HN Explorer

Ask HN: What do you think of all these Hackernews clones?

7 points by zooso ↗ HN
In the last week, I saw a couple of HN clones that were subject specific (i.e HN for data science, HN for design...).

I am wondering what would be the motivation for creating a topic specific HN ? If it is useful why isn't HN itself creating subtopics ?

Personally, one reason I love HN is the serendipitous nature of discovering interesting stuff.

4 comments

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Jekyll
I guess you just summed up the benefit of having a non-specific HN in your last sentence.

Serendipity has led me to find all sorts of wacky stuff here that I would never have found otherwise.

Perhaps they may be some sort of benefit for having a "HN for [insert topic here]" for people to find a narrower information set. Personally, I like it as it is and one can always use the search function to target posts with keywords

krapp
HN isn't creating subtopics because HN is paranoid about making changes to the structure of the site, particularly when those changes make the site look and feel like Reddit (because then the sort of people who like Reddit might show up here and stink up the place. And that would be terrible. Just terrible.)

The motivation, I think, is primarily twofold - a desire to 'recreate' HN with a more limited focus, or with a different and more up-to-date UI which still maintains the minimalism people like about the original. Why make a 'HN for data science?' Maybe because stories about data science can't get the focus one might like here.

gus_massa
One of the good things of HN is that the community is diverse and you have specialist for almost all the themes. If there is a discussion about a security program you can expect a comment from tptacek. If the discussion is about webspam you get comments directly from Matt_Cutts.

For more obscure topic, it's more difficult to remember all the names, but I recognize some of them when I saw. For example, I remember that there was a big plane accident, and the first comment was from a pilot that recommended a specialized forum with more technical information that the standard press coverage. I also remember a discussion about the Helium content in the universe and one of the comments was from one of the scientific that measured it a few years ago.