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Show HN: I built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites
- DesaiAshu 14y agoI think this would make a really neat mobile game! If you're interested in building it into one, drop me a line (ashu@makegameswith.us)
- dude3 14y agoInteresting concept and nice site. But, built in 24 hours? If you did actually accomplish that, props.
- thehodge 14y agoI've got a video I'll be uploading onto youtube of the first 12 hours coding, I'll comment with a link tomorrow as its 2am now :)
- thehodge 14y agoHey HN, this weekend I built a stock market game based on a dataset of the top million sites (ordered by the amount of links pointing towards them) It needs quite a bit of tweaking but that will come as I get more data, reaction so far as been great but I'd love some comments from HN :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- thehodge 14y agoThe base price will update once a day (on average) but I'm hoping to build something based on facebook likes and twitter tweets that affects it and we can check that a few times a day without doing affecting the endpoint servers
- bo1024 14y agoI think you're thinking about this a bit backwards. In the study of e.g. prediction markets, the idea is that if the price is too low, lots of people will try to buy it. Then the price gets raised up to compensate. If the price is too high, lots of people will try to sell it, and the price gets lowered to compensate. What all this means is that the traders don't learn info from you, you learn info from them. You shouldn't have to put any information into the prices. If you have a supply/demand matching algorithm, then the prices will give you the information.
- bo1024 14y agoI should've added, the prices have to be tied to some value. So for example, what you could do is give everyone 10,000 play dollars at the start, and they can buy/sell whatever "sites" they want at the going prices. But every day (week?), there's a payout -- if you own one share of site X, and site X is #n in the rankings, you get a dividend of say 50,000 - n cents. Then if I think that site X will be in 1000th place, I should be willing to pay up to $490.00 for a share, because that's how much I expect it to pay off for me. Something like that.
- amwelles 14y agoNo vanilla registration? I don't really want this linked to my Facebook or Twitter account. I also didn't see what the prize for "winning" is.
- thehodge 14y agoI'm happy to add that but this is the first request :) the prize is a mystery prize (but I also own a sweet shop so you could take a guess ;) )
- csomar 14y agoI'll make the third request in a comment since you can't see the upvotes.
- sukuriant 14y agoAnd a fourth
- amwelles 14y agoMystery prizes are good, too! Maybe adding "mystery" in the copy somewhere would help clarify that. Or change "prize" to "surprise." In any case, it seems like a neat idea and it's well-executed for a 1-day project.
- icebraining 14y agoConsider this a second request ;) I don't have neither accounts, but would really like to register; it seems very interesting.
- slashedzero 14y agoFourth request. Seems like a cool idea, but not cool enough for me to have to create an account on either of those two services.
- RobotCaleb 14y agoIn for vanilla registration. I don't have either of the two services you allow.
- jcmoscon 14y agoVery interesting idea. Do you mind sharing what language/db was used?
- thehodge 14y agoSure It's Ruby / Rails + MySQL
- justinsoong 14y agoHow did you implement order matching?
- fmstephe 14y agoI would like to second this question. Is the implementation based on a market where users buy and sell shares from each other, over some kind of exchange, or are we buying and selling shares from the site itself? Great idea. Look forward to having a go. (I ask because I am writing up an exchange as a side project just for fun :)
- fudged71 14y agoNeat idea, great implementation. Kudos
- thehodge 14y agoThanks!
- ashleyw 14y agoLooks similar to Urladex (http://www.urladex.com http://www.urladex.com), which uses the Alexa API. I used to have a lot of fun designing my own naive trading algorithms and terminal based dashboards, so I'd love to see an API!
- thehodge 14y agoI'd love to talk about how I can take the factors and make a decent stock price with someone who actually knows a bit about stocks!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Baltoli 14y agoYou can buy a negative number of shares, resulting in you gaining ludicrous amounts of money very quickly (although my fraudulent purchases seemed to be removed after a couple of minutes.)
- thehodge 14y agoYep I was emailed and tweeted this a few minutes after the first one was spotted.. that's fixed and deployed now :) I'll look for you in the database and reset your dollars
- kokey 14y agoNice, years ago I used to enjoy playing with Blogshares. I also started coding something similar to this years ago, while I was wondering how one could make money from it. I toyed with the idea of a virtual currency which would be a share in the total real money value market, adjusting upwards and downwards based on your share performance. I think the main issue against this is that it's not like trading on a market, it's making a bet and this could probably be considered a form of gambling.
- thehodge 14y agoYeah to be honest I haven't thought like that at all, if it gets popular I thought of selling a sponsor slot on the shares.. or doing some sort of promotion within the daily stock update emails..
- nchuhoai 14y agowould love the ability to short some sites
- sowhatquestion 14y agoAs of 6:30ish p.m. EST, this (http://linkdaq.net/sites/247vicodindrugstore.com http://linkdaq.net/sites/247vicodindrugstore.com) is one of the top "movers and shakers"... Can that be where the prize comes from? ;)
- thehodge 14y agoif you play your cards right ;)
- niggler 14y agoRequires facebook or twitter login -> nonstarter
- TomGullen 14y agoVery fun and good idea :) Prize can never be too lucrative though as it would be easy and fairly cheap to game it.
- thehodge 14y agoI run a hack day where the main prizes are from the pound shop.. I know how to do a cheap prize ;)
- dbh937 14y agoI noticed that in the url when searching there is a parameter "?utf8=✓". I just thought the use of ✓ was a little odd, and was wondering why this choice was made.
- pash 14y agoBecause it can be—UTF-8 is enabled. It's kind of cute to use a character from the extended set to indicate that.
- TallboyOne 14y agoIt's the default in rails
- alexirobbins 14y agoThis is fantastic! I've been considering this idea for a while - it 1) could become a legitimate way to invest in tech startups, and 2) could inform smarter investment - the best startups can get spotted faster. Great job making it! EDIT: it is fairly easy to game it, might want to carefully pick a set of sites (news/blogs/etc.) to scrape to impose some controls?
- politician 14y agoIf you can't wish for unlimited wishes, wish for unlimited genies. Or in this case, unlimited Twitter accounts earning $10,000 of funny money per account.
- alexirobbins 14y agoask for socials? square does it..
- peterhajas 14y agoWow! Fun! Any hope for an app?
- thehodge 14y agoif the site actually gets used I'd probably just create an API and let others play..
- mahmud 14y agoGood way to monetize DoS attacks ;-)
- polemic 14y agoThis actually would have a lot of value, if it were executed slightly differently. Online trading markets are excellent at exposing 'insider information', but the prices have to be informed by (a) availability of stock and (b) the ability for traders to negotiate prices between themselves. In this instance, the valuation is based on: "...a simple formula to give each domain a daily price." So, what does this achieve? It rewards the user(s) who can best approximate the formula, gather the requisite information and act on it. In other words, the best performers are those that can best emulate the workings of the site. Ok, it is called "LinkDAQ" for a reason - but there is an opportunity here to build something linked to real value. It would be better to seed initial stock values from such a formula, but then leave users to trade between them. Stocks "cash out" during [real] funding rounds, dividend payouts or difference in actual stock valuations. If you can refine the market sufficiently, you should have a reasonably informative prediction engine. I've been a long time user of the iPredict prediction market in NZ (ipredict.co.nz) - but that's small biscuits next to InTrade, for example.
- alexirobbins 14y agoDo you think it would make sense to issue X shares for each site, and then split the shares at Y value? And in real stock exchanges, companies issue shares of the company, so they have real value. InTrade links its share value to the likelihood of something happening - but the goals of websites/startups vary greatly, so it's difficult to set a fixed standard that way. You might also be able to set up a market in which shares only have value because of scarcity, but I think it would be difficult to convince people to buy them in the first place, which is why starting with funny money might actually be a good move in trying to establish this sort of market. And should sites be allowed to apply for the exchange? Do you think you could allow the companies that own these sites to sell actual shares to accredited investors using a Funders Club model?
- polemic 14y agoCould do. The biggest problem with the whole thing is, you really need to link the stock price to cash, and that makes it a futures market, with all the regulation it comes with. If it were bitcoin based tho....
- kyro 14y agoRelated idea time! So this is really great, and for a while I've been thinking about what a stock market game for pop culture would be like. It'd serve as a great discovery tool, like searching for that penny-stock that's going to blow up, and it'd be a great way for fans and haters of particular celebrities to duke it out in the market place (think of the 50 Cent / Kanye competition, or the rabid fans of Chris Brown and those who detest him). You could gather information from across a whole host of resources (imdb, movie ticket / record sales, tabloid sites, twitter, spotify plays) to come up with predicted performance forecasts for each celebrity. Something like that would make people feel they played a direct part in a particular success story. Early "investors" would be considered more loyal fans, you could incentivize using concert tickets and schwag, etc, etc - there are lots of ways to 'gamify' it.
- mshang 14y agoSounds a bit like Fat Dog Exchange. Does anyone know what happened to that site?
- stevesearer 14y agoAlso similar to Hollywood Stock Exchange: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stock_Exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stock_Exchange
- Dramatize 14y agoI tried to find out what happened to that site. Doesn't seem to be much info out there.
- jaxn 14y agohttp://www.blogshares.com http://www.blogshares.com has been around for years. I used to play that regularly.
- praveenhm 14y agoNice site. How did you manage to get the data? what are API used?
- simonrobb 14y agoI think this is the closest thing I've seen to valid use of the marquee tag.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 14y agoSo I'm interested but I have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook account. What do I do?
- unkoman 14y agoJapanese characters in username doesn't seem to work when connected from a twitter account.
- thehodge 14y agothanks I'll add that to the list
- brandoncapecci 14y agoWould be nice if you added the ability to short...
- C0d3r 14y agoYou gotta trim the string upon searches. Very good design and idea, hope it gets to be a good game.
- thehodge 14y agojust patched that locally, will deploy it next :)
- jack_lockyer 14y agoJust bought $10,000 worth of Hacker News shares!
- jack_lockyer 14y agoAnd another $5,000
- DanBlake 14y agoAnother one was alexadex iirc
- davejazz 14y agoI built the same concept for viral videos. Http://vvx.io - we should talk.