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> which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners At its inception, Hacker News (then called startup news) was inten

> which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners At its inception, Hacker News (then called startup news) was intended primarily to share stories amongst the y-combinator network. Reddit was used for this purpose earlier, but due to its rise in the mainstream consciousness, most stories were no longer geared towards hacker/founder-focused YC. If you view HN's early days on the internet archive, you'll see that a large portion of content came from yc-affiliated folks. So clearly, a news site for a small community can have value for that community, irrespective of mainstream adoption. FundersClub's community (though it shares a lot of YC dna for obvious reasons) is distinct from HN in that investors & founders of funded startups are the largest component. Of course there are many of these people on HN as well, but they are a small minority. A glance at "venture news" demonstrates that the focus is much more startup/industry focused than HN. The difference is also clear from the name: "hacker" news vs "venture" news.

ecesena 13y ago
On the chicken&egg problem, imho a front page with the 1st news having 2 comments and all others with just the button "discuss" is a first evidence of missing community. I'd consider hiding that at the very beginning in favor of other signals that actually show the presence of the initial community. At Theneeds.com, where we aim to create a HN-like for "normal" people, i.e. no hackers (and no ventures :), we started with a facepile that generically represents users that interacted with the content, wether they simply upvoted or actually discussed it. I understand that the style here is less graphical, but I think the idea can be elaborated to reduce the "sense of desolation". Well, it's actually Monday night... good luck for tomorrow morning ;)

ecesena 13y ago

On the chicken&egg problem, imho a front page with the 1st news having 2 comments and all others with just the button "discuss" is a first evidence of missing community. I'd consider hiding that at the very beginning in favor of other signals that actually show the presence of the initial community. At Theneeds.com, where we aim to create a HN-like for "normal" people, i.e. no hackers (and no ventures :), we started with a facepile that generically represents users that interacted with the content, wether they simply upvoted or actually discussed it. I understand that the style here is less graphical, but I think the idea can be elaborated to reduce the "sense of desolation". Well, it's actually Monday night... good luck for tomorrow morning ;)