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Hacker News for Gamedev

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Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#211

Post by johnnyanmac »

Grumbledour wrote: post #80
CJefferson wrote: post #54

When you've only got 3 comments on your whole front page, not sure invite-only is the best idea.

This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people. All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fe…

>While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.

Their verification method already seems to be enough of a gatekeep.

>if you don't know (or can't find) an existing_user from whom to request an invitation, you can make a public request for one. This will display your name and memo to all other logged-in users who can then send you an invitation if they recognize you.

And they ask for some personal website to verify as well that is visible. Given the volume at this scale, this could have been a manual verification by the creator for a while until there's enough scale to rely on invites (similar to Tildes).

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#212

Post by johnnyanmac »

saint11 wrote: post #197
CJefferson wrote: post #54

When you've only got 3 comments on your whole front page, not sure invite-only is the best idea.

Website maintainer here, that's kinda what we are going for. I really don't want to have to moderate a big community, this is supposed to be something you check once or twice a week.

once a week may not really be enough to engage a community unless you are sure who you are recruiting will be very active.

But I respect the choice, nonetheless. It just simply does fit my ideal style where I could find at least 1-2 interesting posts when I check twice a week. Having niche interests can be a curse.

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#213

Post by johnnyanmac »

ANewFormation wrote: post #170
ryandrake wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for tags. As HN has grown, the topics here have become so broad that it might be months before a particular topic you are interested in like gamedev makes it to the front page. It would be awesome to click a tag and only see submissions about that topic. Or better yet, unclick a tag and filter out submissions about that topic. I'm so sick of AI this and LLM that and DeepFoo and ChatBar, it would be so nice to just…

Theres some sort of something quite special about HN and I suspect it's the lack of anything special.

I think it's just the "Ways to make a living in business"[0]:

> Be First, Be Smarter or Cheat

A lot of the most popular communities were simply first. Most others cheated. There's very, very few communities I can think of that were truly smarter and successful as a result.

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#214

Post by johnnyanmac »

dewey wrote: post #156
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a community focused on something isn't hard, you grab a few people you know with shared interest, and they grab and invite their friends. Small game development communities everywhere thrive, I've never been a part of one that wasn't doing well. Building a large community not focused on anything is much harder.

Dead subreddits, dead forums and abandoned meetups might disagree with that assessment. Building a community is far from easy and there's a lot of effort involved to keep it going as an organizer or moderator. Setting it up initially is easy, keeping it going for many years is hard. I've set up, moderated forums, irc servers and organized a regular meetup for many years and I've seen that all the time.

Well you said it yourself. the beginning and short term is easy.

maintaing is very, very, hard. As a website, you fight for attention against decades of algorithms, SEOS, trillions of dollars of ad revenue, and you still gotta be picky to not pick up trolls. IRL, you're fighting for time in a person's schedule to travel and incentivizing them to keep coming in person while people are more overworked and less compensated than ever. Even the most benevolent, well mattered communities that attract high quality participants will decay naturally. So maintaning is a never ending, thankless job.

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#215

Post by johnnyanmac »

appleorchard46 wrote: post #151

The problem with 'HN but for [x]' sites is that what they offer is just a subset of HN. Game dev posts might not be the most popular here, but they're still allowed and do get some traction from time to time - so there's little incentive to post somewhere that has even fewer eyes. IMO for a site like this to succeed it needs to offer something HN doesn't. Chat, subforums, personal promotion section, something .

Personally, I do just really want a "HN but for gamedev". The frequency of games content here is my personal weakness.

But the invite only structure is limiting. I like the mentality behind it, but for so, so, so many of the communities I browse, the issue arises from size before any of the problem invite only solves.

And I don't need crazy frequent posts. Just something where I check after 2-3 days and it's not just 1 post with zero comments.

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#216

Post by johnnyanmac »

samiv wrote: post #123

Looks like another dead forum for gamedev. The ultimate problem is that there's just an abundance of people doing game development or game tool (engines, tools etc) development. The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point? Of course this is more like an aggregator of game dev content so now you can observe…

>The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?

to hope for that 10 views and one quality response, I suppose.

I mostly just want community though. It's a crapshoot advertising a game, it's just nice to get to know other ambitious, talented people working in parallel with me. It's a shame that the only way to really find that is through industry itself.

Discord works too, if you have time for open source contribution. I'm sadly still in this circus of a job search right now, though.

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#217

Post by johnnyanmac »

appleorchard46 wrote: post #140
rglullis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to, but a social site should . And even if you want to give an elitist vibe to your community by making it invite-only, you can set up Lemmy to be without federation and with restricted applications.

Running a Lemmy instance is a nightmare. Putting aside the questionable Lemmy community, the software takes an enormous amount of resources and is incredibly finicky, always some new bug. The end-user UX is rough, and god forbid you ever want to try to improve it by adding a new feature or improving any existing ones. Not to mention federation woes - it doesn't work reliably in the first place, and you either have to…

All your issues just sound like "Lemmy is buggy", not necessarily "federation as a concept doesn't work".

> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better.

It's hard because if no one adopts it, it will improve slower. I'm sure Lobsters has its share of issues and bugs too, but there's simply been less peoeple to battletest it.

If we moved to whatever Bluesky uses it'd probably have the same growing pains. It's just a shame Open Source is slowly corroding and we only "really" fix such issues by paying developers full time to do the boring stuff (which ofc, most OS cannot afford).

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#218

Post by johnnyanmac »

rglullis wrote: post #152
appleorchard46 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running a Lemmy instance is a nightmare. Putting aside the questionable Lemmy community, the software takes an enormous amount of resources and is incredibly finicky, always some new bug. The end-user UX is rough, and god forbid you ever want to try to improve it by adding a new feature or improving any existing ones. Not to mention federation woes - it doesn't work reliably in the first place, and you either have to…

> Hopefully someday the community can rally around something better. I don't disagree, but at the same time I always feel like users keep this infinite laundry list of requirements just to conveniently excuse themselves of any commitment. Case in point: I can host a Lemmy instance for customers (up to 100 users) for less than $20/month. I manage all the software, security and deal with the inconveniences of alpha sof…

Security vs. Liberty. My country claims to want the latter, but gives up the former everytime for something convinient and "it just works".

Most people don't care if it's a black box leeching your data and causing national disrest. they just want to do a simple thing and forget about it. This is partiially why we're heading to doom.

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#219

Post by johnnyanmac »

burgerrito wrote: post #57
bloqs wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to get rid of lemmy. I know some instances are better than others, but the volume of unstable, immature zoomers (particularly the US variety) pushing openly communist rhetoric (and brigading and just abusing anything that doesnt conform to that) made it completely unusable. I really gave it several tries as well as I liked the tech. It was useless for discussing anything unless you aligned immediately with the…

Feel free to remove my comment if it's not allowed. I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad. But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to…

>This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.

Email is federated and can be used to spread knowledge and subterfuge alike. That's the cost of freedom.

Like any other community, you need to find what you fit with and stick with that.We can't hope to grow if we quick every last alternative over solvable problems. Every centralized website had solveable problems too at one point.

>The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].

if we're being frank: this is an issue we will always deal with as people on the fringes. Quote I take to heart:

>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong

All the normal people will stick to Tiktok/Instagram/Facebook/Reddit/etc. no matter what. When you hear all this bad press they are not the ones will who use their energy to move to an alternative. So by that definition, we are already "radicals" for moving off. So yes, we will get a lot of "wtiches" on the way and it's up to our judgement to find the "civil libertarians" to form community with. It's simply inevitable and friction we need to overcome if we don't simply want to give up to the centralized sites.

Re: Hacker News for Gamedev

#220

Post by swiftcoder »

swiftcoder wrote: post #49
timknauf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a mechanism for applying, or were you able to ask via a friend? This is right up my alley — I like the Lobsters format, and have long wished for a game dev-specific take on it!

If you go through the sign-up, it says it will post your application in public for anyone to approve shrugs

Someone did in fact approve my invite overnight
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