Well, the social news sites I already frequent have some central theme. Reddit is for general purpose news (so the most generic theme is already covered), Progr

Well, the social news sites I already frequent have some central theme. Reddit is for general purpose news (so the most generic theme is already covered), Programming Reddit is for programming and technical articles, and Hacker News is for interesting articles and startup related links. What's the theme for your site? To be honest the site lost me in the first minute because it didn't seem like I'd be interested in it. The theme wasn't apparent in the first 10 seconds. If it was a slickly designed site where people could upvote/downvote cool pictures of exotic sports cars, then maybe I would have stayed. There has to be a niche. Plus, since there are a lot of other social news sites out there, and I already visit a bunch of them, it's going to be really tough to pull me to a new social news site. Perhaps try building something in a domain that nobody has really ventured into yet? We already have social video sharing, social image sharing, social news, and social profile databases. Maybe there's some new category of social websites that you and I haven't considered yet? Your chances in that new category might be better than with a new instance of the social news class. "I built it but they didn't come" is probably the leading complaint for the large percentage of startups that fail. You just have to be brutally, brutally honest and straightforward when analyzing your site. Put yourself in the shoes of an average visitor to the site: what does she read that catches her attention? How does she tell you apart from all the other sites on the Web that are similar to yours? Are you solving some burning need for this user that no other site can solve? What are you offering her that's going to make her bookmark your site and keep coming back? It's a really hard thing to do. I'd suggest not just building one thing and waiting for people to show up. Rather, build a hundred things, each of which you think are pretty good, and then maybe 2 - 3 of them will become amazing hits.