Since community-building is part of the goal of this site, could you include an optional "location" field in the profile? I'm interested in getting in touch personally with other people in my area.
If I bought yspace.com would you use it?
Why we made this site
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Why we made this site
#22Just a little bit of graphic design wouldn't hurt, really. In any case, congratulations on the launch and I'm sure it will become an interesting hub.
Yeah, I know. The site is at least simple and functional, but we should (and will) make it look better soon.
Please don't. I vote for the simple, straightforward design you currently have.
Re: Why we made this site
#23Thanks for the rationale. I'm most interested in the ARC aspect of the site.
OK, here's the question, pg, is this site actually running on a lightweight webserver written in ARC, or did you tie ARC into apache or something for the application logic and storage? Or did you use ARC as a markup language? Just curious.
Re: Why we made this site
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I know. The site is at least simple and functional, but we should (and will) make it look better soon.
Please don't. I vote for the simple, straightforward design you currently have.
I second that, I love the minimalist approach. Reddit was much like that in the beginning.
Re: Why we made this site
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I know. The site is at least simple and functional, but we should (and will) make it look better soon.
Please don't. I vote for the simple, straightforward design you currently have.
It's possible to make a site simpler and more straightforward for users by making it prettier. Really good web design is very subtle; things like giving small but definite visual cues for where posts begin and end, or making the "reply" link a slightly different color from the post so it doesn't look like part of the post -- these small changes do more than look pretty, they also lower the cognitive load on the user and make it feel simpler.
A lot of what Reddit has been doing to their interface has been tiny changes that make it feel simpler. Good web design is something to be appreciated; great web design makes you forget that it's even there.
Re: Why we made this site
#26You've filled a hole reddit was starting to dig(g) in my life. Thanks!
HaHa! Yes thank you Paul, I was just about to swear off of Reddit for good, and this is the tipping point. I will probably still visit there to get my inane fun for the day, but I wont spend time looking through 4-5 pages of backlogs for the good articles.
Yes everyone I know has bailed from reddit. Too many alarmist political , Bush bashing, boring articles. Not enough interesting tech links.
Re: Why we made this site
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don;t you make this invite only - if it truly reflects the values of Y's and their friends who are starting up why not do that. That way you preserve the signal to noise ratio. I'm only on here cos Kulveer and Harj are doing Y combinator - meaning that other UK young entrepreneurs who are good can get on it.
Making the site invite-only would be the opposite of what we want. One of the goals of this site is to discover smart people we might not otherwise notice when they apply for funding. Doing things through connections works well in the VC world. Because of the large investments they make, they're more conservative. But in the seed funding business you need to be aggressively democratic.
Maybe you should make it so you don't have to log in to read comments? Some people might not realize how easy it is to create an account...
Re: Why we made this site
#28Damn it Paul, you beat me to it. I slapped together a reddit clone last summer in reaction to its diluting startup content, but I went on to travel for a month and have been procrastinating from finishing it up ever since. Nevertheless, I really appreciate that you are opening this to public.
Re: Why we made this site
#29I up-voted a comment by mistake and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove my vote. One of the main reasons I was visiting Reddit in the beggining, was the high probability to find start-up articles and a place for discussion. So, this site is defenetely going to be my new point of reference, and for lots of others too.
>I up-voted a comment by mistake and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove my vote
It'd also be nice to have ajax for voting, so we don't have to re-scroll to find where we left off.
Re: Why we made this site
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don;t you make this invite only - if it truly reflects the values of Y's and their friends who are starting up why not do that. That way you preserve the signal to noise ratio. I'm only on here cos Kulveer and Harj are doing Y combinator - meaning that other UK young entrepreneurs who are good can get on it.
Making the site invite-only would be the opposite of what we want. One of the goals of this site is to discover smart people we might not otherwise notice when they apply for funding. Doing things through connections works well in the VC world. Because of the large investments they make, they're more conservative. But in the seed funding business you need to be aggressively democratic.
Paul, in that instance as a way to identify smart people it makes a lot of sense for it not to be invite only.
But it has triggered my thinking about how to create dense communities around diverse knowledge areas. So it would be cool to do this with scientific papers and get people to register with university email addresses to generate trust and preserve fidelity. I know digg and reddit are pretty mainstream but allowing people to create specific knowledge networks on this platform would be cool. Where its an industry group or networking organisation it would be a great way to pool knowledge and if need be preserve the value of the information by requiring users to be trusted by at least one person.