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FundersClub Unveils Venture News

venturebeat.com

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: FundersClub Unveils Venture News

#3
Not only is there a chicken-and-egg effect in creating a successful Hacker News spinoff, but looking at the sample content on Venture News, it seems that all the content on VN is redundant with content that generally hits the Top 5 on Hacker News. (Are people who use FundersClub and Hacker News different demographics?)

Compare with the launch of http://www.usv.com which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners, with a low volume of posts in general.

Re: FundersClub Unveils Venture News

#5

Not only is there a chicken-and-egg effect in creating a successful Hacker News spinoff, but looking at the sample content on Venture News, it seems that all the content on VN is redundant with content that generally hits the Top 5 on Hacker News. (Are people who use FundersClub and Hacker News different demographics?) Compare with the launch of http://www.usv.com which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories a…

I think the mirrored content is an indictment against how mainstream HN's news is - we get most of our news from the biggest news publications and tech blogs. Right now we have the BBC, The Guardian, WaPo, Bloomberg, NYTimes, Wired and CNBC on the front page.

Re: FundersClub Unveils Venture News

#6

Here is the link in case anyone is interested in checking out the site: https://fundersclub.com/venture-news

The chat box give the impression that it might be a spammy hard-sell feature.

What am I going to get from a one-on-one chat with [faceless website]?

A sales pitch? What headless collective entity will I be conversing with? How many people can see the message queue I'm dumping chat messages into?

Re: FundersClub Unveils Venture News

#8

Here is the link in case anyone is interested in checking out the site: https://fundersclub.com/venture-news

The chat box give the impression that it might be a spammy hard-sell feature. What am I going to get from a one-on-one chat with [faceless website]? A sales pitch? What headless collective entity will I be conversing with? How many people can see the message queue I'm dumping chat messages into?

Haha, nice catch, that's not supposed to be there (it's for other parts of our site). Our dev team is removing.

Re: FundersClub Unveils Venture News

#10

Not only is there a chicken-and-egg effect in creating a successful Hacker News spinoff, but looking at the sample content on Venture News, it seems that all the content on VN is redundant with content that generally hits the Top 5 on Hacker News. (Are people who use FundersClub and Hacker News different demographics?) Compare with the launch of http://www.usv.com which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories a…

> which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners

At its inception, Hacker News (then called startup news) was intended primarily to share stories amongst the y-combinator network. Reddit was used for this purpose earlier, but due to its rise in the mainstream consciousness, most stories were no longer geared towards hacker/founder-focused YC.

If you view HN's early days on the internet archive, you'll see that a large portion of content came from yc-affiliated folks. So clearly, a news site for a small community can have value for that community, irrespective of mainstream adoption.

FundersClub's community (though it shares a lot of YC dna for obvious reasons) is distinct from HN in that investors & founders of funded startups are the largest component. Of course there are many of these people on HN as well, but they are a small minority. A glance at "venture news" demonstrates that the focus is much more startup/industry focused than HN.

The difference is also clear from the name: "hacker" news vs "venture" news.

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