

Ask HN: What are your HNs for other domains? - tamersalama

What are the Hacker-News for other domains?
======
tokenadult
Newmogul

<http://newmogul.com/>

for business. It has exactly the same user interface as Hacker News.

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barredo
It's the same platform as HN?

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jfarmer
Yes. The HN source is available in the arc distribution.

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nx
Academic Hacker News: it's like reddit.com/r/compsci

<http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/news/>

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r11t
Thanks for sharing the link, I have submitted it.

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nx
Thanks for submitting the link, the content there is very interesting.

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tonystubblebine
I use Fluther for Q&A. It has a respectful and smart community, just like this
one.

<http://www.fluther.com>

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bouncingsoul
I started (what I hope will be) an HN for design a few days ago:
<http://reddit.com/r/designthought/>

Existing design link sites are very low level and amateur. I'm trying to
create a place for design links with substance.

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sho
I don't think subreddits count.

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bouncingsoul
I don't see why they shouldn't.

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TheSOB88
Because they're on Reddit, which is diluted.

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brandnewlow
Journalism/News Industry

<http://www.jstartup.com>

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vaksel
i just use HN for everything. Its a lot more relevant.

There isn't really a HN for "business, management" yet(I don't count the few
forums with a few hundred users). I also don't really count newmogul, since a)
they too have only a few hundred users and b) most of them are on HN anyways.

And if some time in a future a site will emerge like that, for business owners
to post and discuss, most of the content won't really be relevant anyways,
since most users will be the brick & mortar/services types(grocery store
owners, dentists etc), which face quiet a different set of problems from the
web startup world.

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HeyLaughingBoy
Yeah, but what a resource of new product ideas that would be. I for one would
love it!!!

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nsrivast
As I commented previously, we should consider the formation of sub-HNs:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506181>

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RossM
You could always setup your own (the Arc source is available) - I have a
feeling branching out like reddit could dilate the quality here (not that
there's that much wrong with reddit (in comparison to places like digg), but
it's just different).

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ja2ke
There is often a strong desire to sub-categorize online communities, but the
result often ends up just fragmenting the group and diluting anything
interesting.

I work in games, and as a result of that (and as a result of it being a hobby
of mine as well) end up reading a lot of gaming forums.

The gaming forums which have split themselves organizationally into sub-forums
like "First Person Discussion" "RTS Discussion" "Mod-maker and homebrew
discussion" "retro discussion!" etc, etc, tend to lack in-depth discussion and
long-term vitality, and instead focus almost entirely on surface level
discussion.

The most interesting gaming forums, the ones which end up being the most full
of life, and have a sense of solidity and community and "place," are the ones
which just have just one forum, usually called something like "Gaming
Discussion." Within that forum, since it's the only place there to talk,
unofficial (but well-regarded) rules tend to form and the community tends to
self-regulate.

In places where the community comes pre-segmented by the administration (eg
into sub-forums or sub-sections of a site) the assumption seems to be that if
you're posting content which vaguely fits within one of the pre-defined sub-
sections, you're in the clear regardless of how useless your new thread is.
This results in 8 billion threads with titles like "anyone played [game x]?"
(often with a single sentence post within, saying something like "i havent but
my friend says its lame. thoughts?"), or "fans of [genre x] team up and post
here!" (even though that is implied, since you're making this post in the
[genre x] sub-forum).

In the less stratified, single "Gaming Discussion" forum layouts, however, the
community itself is responsible for segmenting and organizing the conversation
in the only way they can -- through the actual threads they create. This
significantly raises the implied quality requirements for any new thread (as
anything deemed "throwaway" or "quick" like "who is a fan of this?" should
either be left unsaid, or should be relegated to a single post inside a larger
conversation) and tends to result in a forum filled with fewer new threads,
each containing deeper, more thought-out discussion, versus the heaps and
heaps of shallow threads that you get in a more stratified gaming forum
community.

When there is only one place to post, and the responsibility for segmenting
the content therefore falls on the community (by creating new threads), the
threshold to propose a new sub-discussion area (a new thread) gets raised far
higher, and as a result people post longer within pre-existing threads,
causing the discussion to actually last long enough to get beyond the surface
level comments which plague more pre-stratified and pre-moderated discussions,
and that style of conversation eventually seeps back up to the top and carries
into the beginnings of the next new thread.

Look at the forums on the gaming meganews site gamespot.com for instance,
which is stratified down not just to different genres, but to a sub-forum for
_each individual game_ (and is considered a wasteland, consisting of nearly
entirely "when is this game coming out?" and "I liked this lol" threads),
versus the single-forum communities at www.neogaf.com and the Something Awful
gaming forum (which are both stable enough to be populated with fans and
developers and press alike all on the same board, and are both frequently
visited as sources of news and interesting discussion by all of those groups).

Of course, these _are_ gaming forums I'm talking about, so there is always
going to be _significantly_ more idiocy than something like Hacker News. So,
to the untrained eye I'd imagine even NeoGAF or the Something Awful forums may
look like a wasteland devoid of content, but (with a little investigation)
relative to the rest of the gaming community/discussion landscape, their
content and vitality speak for themselves.

~~~
TheSOB88
What are some interesting forums that you go to?

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ja2ke
Re: games? I tend to mostly lurk on two of the bigger ones - www.neogaf.com
and the www.somethingawful.com games forums, though I also sometimes read the
more industry-focused www.quartertothree.com and www.thechaosengine.com
forums.

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sgrove
A bit of Ask HN/stackoverflow for startups: <http://www.chuwe.com>

This is my startup of course, just for full disclosure.

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johns
I built a clone for .NET programmers and launched it right before MIX
<http://managedassembly.com>

Explanation for why it was needed: <http://john-sheehan.com/blog/introducing-
managedassemblycom/>

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o_sam_o
DZone - Programming links

<http://dzone.com/links/>

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ekpyrotic
I have often wanted to set up a HN for the humanities.

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aswanson
What is stopping you?

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ekpyrotic
aswanson, absolutely nothing. Similarly, nothing has stopped me from writing
that book I've planned for two years; but, unfortunately, what I intend and
what I do are distinct.

abe-epton, it's unfortunate that they do not allow comments.

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petercooper
RubyFlow ( <http://www.rubyflow.com/> ) is _vaguely_ similar in spirit in the
Ruby sphere (no voting though).

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jsdalton
I used Slinkset to set up an HN for moms/parents at <http://www.bababase.com>.

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blhack
Are you asking what HN's users have created as far as news aggregators go?

<http://www.gibsonandlily.com> is mine.

Its moderated, but I feel like it has a pretty good, pretty tight-knit
community :)

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netsp
This brings to mind an add-on question. Have any Slinksets become important
hubs on any domain? I haven't really seen any with a sufficient number of
comments & points to "qualify" as HNs. Strange considering how well it works.

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dc2k08
<http://socialpreneur.slinkset.com/> is worth a look

