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Show HN: FollowDev, HH-like forum exclusively for software dev-related topics (followdev.com)

41 points by followdev ↗ HN
I'm not interested in politics or business, yet I somehow end up wasting time reading them here. That's why I've decided to create a Hacker News-like forum exclusively for software development-related topics.

I find ranking to be unnecessary since i don't see more than 50-100 posts a day. I will add a comments feature once there are enough users.

I hope FollowDev helps you discover new & unique content

22 comments

[ 853 ms ] story [ 1720 ms ] thread
Gys
The title says 'HH-like forum' so I came here to understand what 'HH' stands for. Seems a typo?
de6u99er
> The title says 'HH-like forum' so I came here to understand what 'HH' stands for. Seems a typo?

Same here.

Not sure why OP thinks HN is full of politics and business (whatever that means) content.

gregdoesit
Neat idea!

If I recall correctly, this was the same frustration that Lobsters[1] was created. In the case of Lobsters, moderation decision have carefully been considered and implemented.

My two cents is that it's when it comes to comments - and moderation - that things get challenging. It's also where both HN and Lobsters managed to find a (hopefully) sustainable model. Good luck with this!

[1] https://lobste.rs

andrewstuart
The main reason lobsters isn’t very interesting to me is it tends to be a subset of HN.

I’d find it more interesting if it didn’t have the same posts.

dewey
Have you thought about classifying HN posts and then displaying them in some alternative frontend for your use case? Then you don't have the cold-start problem and can benefit from the discussions already happening here. Could even be a browser extension.

Seems a lot more realistic than trying to create a niche community out of an existing niche community.

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TotoHorner
Yeah, there's a couple email newsletters that do this.

- TLDR (https://tldr.tech/) <- it's mostly tech-related news. Has like 1 million+ subscribers

- Quastor (https://www.quastor.org/) <- sends summaries of the engineering blog posts that hit the top of HN (full disclosure - I've been writing this newsletter for several years now)

- Pointer.io (https://www.pointer.io/) <- summarizes the engineering leadership content that rises to the top of HN

etc.

I believe someone also developed a chrome extension for HN that would let you filter out the non-engineering related content but can't remember the name right now.

colesantiago
Why should I use FollowDev when HN exists?

I always come to HN for the comments first article second, then I won't waste my time reading the article sometimes.

But it doesn't look like there is anything here so I may just bounce off this website in seconds.

lloydatkinson
A hacker news alternative that actually focuses on hacker news is very exciting
pullosa
Will definitely be following this, I fully agree about your comments on HN content.

Personally, I think a very basic ranking would be nice to have, especially as the platform grows. Just allows for users to get an idea of what others find the most interesting/helpful.

One other note, adding some sort of tagging would be useful if users are interested in certain topics but not others (ie a distributed systems eng might not find javascript posts particularly interesting).

coastermug
Given a quick read, I enjoy it and see why it is different. I can’t get on with Medium because of their login process, and HN is great but I just doom scroll comments and don’t really use it for technical learning. - I already found an interesting article on SQL optimisation, so thank you.
andrewstuart
I imagine AI could sort through various web sources and come up with a feed of relevant content to satiate your hunger that HH does not fulfill.
jacquesm
A 13 day old account that tries to fork off the HN audience to their own website? Flagged regardless of merit, if HN isn't for you then that's fine but don't try to hijack the forum.
andrewstuart
There’s nothing wrong with this. People are always coming up with HN for this or that.
jacquesm
If a long standing member would do this, fine. But a novelty account whose first action is to try to fork the community is wrong in my opinion. And I'm fine with you disagreeing with that.
andrewstuart
Meh. There’s no chance it will succeed in forking the community, so it’s just another thing in the HN Cabinet of Curiosities.
swyx
all true altho its pretty rough if a new member’s first experience with HN and perhaps sharing of an idea is flagging and rejection. maybe we shouldnt ascribe to malice an innocent attempt to build for a need they perceive to be missing (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery)
plagiat0r
There are people reading HN for a decade but with fresh accounts, like myself. Never bothered to register until I started a DNS project that I may eventually publish here to get some feedback.

This "elitism" judgement will do no good in the long run, just saying.

roblh
Looks cool, I’ll check it out, but please consider making the content denser on mobile. 3 posts take up my entire screen, which is just too much real estate and makes it tough to get a good overview without having to do a ton of scrolling.
plagiat0r
I would love to have an RSS feed for this site.

I'm an old it guy, without rss I will not bother checking the site ...