

Lonava- Retrospective of a failed RealName HN/Reddit clone - e1ven
http://e1ven.com/2010/09/15/lonava-com-retrospective/

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prodigal_erik
Yeah, sorry, any venue that requires my True Name will never get more than
cheerful fluff from me, no substantive opinions (unless they're utterly non-
controversial) much less What You Can't Say. I rely on getting food and
shelter by negotiating with other members of a nosy, judgmental, sometimes
irrational species.

~~~
e1ven
Fair enough, that's what I wanted to test ;)

People post to HN while hoping that pg et all will give them money- There's
even more on the line then there is posting under your name.

I still think that people Would, if there were compelling enough content there
to warrant the "price of admission", but since the site only works once people
pay it by verifying themselves, it never builds up that unique content and
discussion, so never will hit critical mass where people are willing to ID
themselves to join.

~~~
ryandvm
Facebook is what a social site looks like when you don't have anonymity - and
I don't like it.

People end up self-censoring about 3/4 of the things they _want_ to say on
Facebook so they don't offend anyone. It's an intellectually barren wasteland
of harmless platitudes and abandoned thoughts.

I appreciate where you were coming from with this idea, but I like a little
anonymity to my Internet. It's the truth spice.

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michael_dorfman
I think there's two issues going on here.

One, of course, is the RealName issue, and naturally, that's where the focus
of the discussion is.

The other, however, is that a site like this, RealName or otherwise, has a
serious chicken-and-egg problem. You need to have a serious plan for traction
before even starting. Without a built-in audience (like Joel and Jeff's
readers at StackOverflow), you're fighting a seriously uphill battle to begin
with.

~~~
petervandijck
Agreed. Chicken and egg problem would be much harder than the realname bit.

There are 100s of these sites out there, it's just hard.

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e1ven
Ultimately, I had fun building the site, but it didn't pan out. People don't
want to post under their Real Names ;)

I've disabled the Real Name Verification aspects on the site- If you create an
account at www.lonava.com is assumes you're verified, if anyone wanted to see
how it worked.

Code is at Github.

~~~
e1ven
An example post of how stories with images look is available at
<http://lonava.com/stories/24416>

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petervandijck
Interesting post. I think you made a bunch of mistakes.

1\. Underestimate the importance of good content to attract people.

2\. Overestimate the importance of real names.

3\. Design. Either make it ugly (which would have been fine), or really good
looking. Both your design and the designers' design where in-between meh. You
should have kept it ugly and focused on the content :)

4\. Pulling in feeds makes the content worse, not better. Automated content
doesn't create community.

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quesera
I imagine the user resistance is more due to a) not wanting to pay to join a
ghost town, and b) not having significant issues with the quality of community
on HN/Reddit (or being satisfied with the local methods of filtering).

I wouldn't draw any conclusions about Real Names from this exercise, except
perhaps that users don't consider them valuable enough to overcome the other
frictions created by your product.

