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First of all: thanks for writing the post. I was one of the people who asked you to, and I'm glad you took the request seriously. It's much easier to see now

First of all: thanks for writing the post. I was one of the people who asked you to, and I'm glad you took the request seriously. It's much easier to see now what you're up to. Now: I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. What makes HN HN is not, by and large, a function of the software, but rather, a function of the people who happen to hang out here-- who were attracted by something other than the software. So, if you wanted to get an HN-like-community gathered around, say, knitting, you'd need some way to get a large enough community of knitters together together to get the ball rolling to create traction (i.e, the chicken-and-egg problem.) The easiest way to do this would be to have the active, committed involvement of the-Paul-Graham-of-Knitters, whoever that might be. For an object lesson in how this works, take a look at StackOverflow. They were able to get immediate traction because the pump was primed by readers of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Note that they have not yet been able to gain similar traction in any other vertical, and have a lot of VC money working on it. That being said: what is the salient difference between "A Hacker News For The Rest Of The World" and "Reddit"? What can I do with your software that I can't with Reddit? Follow up question: is this advantage significant enough to make up for the enormous head start they have in terms of users? EDIT (I clicked before I was really finished, oops): Finally: "a hacker news of the rest of the world" is not, in my mind, a pretty solid elevator pitch. HN is not a business, and generates no revenue. And, the people who hang out here are not at all like "the rest of the world" in many ways-- in fact, some of us take pride in being outliers. So, I'm not really sure that the notion is solid. If you got traction, I can't begin to imagine how you'd keep the trolls out, or keep the conversation focused in each of the "interest networks". Still, I wish you luck.

jsmoov 16y ago
No problem - I appreciate the good feedback! Finding the 'Paul-Graham-of-Knitters' for each community is exactly how I was thinking of approaching this. Getting those people to buy in to the concept will be a challenge, indeed - but not impossible. With Reddit, the difference is in how customizable it is. You can hit "Politics" and get a list of posts loosely related to politics. But you can't get a feed specifically for "New York Politics" or better, "New York Republicans". I may be wrong, but HN could be a business if PG wanted it to be. We all take pride in being outliers, I agree. However would you agree that even HN has it's share of trolls? How does HN keep them out? I believe there are people out there who take topics (of the non-technical variety) seriously enough to fight for the maintenance of their community. Hopefully I'm right! Thanks again for the feedback.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Finding the 'Paul-Graham-of-Knitters' for each community is exactly how I was thinking of approaching this. Getting those people to buy in to the concept will be a challenge Indeed. And you are competing with the likes of StackOverflow and their millions. With Reddit, the difference is in how customizable it is. You can hit "Politics" and get a list of posts loosely related to politics. But you can't get a feed specifically for "New York Politics" or better, "New York Republicans". Folks can create sub-reddits as detailed as they want. Some get enough traction to survive, some don't. I still don't see how your site would be different. I may be wrong, but HN could be a business if PG wanted it to be. And how would you monetize it? I don't see an obvious business model. However would you agree that even HN has it's share of trolls? How does HN keep them out? HN has trolls, despite the fact that and PG spends a lot of time trying to cultivate the commnity. There are (all too often) posts complaining that "HN is turning into Reddit"-- which ought give one pause. I believe there are people out there who take topics (of the non-technical variety) seriously enough to fight for the maintenance of their community. I imagine there are. And I imagine that in a large number of cases, they've already done so. I imagine there is at least one Knitter's forum successfully meeting the needs of a large chunk of the Knitter's community. I'm not really sure there is an untapped market out there. I don't mean to sound so negative-- but there's a difference between an application and a startup. You've written some software; I'm not sure there is a viable business model behind it, especially in competition with Reddit.
  - jsmoov 16y ago
    Re: differences - I would say Reddit is 1) disorganized and 2) has its focus primarily on front-page. I don't know many people who know how or have to time to dig through all the sub-reddits offered to maybe find something they like. This structure does work for many of us, and that's cool. I think it can be improved upon, though. Same with your argument about untapped markets. I'm sure Hackers had a preferred method of communicating pre-HN (IRC?), but something better and more structured came along and displaced it. Re: HN business model - paid job board, paid newsletter, hacker conferences, hacker news apparel, regular old google ads, etc. there would be many paths to take if this was a for-profit endeavor.
mseebach 16y ago
> HN is not a business, and generates no revenue. Off topic, but still: While HN is not a business on it's own, I would be very surprised to learn that the mind-share for, and applications to, YCombinator generated by HN doesn't comfortably out-weight PGs investment in it.

jsmoov 16y ago

No problem - I appreciate the good feedback! Finding the 'Paul-Graham-of-Knitters' for each community is exactly how I was thinking of approaching this. Getting those people to buy in to the concept will be a challenge, indeed - but not impossible. With Reddit, the difference is in how customizable it is. You can hit "Politics" and get a list of posts loosely related to politics. But you can't get a feed specifically for "New York Politics" or better, "New York Republicans". I may be wrong, but HN could be a business if PG wanted it to be. We all take pride in being outliers, I agree. However would you agree that even HN has it's share of trolls? How does HN keep them out? I believe there are people out there who take topics (of the non-technical variety) seriously enough to fight for the maintenance of their community. Hopefully I'm right! Thanks again for the feedback.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
Finding the 'Paul-Graham-of-Knitters' for each community is exactly how I was thinking of approaching this. Getting those people to buy in to the concept will be a challenge Indeed. And you are competing with the likes of StackOverflow and their millions. With Reddit, the difference is in how customizable it is. You can hit "Politics" and get a list of posts loosely related to politics. But you can't get a feed specifically for "New York Politics" or better, "New York Republicans". Folks can create sub-reddits as detailed as they want. Some get enough traction to survive, some don't. I still don't see how your site would be different. I may be wrong, but HN could be a business if PG wanted it to be. And how would you monetize it? I don't see an obvious business model. However would you agree that even HN has it's share of trolls? How does HN keep them out? HN has trolls, despite the fact that and PG spends a lot of time trying to cultivate the commnity. There are (all too often) posts complaining that "HN is turning into Reddit"-- which ought give one pause. I believe there are people out there who take topics (of the non-technical variety) seriously enough to fight for the maintenance of their community. I imagine there are. And I imagine that in a large number of cases, they've already done so. I imagine there is at least one Knitter's forum successfully meeting the needs of a large chunk of the Knitter's community. I'm not really sure there is an untapped market out there. I don't mean to sound so negative-- but there's a difference between an application and a startup. You've written some software; I'm not sure there is a viable business model behind it, especially in competition with Reddit.
- jsmoov 16y ago
  Re: differences - I would say Reddit is 1) disorganized and 2) has its focus primarily on front-page. I don't know many people who know how or have to time to dig through all the sub-reddits offered to maybe find something they like. This structure does work for many of us, and that's cool. I think it can be improved upon, though. Same with your argument about untapped markets. I'm sure Hackers had a preferred method of communicating pre-HN (IRC?), but something better and more structured came along and displaced it. Re: HN business model - paid job board, paid newsletter, hacker conferences, hacker news apparel, regular old google ads, etc. there would be many paths to take if this was a for-profit endeavor.

mseebach 16y ago

> HN is not a business, and generates no revenue. Off topic, but still: While HN is not a business on it's own, I would be very surprised to learn that the mind-share for, and applications to, YCombinator generated by HN doesn't comfortably out-weight PGs investment in it.