agree this at least a one-year commitment. Please, somebody start this back up again. I also don't have the time, otherwise I would.
Reedx 11y ago
It had a great start[1], but died off quickly[2]. If that strong launch and big influx of users fell off (almost entirely it seems), what chance does it have of slowly reversing itself? Momentum is vital for stuff like this. No one wants to contribute to an echo chamber. It's not very realistic that it'd regain momentum without major changes or a big sustained push from somewhere. That said, it's not impossible that it could revive, but it's really unlikely. And once such a drop off has occurred, it's hard to stay motivated. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465

bt3 11y ago

As CM30 suggested, the "going away" message is awfully vague. Calling the site an "experiment" might be an interesting way to forgo actual considerations like upkeep costs, but the fact remains that this "experiment" ended too early and without much reason. At first, it seems at though Product Hunt legal went after them, but the fact they're offering to hand off the domain and the codebase itself suggests otherwise.

ikeboy 11y ago
Yeah, should have used shutdownify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229
- bt3 11y ago
  Oh the irony of a shutdown-service shutting down.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    That was satire, in case it isn't clear.
jacquesc 11y ago
Nope, we didn't have any legal issues. Product Hunt was actually pretty supportive (and listed us https://www.producthunt.com/tech/open-hunt https://www.producthunt.com/tech/open-hunt).

imaginenore 11y ago

I can't imagine that running that thing was expensive or time consuming. I would just leave it running.

unclebucknasty 11y ago
There can be a lot of value in moving on.

jarnix 11y ago

Anyone would like to keep the service running? I could help finance/code/etc, let's keep it up!!

jeffheng 11y ago
@jarnix: I'll join you. What's your contact?
joeblau 11y ago
I'm curious as to what your motivations are to keep this up and running?

wuliwong 11y ago

I think the big product miss with OpenHunt was not showing the comments. The lack of conversation reduced it to just a list of links. I think a similar offering or even an updated re-release of this code with a visible discussion could be great. Thanks to jacquesc for giving it a great try and being so gracious to leave it open for someone else!

jacquesc 11y ago
Thanks! I agree about the lack of public comments being a big mistake. We should have just thrown Disqus in there to get it started. We tried to do a weird, more complicated feedback feature and it didn't really work out.
- jfoster 11y ago
  Actually, as someone who had the same product on both OpenHunt and featured on Product Hunt, I found the OpenHunt feedback very interesting. Perhaps a more open commenting feature would've been better across general users, but you didn't completely miss the mark!
  - wuliwong 11y ago
    Sorry for the super late response, I forgot about my comment. I wonder if another option would just to have things communicated a little more clearly to the commenter. Maybe some way to view all the comments you've sent, even allow you to edit them. Also, if they person receiving the comments had the option of responding, might be cool too?
Huhty 11y ago
Need to spend some more time and effort getting the word out. The one and only time I heard about it was here on HN (and at the same time it was listed on PH). And I spend a lot of time reading up on business/entrepreneurship.

jacquesc 11y ago

If someone wants to take over OpenHunt, email us at support@openhunt.co The code and production database is available (with all the users and projects), so you'd be able pick it up right where it left off. I was going to write up a post-mortem but haven't gotten to it yet. Anthony Franco's comment on HN was pretty spot on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729 Would like to reiterate (as I said on the original launch threads on HN), OpenHunt had no animosity towards ProductHunt. The community (including me) had some critiques against how PH was being run, but instead of constantly complaining about things, we launched an experiment to see if things would be better with an open source community. It didn't work out this go around, but I'm hopeful another team can do better.

unclebucknasty 11y ago
>Anthony Franco's comment was pretty spot on Respectfully, I believe the content issue tells only a small part of the story (or is even more a symptom). The far greater challenge was that there was no notion that the audience included influencers, as does ProductHunt's audience. That single fact creates the value of ProductHunt. It contributes to the belief that what's being posted there actually matters, which then keeps the content providers (submitters) and consumers coming back.
joshdickson 11y ago
I tried sending you an email, but it bounced.
- factorialboy 11y ago
  Same here
peckrob 11y ago
Let me provide you with a little bit of feedback for your future projects. You had a great launch that showed a lot of interest from the community. I still think there's room in the ecosystem for an open competitor to PH's closed model. But what did you do to capture that initial surge of visitors and bring them back? What were your plans to keep user engagement strong? Here's an example: When you posted this on HN 78 days ago, I asked if you had a daily summary email [0] like Product Hunt did. This is primarily how I interact with Product Hunt. An informal survey of my coworkers shows the same thing. We all read the daily email. It keeps us coming back to PH. This, IMHO, essential feature that Product Hunt had Open Hunt lacked on launch day. For some reason I think you may have added it later, and I seem to recall I may have signed up for it. But looking through my emails I never received a single email from Open Hunt and, after awhile, I forgot it existed at all. Until today, when you announced you were shutting it down. Engage your users. Capture visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back and engaging with your product, or they'll forget it exists. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614

jacquesc 11y ago

Here's the traffic chart if anyone's interested :) http://cl.ly/0A3K3U0V1V0e http://cl.ly/0A3K3U0V1V0e

minimaxir 11y ago
Interesting. A good barometer of the amount of traffic a front-page HN submission receives is about 100 pageviews/point. OpenHunt, with 1000+ points when it launched, only received about 15 pageviews per point. (and that's not even counting the traffic it received from Product Hunt proper, which is likely less significant.) Maybe I have to recalibrate that particular heuristic.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  I'd like to hear more about this. Is the 100 an observation from personal posts or analysis from some dataset?
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    More of an observation of those who have discussed traffic resulting from HN, and from my own analytics when my posts hit the front page.
- rory096 11y ago
  Seems likely that the heuristic would stop holding true at the high end of the vote total distribution. As a post that directly called on the HN community to take action a high percentage of readers went back and upvoted. But with 1000 points it spent the whole day on the top of the front page, so you run into the limit of the total audience reading HN in the first place.
- soared 11y ago
  There is a similar metric for Reddit, but it really depends on the subreddit. I generally get 5 users per point on a link in a comment. Direct link I get ~20 users per point though.
11y ago

phantom_oracle 11y ago

It would be interesting to have a service where you can put these types of projects into a moratorium, so that they stay in a somewhat passively-active mode to see if any other interested parties would like to take it over, instead of killing it off instantly.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tedmiston 11y ago

In the spirit of openness, I have 7 invites for comment access on Product Hunt. I offer them to anyone who was active on Open Hunt or would be active on PH given the ability to comment. To avoid making noise here, please email or tweet me [both in profile] something with "HN Product Hunt" instead of commenting. I will update with a comment once they're all accounted for.

dragonlayout 11y ago

yes,is good to know.

jiten_bansal 11y ago

Contact me at support@betapage.co