

Is there a list of Hacker News clones? - texjer

I've heard that the source code is available online.  I'm not a programmer, I'm an artist. I just have a insatiable interest in what the entrepreneurial hacker community is up to.<p>My favorite twitterfeed is @newsycombinator (by a longshot, and its a bot!), and I want to see if a similar community could be created for art.<p>So my thought was: is the hacker news format successful for other communities?  Since the source is available, what have other people made with it?
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texjer
I think I should correct myself -- when I say that I want to create a clone
news community "for art", I really meant "for artists".

On hacker news, you don't see a lot of articles called "Look at this awesome
new app!" -- instead you see stuff about the guys who made this "awesome app"
and all the successes and failures that they've overcome.

As an artist, there comes a time where you don't want to look at other
people's "awesome new art". You want to read about what drives them, or how
they got started (and in the process learn about their awesome new art). I
want to read about what's going on in the art market, and what people are
predicting for the future of art. I want to read articles from the curator's
perspective, from the collectors' perspective, the viewer's perspective.

I think the best way to get this is a non-visual system user-driven
aggregation system like HN. Y'all have an awesome community of smart people
submitting compelling articles... I'm simply jealous.

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texjer
I found a few: <http://www.uberlook.com> for web design and graphics.
<http://bitlynews.com/> looks like its for trashy news.

And here's some defunct ones that were mentioned: markenomics newsmogul

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soult
Bitlynews was a contestant in the bitly API contest. They take the most
popular shorturls and display it using an interface similar to Hackernews.

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texjer
Ahhhhh, I get it now.

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genieyclo
The most prominent I know of are quant.ly and forlue.com

There was also nickb's New Mogul, but that's dead. There was also another
education HN clone by the person behind BrainRacer, but that's also dead.

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texjer
Do you know why they die out so quickly? Is it just because they didn't
generate enough interest? It doesn't seem like it'd be costly or time-
intensive to maintain.

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genieyclo
Well in New Mogul's case, nickb has been gone for a long time, and has
basically vanished. The domain expired a while ago and he stopped paying the
bills when he vanished.

BrainRacer's edu news site was shut down due to a lack of traction mainly, but
it would probably be best to actually ask the founder as to why exactly.

Fwiw, I also ran a short-lived HN clone for a few months (also for education
news) but killed it; mainly because of a lack of traction, and I didn't care
too much to keep it up. Only about 15 registered users were on it, and only 4
active submitters, including myself.

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texjer
Yeah, I'm afraid to put a ton of work into learning how to do this if it's
just going to fail when I don't get that critical mass of users.

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genieyclo
Well, it's very simple to actually run a site running on news.arc

The guide here <http://arclanguage.org/install>

and the how-to-run-news file you extract make it simple to have it up and
running in under a couple of minutes. It's just a question of whether you want
to run it. I just did it to try out arc and see how HN ran in the back, but it
got expensive to run it in aws all the time with no actual users or tangible
benefit.

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texjer
Thanks for the guide, it looks perfect. What server/host did you use?

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genieyclo
AWS with an Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit ami

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jnazario
in terms of tools that may power some of the clones out there, in looking
around i see this one:

<https://github.com/antirez/lamernews>

which powers a couple of sites. this one's demo site seems down:

<https://github.com/jaekwon/YCatalyst>

not entirely sure what sites it powers. these may help you find some of the
more community-specific clones out there.

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vertr
<http://lamernews.com/>

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adrianwaj
<http://arclanguage.org/forum>

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dholowiski
Hacker News works for programmers because programmers work in text and Hacker
News is pure text. I don't think it would work for artists, I think you need
something much more visual.

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texjer
Text is still the best way of discussing ideas, even among artists. My concern
is that a similar service won't get any where near the critical mass in terms
of its user-base... which may be because we're more visual ;)

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dholowiski
Hm, what about a subreddit? It's a bit more visual, and comes with (at least
the potential for) a built in audience.

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texjer
Brilliant idea, I've never been very far below the surface of Reddit. I'm a
big fan of the @newsycombinator twitter account for mobile reading -- do you
know if there's a way of making something similar for the reddit subgroup?

