If it’s going to be like HN, then it needs the front page to have posts voted beyond a threshold. Right now it shows the latest, which is like going to the “new” section on HN and seeing all the submissions pouring in and waiting to appear on the front page. Maybe the front page showing top posts with recency could help. Health is another area where there’s a lot of clickbait articles and spam. So controlling the quality of posts on the front page is very important.
Absolutely so. Posts with more engagement will automatically climb up and that's on the "Top" section (https://news.nukleosome.com/top). We'll make this section the default as the community grows.
The reason we're leaving it at 'Latest' for now is because that's where the 'Welcome' post is pinned, which is important for people to get a sense of what it's all about and what does it stand for (i.e. mission).
Hahaha, trust me, I have health anxiety because I've ridden that bike way too many times and are currently undergoing through the process of riding it even further :/
Yeah I have a rare illness called intracranial idiopathic hypertension (7 months of daily headaches so far, yikes) and more bad things going on health wise, and consequently, I've developed health anxiety.
Sure, just tell me how we could get in touch on HN privately ;) Also I'm from Spain so just fyi.
I appreciate the use of Discourse for this project, but unless the community is substantially similar to HN I don't see the value. A nontrivial number of links on HN deal with health (I'm thinking about recent stories related to dietary habits, sleep quality, and depression). And while these also appear elsewhere (Reddit, Twitter e.g), what I really value are the comments from this community that are well-moderated and on-point. Without the HN community the links on their own yield little value.
I think HN teaches some great lessons. Building an online community has little to do with the technology of the platform. What matters the most is a strong robust set of founders, slow growth, and vigilent moderators. The founders will set the culture, and slow growth will help new comers to adapt. If you experience rapid growth you run the risk of new comers bringing in their own cultures without experiencing some of the "we don't do that here forces" thus diluting what makes the community special. Diversity of backgrounds is great, but once they're here... there are sets of expecations about behavior.
"[...] with about 5 [contributing] users." On the 'consuming' side, it's more than 20X of that.
In any case, the raison d'être of this is to maintain a quality discourse around human health and biology. Why it doesn't "seem" to have achieved that goal yet is simply because it's a brand new project.
Now the reason for starting with Discouse is that, among its numerous capabilities, it actually does more than you'd expect when it comes to moderation. So it will help us maintain the quality as the community grows and we build our own tools.
I'm a moderator on a Discourse instance and while it's not perfect, it's pretty dang good. That said, it's more oriented toward discussion than link-sharing. Do you plan to be more Reddit-like or forum-like? (Of course, there's overlap between those categories, but generally speaking.)
38 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 77.8 ms ] threadE.g. https://news.nukleosome.com/latest.rss
If it’s going to be like HN, then it needs the front page to have posts voted beyond a threshold. Right now it shows the latest, which is like going to the “new” section on HN and seeing all the submissions pouring in and waiting to appear on the front page. Maybe the front page showing top posts with recency could help. Health is another area where there’s a lot of clickbait articles and spam. So controlling the quality of posts on the front page is very important.
Thanks for the feedback!
Nonetheless, it's totally understandable.
Sure, just tell me how we could get in touch on HN privately ;) Also I'm from Spain so just fyi.
Health news fits 14 links in the same amount of space.
Looks good, but increase in information density would be nice.
I think we totally agree. Our sole goal, as stated here: https://news.nukleosome.com/t/welcome-to-health-news/7 is to evolve this into a community that is as high quality as HN is. But HN wasn't HN on its day one. Speaking of which, here's a legendary post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 ;)
This is great! I shared it with my cardiologist cousin and he says its epic!
Did you use word press to build this?
Only lobsters and Product Hunt made it out alive from what I can tell. Says a lot about HN's moderation team, do the things that don't scale indeed.
However, please feel free to submit any interesting stuff on that front!
What makes it "Hacker News for Health"? Have you implemented features that make it work more like HN than Discourse usually does?
In any case, the raison d'être of this is to maintain a quality discourse around human health and biology. Why it doesn't "seem" to have achieved that goal yet is simply because it's a brand new project.
Now the reason for starting with Discouse is that, among its numerous capabilities, it actually does more than you'd expect when it comes to moderation. So it will help us maintain the quality as the community grows and we build our own tools.
Again, this is still in its infancy phase and even HN didn't look like HN on day or week one; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1
I guess good things don't get built up in a hurry :) especially good communities.
The aim is to really have some good discussions from time to time. We definitely don’t want to make it a place to just dump links into.