I actually love this as a name. I was originally going to say "just stick with Financier News", but Banker News is perfect.
I actually like the idea of this site. I spent a few years consulting in financial services and always found the world fascinating. I could see myself browsing it on a regular basis.
Another vote for Banker News. Three syllables vs six. That, and Financier News might attract pastry chefs in addition to your target audience...
As a member of your target audience, I'd suggest focusing on the discussion side since that's where you likely to be able to add value. Finance professionals already have content professionally curated and ranked by the various paid news services - Reuters, Bloomberg TOP, READ (ranked by views) etc., but there is no discussion there.
I'm also a member of your target audience. Change the name to something else from "Financier News" && "Bored Banker". Site looks good - have bookmarked.
That is true: I was going for a funny and short name that's easy to remember, but I realize now how boredBanker comes across as lazy and not conducive to interesting discussions.
EDIT: I am currently considering changing the domain (and the title)
BoredBanker is an excellent name - memorable, amusing & not overly long. There's already enough dry, grey, "serious" content associated with this industry - having an offbeat and slightly subversive name will be part of your appeal.
People who tell you they won't use the site because of the name are being disingenuous - if the quality of news & discussion is good enough they'll come.
Exactly, Windows "Vista", the "Xbox", the "Wii", the "iPad".. and more were all ridiculed as stupid names early on but all became serious brands. You couldn't move online for jokes about the "iPad" being a female hygiene product for a while around the launch..
Bored banker here. I think it's a great name. It shows that even though a lot of people look at the finance world as high-energy and lucrative, in reality it's a bunch of overly-confident young guns looking at spreadsheets all day. I felt like the domain was calling my name..
If hackernews was called "bored programmer" I would be reminded I was bored every time I visited. From a marketing standpoint, sounding cool and compelling is a thousand times more important than being literal and accurate.
My first reactions to:
"Hacker News" = "Whoa, hackers! This is what hackers read!"
"Bored hacker" = "What kind of hacker is bored? I want to go where the cool up-to-date hackers are."
"Bored programmer" = "Man, fuck those guys."
I think name matters less than you think. Otherwise sites with names like "google", "yahoo" or "reddit" could never make it. If it's good, they will come, whatever the name is (within reason, of course).
Hosting something like this would be very cheap. A $40 a month VPS could handle it for a while and if it outgrows that then it will be worth something.
Hey! Awesome job. Can you please tell me how I can do this, albeit for the natural resource and conservation sector (which really needs disrupting)? Is there some off-the-peg software that I can use?
If you'd like to add a full-text search feature, Searchify.com would be happy to power it for free, to get you started. It's a pretty simple search API, and it gives you lots of control over ranking results (you can combine upvotes with text relevancy, for example). I'm the founder, feel free to contact me chris at searchify.com.
Awesome. It seems like there are very few comments. Have you considered advertising on economics forums? Grad students tend to like posting on sites like this, an HN has a very good format.
The scarcity of comments is explained away by the fact that the website has been made public only very recently.
But thank you, yours is a good suggestion
This is cool, and I hope it catches on. Despite its flaws and quirks I think HN has something nice going on in terms of the overall submission and discussion quality, and I don't think it should be restricted to just 'hackers' (or startup founders, software engineers, enthusiasts, etc). Just like how there's a whole ecosystem of Stack Exchange sites for a variety of interests, maybe there should be more HN-like sites as well, fulfilling a cultural role that (e.g.) subreddits alone can't. Plus, the software (minus some of the ranking algorithms) is out there already for anyone to use.
Stack Exchange is an interesting example. they have a complex nomination and incubation system in place to figure out what sub sites to add. this ensures that they only sites when is a proven community to jump in.
They have a very mature software stack that relies on a complex point system to automate curation. HN is much more of a one-man show
I highly suggest you curate the quality of your posts, users and comments. Perhaps, even at the expense of potential users. I think reddit is a prime example of how badly quality can deteriorate. I know there's no metric for 'good' vs 'bad' comments we can appeal to but I think we can all understand that all the 'true' subreddits[1] denote the fact that once you get far enough on the adoption curve[2] quality will start to suffer as I contend occurred on slashdot, followed by digg, subsequently reddit, and now HN. It will deteriorate into Eternal September[3] -- filled with one line quips and memes. I don't want to make any value judgments on this specific community but I'd like to say I miss the edw519s.
Good examples of communities that have managed to maintain quality well are /r/askhistorians and lobste.rs. Ask Historians managed to do it by ruling with an iron fist. Lobste.rs by heavily curating which members are able to join. Another interesting example of retaining long term quality is visible in private torrent sites- many of which employ both an invite system and strict rules.
Finally, what made Hacker News so good ~4 years ago was it was originally populated by people within the industry with decades of experience. You yourself said this was for the financial industry-- trying to pick up early adopters here makes about as much sense as trying to pick up adopters for a medical industry community on an economist forum.
Retained its character at the expense of being stuck in the mid 2000s. For a modern aggregator they have a shit layout to be honest. A site that gets as much traffic as they do and they still have flat comments?? Inexcusable.
I think you bring up an excellent point. With traffic, content certainly tends to deteriorate, or at least change. Like you've noted, most things are their best at the beginning. This being said, how do you try and stay on the cutting edge of the best sites in their early stages?
I'm honestly too young to have an experience with this myself, and don't expect finding out the best new sites to be easy or quick, but what tips from your experience can you offer?
As someone who's spent most of their career in professional finance, my strong advice would be to avoid the proliferation of "contributor" sourced sites.
These sites typically allow anyone to write financial articles, trading recommendations etc. and get paid for page views. There is little to no verification of the content, let alone diligence on the credibility of the authors, and the quality of the discussion is extremely poor.
Unfortunately, given the volume of content they can produce through crowd sourcing, they are also extremely popular. Examples include Forbes, Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool.
EDIT: Assuming your question was in relation to financial news.
Agreed. Also, in the name of "understand your market" - what did early HN readers get from reading HN that they wouldn't elsewhere and how does that translate to finance? Would HN be successful if some random dude had started it instead of PG? I admittedly wasn't around in the early days, but back then I would imagine that the expectation was "wow, generally people who post on here are legit" as a direct consequence of that association.
I'm not familiar with the author - is he/she someone baller enough in the finance world to draw quality discussion? Are people going to break away from WallStreetOasis and minesweeper for this? Is there useful industry-relevant information? (My impression from friends who've gone into finance is that technical skills matter for jack shit as long as you're competent, and relationships, positioning, and sounding like you know what you're talking about rule the day. Is that something you can vaguely convince yourself you're getting better at at while wasting office time on a finance hacker news clone?)
Unrelated, I've always thought it would be fun to hem up a corpus of SeekingAlpha articles, use some rudimentary NLP to look for clear short-term bullishness or bearishness on some specific security, and see if you can either (a)find anyone who's demonstrably worth reading and following (and maybe trading based on them), or (b) more likely point out that everyone is full if s, most of them are convinced of their own s, and in the end it's all clickbait with charts and important-sounding finance words.
The problem with this approach is that given a sufficient population of contributors, a random distribution is going to give you individuals that consistently out/under perform purely by chance. This can be seen in the professional asset management industry, where:
there is strong evidence that chasing managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records is actually harmful to your portfolio health [1]
I'm a former banker/pe/prop trader and this is completely garbage content. Are you sure you are an investment banker or a quant?
This is stuff almost no banker cares about. Bitcoins? r u kidding me? Most bankers don't even trade b/c they don't know anything about the markets. Who is your intended audience? bankers or traders or everyone in finance? Bc unlike hackers the banking industry is extremely broad, but in this case you should start with a very focused group.
If you want to know how to make this 100x better than you can contact me. (Also it's sad that you would apply a plug and plug model... should have expected that you would as a banker since all bankers love using templates; HN sucks in today's standards and it only works because it has network effect (i.e Craigslist). If you had to make something from scratch why not make it so much better with technology available today?
You want content that's juicy. stick to keycard bumping. that article got spread across every banking anlayst inbox in an hour. or how about $500k upper west side craigslist chick? know your audience and what they want to read about.
i guarantee you it's not 5 more articles on bitcoins.
I think what made Hacker News so good ~x years ago was the intentions of the users - people were here to share and learn, now many people are here to get traffic to their blog or startup or news site.
In finance I expect this will be much more aggressively pursued because AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.
Is there something specific about finance that makes AdSense more valuable besides traffic? And if you already have traffic, seeding it in a brand new forum doesn't seem like a good way to get a big boost. From what I understand, there is a reason why high traffic blogs like Instapundit are supported more by Amazon affiliate type programs than AdSense revenue. AdSense will make you a bit of money, but I don't really know of anyone who uses it as their primary income.
Re: lobste.rs, Every time I go on there, I don't see a bustling community and interesting discussion, I just see dead silence, no comments, and a few upvotes. Take a look now: https://lobste.rs/ The links are good, but that's about it.
I think that's a problem with the invite only way: it can be too exclusive to build enough critical mass to create a community in the first place. It's easy to argue that there is no noise if there is close to no signal.
I am working on a StackExchange style of subject oriented news communities with Digg like content curation but I am having trouble thinking what will be substantially new in my idea that will differentiate it from (sub)reddit.
I love how the the HTML source generated by news.arc sets it apart. It has no boilerplate. It's literally: HTML tag, news.css, favicon, upvote JavaScript, title, humongous table.
As someone who's tried starting a new HN for business news (forlue.com, now defunct) after New Mogul left us I found the most difficult thing was getting a niche community to consistently submit stories.
If you know of a small group of people (ideally in the financial/money industry) who'd be interested in this, get them to use it amongst each other to trade stories during the day.
I still believe there's a market for this. It just needs to start in the hands of small group of people who'll constantly use it throughout the day to communicate with each other about business-related stories.
If you get people to consistently submit good stories, readers will follow, and then some time after, albeit slowly, commenters.
Why continue the HN way of commenting, once a post gets past 50 comments its impossible to follow where new content is landing.
Maybe look at Discourse or something similar...
Member of your target audience here; some others have done similar styled sites (up voting, but no discussion). Check out [0]. Might actually be run by someone who follow HN.
For those interested in this area, I find The Whole Street's "Quant Mashup" reasonable. It aggregates blog posts from a broad group of quant oriented blogs:
That is a REALLY interesting idea. You'd need to add something to encourage highly valued contributions. Like perhaps the comments are paid for with points (purchasable for money) but the submitter of a story gets "paid" 25% of the points spent on comments unless another person submitted the same story within 6 hours (in which case no one gets paid). Posters of comments also can get back the cost of their comment if it receives more than N upvotes (tweak N until it works).
At the expense of a few rep points, this site is going to fail not because it isn't a good idea, but because finance people are just so frequently miserable human beings.
170 comments
[ 197 ms ] story [ 446 ms ] threadedit: Probably too much time spent on hn
Maybe 'Broker News' or 'Teller News'?
I actually like the idea of this site. I spent a few years consulting in financial services and always found the world fascinating. I could see myself browsing it on a regular basis.
As a member of your target audience, I'd suggest focusing on the discussion side since that's where you likely to be able to add value. Finance professionals already have content professionally curated and ranked by the various paid news services - Reuters, Bloomberg TOP, READ (ranked by views) etc., but there is no discussion there.
And thats a big shame, because I was recently lamenting the lack of Slashdot/reddit/HN for the finance industry.
Kinda like how you forget your wife's phone number.. I know I should know it but I always click her name in the address book :)
EDIT: I am currently considering changing the domain (and the title)
BoredBanker is an excellent name - memorable, amusing & not overly long. There's already enough dry, grey, "serious" content associated with this industry - having an offbeat and slightly subversive name will be part of your appeal.
People who tell you they won't use the site because of the name are being disingenuous - if the quality of news & discussion is good enough they'll come.
Plus broad audience, I have only met a few bankers that are not bored with their jobs...
Has links to some nice articles btw
My first reactions to: "Hacker News" = "Whoa, hackers! This is what hackers read!" "Bored hacker" = "What kind of hacker is bored? I want to go where the cool up-to-date hackers are." "Bored programmer" = "Man, fuck those guys."
It always comes down to community.
If you'd like to add a full-text search feature, Searchify.com would be happy to power it for free, to get you started. It's a pretty simple search API, and it gives you lots of control over ranking results (you can combine upvotes with text relevancy, for example). I'm the founder, feel free to contact me chris at searchify.com.
They have a very mature software stack that relies on a complex point system to automate curation. HN is much more of a one-man show
Good examples of communities that have managed to maintain quality well are /r/askhistorians and lobste.rs. Ask Historians managed to do it by ruling with an iron fist. Lobste.rs by heavily curating which members are able to join. Another interesting example of retaining long term quality is visible in private torrent sites- many of which employ both an invite system and strict rules.
Finally, what made Hacker News so good ~4 years ago was it was originally populated by people within the industry with decades of experience. You yourself said this was for the financial industry-- trying to pick up early adopters here makes about as much sense as trying to pick up adopters for a medical industry community on an economist forum.
[1] /r/trueaskreddit, /r/truereddit/, /r/truerreddit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I'm honestly too young to have an experience with this myself, and don't expect finding out the best new sites to be easy or quick, but what tips from your experience can you offer?
These sites typically allow anyone to write financial articles, trading recommendations etc. and get paid for page views. There is little to no verification of the content, let alone diligence on the credibility of the authors, and the quality of the discussion is extremely poor.
Unfortunately, given the volume of content they can produce through crowd sourcing, they are also extremely popular. Examples include Forbes, Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool.
EDIT: Assuming your question was in relation to financial news.
I'm not familiar with the author - is he/she someone baller enough in the finance world to draw quality discussion? Are people going to break away from WallStreetOasis and minesweeper for this? Is there useful industry-relevant information? (My impression from friends who've gone into finance is that technical skills matter for jack shit as long as you're competent, and relationships, positioning, and sounding like you know what you're talking about rule the day. Is that something you can vaguely convince yourself you're getting better at at while wasting office time on a finance hacker news clone?)
Unrelated, I've always thought it would be fun to hem up a corpus of SeekingAlpha articles, use some rudimentary NLP to look for clear short-term bullishness or bearishness on some specific security, and see if you can either (a)find anyone who's demonstrably worth reading and following (and maybe trading based on them), or (b) more likely point out that everyone is full if s, most of them are convinced of their own s, and in the end it's all clickbait with charts and important-sounding finance words.
there is strong evidence that chasing managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records is actually harmful to your portfolio health [1]
[1] http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/guest/BP-130108-Track-...
This is stuff almost no banker cares about. Bitcoins? r u kidding me? Most bankers don't even trade b/c they don't know anything about the markets. Who is your intended audience? bankers or traders or everyone in finance? Bc unlike hackers the banking industry is extremely broad, but in this case you should start with a very focused group.
If you want to know how to make this 100x better than you can contact me. (Also it's sad that you would apply a plug and plug model... should have expected that you would as a banker since all bankers love using templates; HN sucks in today's standards and it only works because it has network effect (i.e Craigslist). If you had to make something from scratch why not make it so much better with technology available today?
You want content that's juicy. stick to keycard bumping. that article got spread across every banking anlayst inbox in an hour. or how about $500k upper west side craigslist chick? know your audience and what they want to read about. i guarantee you it's not 5 more articles on bitcoins.
In finance I expect this will be much more aggressively pursued because AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.
Is there something specific about finance that makes AdSense more valuable besides traffic? And if you already have traffic, seeding it in a brand new forum doesn't seem like a good way to get a big boost. From what I understand, there is a reason why high traffic blogs like Instapundit are supported more by Amazon affiliate type programs than AdSense revenue. AdSense will make you a bit of money, but I don't really know of anyone who uses it as their primary income.
I think that's a problem with the invite only way: it can be too exclusive to build enough critical mass to create a community in the first place. It's easy to argue that there is no noise if there is close to no signal.
If you know of a small group of people (ideally in the financial/money industry) who'd be interested in this, get them to use it amongst each other to trade stories during the day.
I still believe there's a market for this. It just needs to start in the hands of small group of people who'll constantly use it throughout the day to communicate with each other about business-related stories.
If you get people to consistently submit good stories, readers will follow, and then some time after, albeit slowly, commenters.
[0] http://www.streeteye.com/
http://www.thewholestreet.com/
For a more academic bent, Quantivity on Twitter provides curated academic quant research:
https://twitter.com/quantivity
A quick poll of 20 people on Bloomberg chat indicate that no one else had ever heard of it.
No wonder it didn't do well:) If your target audience has never heard of you, your going to have a hard time getting going:)
Charge 0.01 mBTC per comment (to limit spam).
Charge 0.01 mBTC per vote, pay a portion to the commenter.
Integrate tipping.