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Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

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Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#121

Post by aerique »

aw3c2 wrote: post #37
aerique wrote: post #29

No mention of Usenet :-(. It scores on many of the points you mentioned (Reddit subreddits come close.) I'm sad this part of the net has been fading into obscurity the last ten years especially since its alternatives have proven to be inadequate. Its greatest power was it being decentralised and thus couldn't be policed by anyone, the variety and custom readers. Its greatest weak point was perhaps the trolls. Maybe o…

Voting, a threaded display that does not break, no insane quoting, some markup, karma

Agreed on most of your points except a lot of news readers supported the basic markup for bold, italics, underline, etc. one now sees in Markdown & friends.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#122

Post by unimpressive »

ampersandy wrote: post #77
polshaw wrote: post #24

Very sad to see all the 'HN competitors' (lobsters, hackful, lamernews) are all essentially dead (at least extremely dormant). To me, all they needed were a small handful of dedicated posters/commenters (and to be open, i'm looking at you lobste.rs) to start to catch on; i'm very much reminded of the story of the reddit founders sockpuppeting to make the site not look like a ghost town; this kind of 'forced' activity…

I totally agree. It would even be easy to find old, well-received HN submissions that have likely been forgotten and to queue them up for resubmission to your new service.

On a timescale, so that the site would be receiving at least one killer article from the past a day.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#124

Post by Mz »

Most likely: Nothing is ever going to be exactly what you want. Even if you build it.

And I see a fundamental conflict in your criteria: You want a less "social" site. You also want less fighting but with good discussion. Generally speaking, people who have the social savvy to encourage polite discourse are going to have some interest in social stuff. It is the nature of the beast.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#125

Post by mkr-hn »

That sounds profoundly boring. But if you really want that, and have the time, you can get close with Reddit + RES: http://redditenhancementsuite.com/

Add the right subreddits and filter out sites, posters, and keywords to refine it into exactly the thing you want.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#126

Post by JonnieCache »

ajdecon wrote: post #83

I think Hacker News is as close to a "non-social" discussion forum as you're going to find, while maintaining high engagement. The cliché is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and I think one of the primary ways we maintain the high engagement in a discussion thread is by becoming interested in the other participants, not just the topic. That's usually a good thing, because it motivates us to respond and…

I think he means social in the buzzword sense.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#128

Post by heed »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #8

I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're looking for. I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN habit while still feeding me stuff I might be interested in. Because I built it, I can make it do anything I want. I've started to turn it into a slightly broader search engine so that I can find the things that I'm looking for; I got sick of seeing search engin…

Would you be willing to share this tool?

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#129

Post by muratmutlu »

sgdesign wrote: post #31
thaumaturgy wrote: post #8

I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're looking for. I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN habit while still feeding me stuff I might be interested in. Because I built it, I can make it do anything I want. I've started to turn it into a slightly broader search engine so that I can find the things that I'm looking for; I got sick of seeing search engin…

If anybody wants an easy way to set up their own HN, may I suggest taking a look at Telescope? http://telesc.pe/ It's a real-time, open source HN clone built on Meteor, with features like invite-only mode, notifications, and a lot more stuff. And since it's open source, if something is missing you can always code it yourself and contribute it back to the project.

Does this have karma style points for users?

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#130

Post by dreamdu5t »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #92

A fairly transparent bit of rhetoric there :-) In answer to your non-question question, yes that site exists, there are literally hundreds of them. They get a few users, then they don't get new news, they get a few 'bad' things (people get scolded for being negative, or chastised for being 'off topic' or 'social') and then no one wants to post because they can't really tell what is "acceptable" and what isn't. People…

This is the real answer.
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