Ask HN- Does something similar to HN exist?
Hacker News is my first site every day. I see HN as the best pool of popular stories on that day that scramble to keep their lead. I sometime go to see comment though I find them going sideways (not staying on the topic started by the post) pretty easily. But, this (going sideways) is a human nature. One major thing about HN - It shows the same contents for every visitor.
I would love to see such a site for very much everything, including tech news (imho HN stories differ vastly to the ones on say, Techmeme), local news, business, shopping (a great opportunity for opinion-based shopping), travel etc. We don't want review sites, we want to say something on current state of affairs and let someone provide quality response (important feature of HN). Reddit is one, but childish most of time. Fark is another, but hilarious. I think of Quora, Stackexchange family but nothing matches simplicity and openness and global reach of HN. Many see answers in facebook and twitter but they are too close to be called as global for a single login (I have less than 50 friends on facebook).
Do you have any suggestions?
11 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] threadFor an example of this higher quality content I'm mentioning check out: http://www.reddit.com/r/photography
I highly recommend having separate accounts for entertainment and work/serious news.
Also, note that r/ideasfortheadmins is the better place to post ideas like this (and the admins do read it and respond to it).
I know it's a popular opinion that HN long-ago-reached/is-reaching a threshold in popularity that threatens to ruin it... But before people say that, again, take a look at some of the other sites. Judging relatively? The bar with which to judge a community's seriousness of the topic is lower than you think.
I'd hesitate to call it a "4chanification" of the Internet; I actually still often enjoy 4chan. It's the spreading of the culture epitomized at 4chan shows making people chuckle is often easier than making them think. And easy comedy, while not inherently a bad thing, is obviously the most plentiful. The prevalence of comedy is also easily to notice on YouTube or Twitter. And it's not that I have anything against fun or being funny. I love David Cross, Richard Pryor, 3 Stooges, etc. I just sometimes enjoy having fun in ways that doesn't include humor. There's also fun outside laughter.
This is what makes me less eager to log into an old forum I used to love. Once a thread entitled "you laugh you lose" repeating things I'd long seen on 4chan became required reading to get any other joke in every other thread, it loses something. I don't have that community feeling I used to.
And say what you will about the quality of HN, even considering the fact that a good third of us dream of projects that would probably put another third out of business, by far and large people here are respectful and contributory rather than angry and wry. We may not be as tightly knit as many, especially given our numbers, but we're a community of quality decorum. Despite what much of the Internet seems to think, there's value in that.
A few months back I actually considered making a go at a gaming news site that would function like HN or Reddit. The idea being to drive high minded people and experts to have serious and civil discussions. It's not only a love of mine, there's a large number of game developers that blog, tweet, and in general communicate with fans. I figure if you can hook a few, you're good. Of course, I dropped that during a rough patch. Things are looking better now...