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I've considered posting exactly this same "Ask HN", with very similar wording, so thanks for doing it first! I think you are right that HN is not the right ven
by nkurz 6y ago
I've considered posting exactly this same "Ask HN", with very similar wording, so thanks for doing it first!
I think you are right that HN is not the right venue. A lot of what has kept it functional for over a decade is the focus on tech. It's not followed to the letter, but an attempt to make HN into SSC would probably destroy it. It's valuable enough as it is, so let's not take the chance.
The bright part is that (so far as I can tell) if one could attract the core community, SSC should be fairly portable. Scott's top posts were sometimes really good, but I don't think they were essential. I'm tempted that the right approach may be just to create a new space, advertise it, and try to attract enough of the core community to jump start it.
I picture it to be like capturing a swarm of bees: put a large cardboard box under the tree limb that they are hanging from, give it a sharp shake, seal up the box, take it to a new location, and install in a new hive. If you managed to capture a viable queen in the transfer, you are done! If not, you need to get the swarm to accept a new queen, with a process that involves exposure to the new queen's pheremones (and sometimes marshmallows --- I'm a little fuzzy on the details).
If one was to take that approach (metaphorically) where would you begin? And technologically, is there some better tool for the job than a Wordpress blog?
- bluesign 6y ago“ I think you are right that HN is not the right venue. A lot of what has kept it functional for over a decade is the focus on tech.” Exactly this, because tech discussion doesn’t usually split audience 50/50 and audience is usually more scientific. When I am outlier with my comments, I can see maybe I am missing something. I am learning something useful everyday.
- mercer 6y ago> Exactly this, because tech discussion doesn’t usually split audience 50/50 and audience is usually more scientific. I'll have you know that vim is best, tabs are better than spaces, Vue is better than React, Microsoft - on balance - made the (tech) world a better place, everything should be full-stack js SPA's with server-side rendering, Prototype.js was better than jQuery, AI is only true AI when it is conscious, CSS-in-JS is an abomination, json needs to allow for comments and trailing commas, static typing is superior, Linus Torvalds should be nicer, microservices are the future, and significant whitespace is a good idea.
- bluesign 6y agoBut we are not ending with this kind of discussions here (even when we do it is discussed like why vim is better, why MS is good/bad etc) thats the point. Like if you show me some examples from top 100 today, that is splitting audience 50/50, I think would be better.
- mercer 6y agoI was not being entirely serious, but my point was that even when we discuss tech we're often seriously split, and often over silly reasons. And very often the resulting discussion doesn't really fare much better in finding agreement than non-tech discussions do. At least that's been my experience.
- sameerds 6y agoI stopped reading after the first claim about vim. I wish I had the ability to downvote!
- mercer 6y agoI'm actually more of an Emacs with Vim keybindings person :P
- tomjen3 6y agoAs for the tool, a self-hosted version of reddit would probably do nicely, and could then have subreddits for various adjacent discussions (e.g nootropics could be one, SSI could be another).