HN Explorer

Ask HN: what about a mailing list for HN community?

15 points by btw0 ↗ HN
Mailing list may have a cleaner interface than web, every email address subscribed to the mailing list is associated with a handle on HN web site, which can be ensured by some way. What do you think about this?

26 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 76.1 ms ] thread
mahmud
I want to be able to "pitch" an idea to a group of people and have some of them accept to implement it for equity, or choose to fund it for investment.

I feel like I latched on the first successful idea, mainly because it was 'ramen profitable' from the first instant, but I have done the market research for plenty of Plan Bs and Cs and would love to see some of them come to fruition NOW, and not wait for me til I have the time. The good part is that my Plan A is 'advertising', and it can carry all others on its back free of charge. Everything piggybacks on everything else.

Or maybe I should just hunker down and get this one rolling then come back for the others one at a time.

Too many bright minds and too much time is being wasted on "web 2.0" utilities and single-serving crap. Corporate intranet software is where "we" need to be at.

btw0
What are you talking about? I was suggesting a mailing list for Hacker News community to hang out.
mahmud
You have an audience like this and all you wanna do is "hang out"? I wanna put their time and mine to better uses.
btw0
When I say "hang out", I mean people can talk about anything (not just startup ideas) that HN community have interests, like what happens on HN web site, only in a mailing list interface. It has to be mailing list because a lot of people prefer to be able to use their favorite email client (gnus, mutt, etc.) to read and write.
idlewords
Hard to think of a worse use of everyone's time than a constant stream of pitches.
mahmud
Call me a masochist, but I find the "Comment on our startup" posts the most inspirational and useful on this site.
jacquesm
Agreed, but why split that off to some other medium, that works well enough as it is.

That just gives you two places to look for the same information, once in the mailing list and once on the site.

The one really big advantage I think to mailing lists over the current HN setup is that you'd get rid of those ridiculously small pageback limits.

There is plenty of good (make that great) stuff on HN but you are not going to find it by browsing around.

The only way to do that is to use a search engine and search engines do not work well unless you have something specific in mind.

rms
He had a different idea than yours. There is no need for a mailing list for the community to hang out. It sounds like something that doesn't work as well as Hacker News.

Most of these ideas for external groups didn't really go anywhere. The Friendfeed one did have a fair amount of activity, but they changed the name eventually.

jodrellblank
Corporate intranet software is where "we" need to be at.

I think there's a lot of wasted potential where Sharepoint is. Is that what you're getting at, or something else?

mahmud
What exactly is sharepoint anyway? ;-)

You're close, btw.

jodrellblank
What exactly is sharepoint anyway? ;-)

A whole roast hog with an apple in it's mouth, served on a framework of enterprise buzzwords with a side order of idealists's tears. ;-)

In case any of you are interested in this area, you can download a pre-installed Sharepoint demo virtual machine from Microsoft here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67f...

You can see what your competition is in this sector - complexity, limited features, limited browser support... there's a lot you could cut out and a lot you could improve on.

rms
I think that's a good idea for a type of small email group. If anyone ever wants to talk ideas to a small group, you can send me or mahmud an email. Also, Mahmud, you can pitch directly to Hacker News. Just make a link to your executive summary or slide deck or whatever you have. Multiple companies have raised money this way, though it may be a little harder with the world economy collapsing around us.
mahmud
rms, HN is all great for public stuff; but I am talking about arrangements like "here is an idea, and here is your first customer; I will get you a domain name, phone, fax and a dedicated box. I will also do the DB for you. Now run with it!" type of stuff.

My ideas usually come with a "first customer". People ask me for a solution for an specialized case and I see an opportunity to solve the general case.

Anyway, it's probably something left to the existing network of friends instead of trying to acquire others anew.

jacquesm
That would just fork a bunch of threads from HN onto the mailing list, without the benefits that the site offers.

HN is currently 'pull', a mailing list would make it 'push'. I think one of the great things about the website is that you get to choose when you go there, a mailing list (especially a busy one) gets in the way of work pretty quickly.

btw0
Almost all good email clients are able to manage mailing lists nicely, even gmail have a mailing list filter which can be set to make emails from the list go directly under a folder, skipping your inbox. So with a sane email client, a mailing list doesn't necessarily get in the way, you can check it once a day.
jacquesm
I think mailing lists are great and have a purpose, I'm subscribed to several. Btw, mail clients are a matter of preference, being able to handle mailing lists does not qualify a client as 'good', and not being able to do so does not qualify one as 'bad'.

I just can't see the case for essentially moving HN off-web to a mailing list.

If there was a sufficiently narrowly scoped mailing list I might do it (say, one for announcements for startups looking for seed funding, or a mailing list for 'it flies' announcements for startups that make a certain benchmark, say profitability, or a successful exit).

Generalized stuff not so much.

ErrantX
There is a chatterous group - which you can recieve/send updates from/to via email (or web, Gtalk etc).

http://www.chatterous.com/hnyc/

btw0
A mailing list is different from a chat room in that emails are typically longer, insightful and doesn't need instant response chat room needs.
ErrantX
I know (though I have found chatterous to be somewhere between the 2 extremes) but it seemed to suitable for what the OP was suggesting.
woid
let's wait for google wave ...