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Ask HN: any interest in a hacker social network?
i use hacker news, some comp.lang newsgroups, some blogs etc to keep myself updated and learn more about programming and webculture.
i have recently found the need to have it more integrated.
and sometimes i want to be able to have respones from people from all the different groups.
i have thus felt the need for a social site for programmers and hackers.
i mean there is obv a lot of good sites already for different purporses/interest areas of programming but nothing that puts it all in one easy accesible place.
most programming forums also have fairly low quality. comp.lang is generally good though but there are no community features.
so i was thinking i might do one. a good project to learn diverse skills related to programming and even if noone is interested i learn something.
so features:
*profiles
*forum
*chat
*news(hacker news is great though maybe PG would let me integrate it?)
*jobsearch and advertising, specialized ads for computer/programming-related jobs.
*quick-and-dirty outsource application, ie make it easy for a startup to get in touch with a specific programmer to do some shortterm job for them if they need that.
great thing is that it might actually be possible to profit from this then if you can monetarize on jobadvertising? maybe hard but i could imagine a community based on connecting people to create things and get jobs would be easier to monetarize than a lot of other social platforms.
would you people want this?
i think i will start working on it anyway to learn how to build a big application.
- ambition 18y agoI say go for it, it'll be fun, but I don't share your sense that there's a problem to be solved here. Personally, I'm most interested in communities where I can meet folks in person in addition to online interactions, i.e. geography-based in addition to shared-interest.
- jsmcgd 18y agoThere might well be no problem to solve here but ... http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
- jon_dahl 18y agoI don't personally feel any pain by having these in different places. If other people do, then you might be on to something, but otherwise, why not focus on a piece that isn't done well elsewhere, rather than replicating common things (job search, news, forums, etc.)? In particular, I haven't seen a quick-and-dirty outsource app done well. Ideally, I think you want something kind of along the lines of linkedin, where you post jobs to people you know. I'm not going to give SCM credentials to a stranger on elance. If this does well, you could build a community around it, rather than starting with a community.
- shmup 18y agothanks for the hint, ill go with the quick-and-dirty outsource app instead of the whole shebang.