Ask HN: I built it, "they" didn't come...

It sounds like you think your users are stupid. They gave you specific feedback and WTF comes across as you being annoyed, instead of glad to get the feedback.

Stackoverflow is targeted at geeks- if you're cloning their design, you need to clone the target audience as well. .net development != women's issues.

I've tried to use it with http://www.squaremeal.co.uk/restaurants/london/view/80677/Ha..., but it didn't pick up rel=shortlink.

UI is a bit weird — there is no submit button, no progress for the magic ajaxy thing.

Page that explains what it's about starts with mix of obviousness and downsides.

You need to accurately identify a "problem that needs to be solved" in a niche that is not crowded.

Nowadays, things need to look great. Some people partner or pay for programmers, you need to partner with or pay for good design. Don't skimp.

Every single chance you have in your product, convey the problem that you are solving, how you are solving it and importantly who you are solving it for. Look at 37Signals as an example. I think they spend 25% - 50% of their time thinking about the message they are conveying throughout their product - not just through their marketing sites.

Never (never, never, never) expect people to use your product or service. Get the word out fast, hard and often. Unless you get lucky (never count on luck), this will cost you money in one form or another. The amount of money you'll need to spend directly relates to the competition in the niche you are operating in.

Listen and pivot. When your customers / users tell you something, listen to them. Don't assume that you're the smartest guy in the world and "know what they want before they want it". Listen and even if you don't believe in it, try moving in the direction that your customers / users want. If income increases, pivot your business or entire model in that direction.

Never (ever) get married to an idea and remember that business is about making money.

Don't judge yourself against others. Every business, every person, every circumstance is unique. Constantly review your product or service but evaluate it against your own metrics. Don't ignore what others are doing, but if your product is successful earning $25k per year, it is successful.

Keep your chin up and do not give up. It sounds cliche, but the worst mistake someone can make is to give in to the part of themselves that drags them down. If something isn't working, change it and be happy, excited and motivated to make yet another change in a long line of changes.

I suspect it's a reference to the structure of the community, reputation system and permissions that result. The way those three interplay is pretty complex - how you incentivise certain behaviour, unintended side effects and so on. Some of the more interesting bits on the SO blog are Jeff's comments on what they've done, where it's gone wrong and how they've tried to correct it.

On that sense Facebook is very simple as what you can do is almost entirely driven by whether you're friends with someone or not, and the mechanism for becoming friends (or stopping being friends) is straight forward.

Obviously that's a somewhat simplistic view though and ignores little factors such as doing even the simple things with 300 million users is massively complex.

I use StackOverflow. I've posted questions and I've read lots of responses.

I have no idea what the badges, karma, etc. are. For me, it works quite well. In fact, the only mildly confusing thing for me was that I had to use some OpenID thing to login the first time.

Think about that. Their value prop to someone coming in through Google or posting a question is simple and the barrier to entry is very low.