

Ask HN- Does something similar to HN exist? - nshankar

Hacker News is my first site every day. I see HN as the best pool of popular stories on that day that scramble to keep their lead. I sometime go to see  comment though I find them going sideways (not staying on the topic started by the post) pretty easily. But, this (going sideways) is a human nature. One major thing about HN - It shows the same contents for every visitor.<p>I would love to see such a site for very much everything, including tech news (imho HN stories differ vastly to the ones on say, Techmeme), local news, business, shopping (a great opportunity for opinion-based shopping), travel etc.
We don't want review sites, we want to say something on current state of affairs and let someone provide quality response (important feature of HN). Reddit is one, but childish most of time. Fark is another, but hilarious. I think of Quora, Stackexchange family but nothing matches simplicity and openness and global reach of HN. Many see answers in facebook and twitter but they are too close to be called as global for a single login (I have less than 50 friends on facebook).<p>Do you have any suggestions?
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jeffool
I have to agree that the reason I prefer HN so often to other sites
(particularly Reddit) is that often, I'm just not looking for humor. Not
everything has to have a joke with it. Sometimes I just want to read, or have,
a serious conversation. Quora, you mentioned, similarly a great place to read
on a wide variety of things; it's like an inquisitive Wikipedia.

I know it's a popular opinion that HN long-ago-reached/is-reaching a threshold
in popularity that threatens to ruin it... But before people say that, again,
take a look at some of the other sites. Judging relatively? The bar with which
to judge a community's seriousness of the topic is lower than you think.

I'd hesitate to call it a "4chanification" of the Internet; I actually still
often enjoy 4chan. It's the spreading of the culture epitomized at 4chan shows
making people chuckle is often easier than making them think. And easy comedy,
while not inherently a bad thing, is obviously the most plentiful. The
prevalence of comedy is also easily to notice on YouTube or Twitter. And it's
not that I have anything against fun or being funny. I love David Cross,
Richard Pryor, 3 Stooges, etc. I just sometimes enjoy having fun in ways that
doesn't include humor. There's also fun outside laughter.

This is what makes me less eager to log into an old forum I used to love. Once
a thread entitled "you laugh you lose" repeating things I'd long seen on 4chan
became required reading to get any other joke in every other thread, it loses
something. I don't have that community feeling I used to.

And say what you will about the quality of HN, even considering the fact that
a good third of us dream of projects that would probably put another third out
of business, by far and large people here are respectful and contributory
rather than angry and wry. We may not be as tightly knit as many, especially
given our numbers, but we're a community of quality decorum. Despite what much
of the Internet seems to think, there's value in that.

A few months back I actually considered making a go at a gaming news site that
would function like HN or Reddit. The idea being to drive high minded people
and experts to have serious and civil discussions. It's not only a love of
mine, there's a large number of game developers that blog, tweet, and in
general communicate with fans. I figure if you can hook a few, you're good. Of
course, I dropped that during a rough patch. Things are looking better now...

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michaelpinto
It breaks my heart that what you're describing use to be Digg when they were
at the top of their game.

~~~
nshankar
It was probably 2007. A lot of water has passed through Digg. Again, Digg was
more-or-less link->comments story. On HN, "ask HN", "Show HN" are my fav
reads.

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pdenya
Do you have a reddit account? The quality in some of the smaller subreddits is
much higher. If you signup you can unsubscribe from pics, atheism, funny, awww
and whatever other fluff defaults on the front page.

For an example of this higher quality content I'm mentioning check out:
<http://www.reddit.com/r/photography>

~~~
bornhuetter
I have an account set up on reddit that only subscribes to r/python,
r/redditdev, r/django, r/startups etc. The quality on the front page of that
account is pretty good, and there are very few gratuitous memes tolerated in
these subreddits.

I highly recommend having separate accounts for entertainment and work/serious
news.

~~~
nshankar
this is a good suggestion.

~~~
jeffool
Agreed; it's a great suggestion! In fact, I think it'd be great of Reddit to
support this as a native feature, so I just made a post on /r/suggestions/!

~~~
bornhuetter
Supporting it natively has been suggested before, but it's not something the
admins are likely to implement in the near future. Try using the Reddit
Enhancement Suite plug-in to easily switch between accounts (unless you are
force into IE at work).

Also, note that r/ideasfortheadmins is the better place to post ideas like
this (and the admins do read it and respond to it).

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ColinWright
Put a contact email in your profile and I'll give you pre-alpha access to my
experiment. I would value an additional opinion.

~~~
nshankar
please send me access - nitin.nanivadekar at gmail

~~~
ColinWright
Sure. I'm on the road for the next couple of days, but I'll ping you when I'm
back. Thanks for your interest.

