
Show HN: Topic - mrwnmonm
http://www.topic.so/
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michaelmior
Worked on a product for a while with basically the same value prop. User
acquisition is tough when you're essentially competing with a vast array of
topic-specific forums scattered across the Web. Many of these have very large
existing user bases.

In the end, things didn't work out out. I think part of the reason is that
people only care deeply about a small number of topics and they're willing to
go where the community is.

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mrwnmonm
is it still exist? what is it's name/url?

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michaelmior
Not sure what the status is, but posting has been dead for a while.
[http://www.joinbunch.com/](http://www.joinbunch.com/)

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krapp
It feels like twitter except with "categories" replacing tags. Nothing
necessarily wrong with that I guess, but I don't see why I would necessarily
join. Besides there not being an english translation of the terms and
conditions yet, I mean.

The random topic effect is nice but how can I find a specific topic, or set of
related topics, if I'm looking for them? Not having them show up as an easy to
guess API makes it all but impossible.

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meritt
Twitter hashtags. Categorized tumblr posts. Subreddits.

Yeah.. Not really seeing the value this provides, or even a gap it might fill.

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mrwnmonm
hi, i'm not the creator, i just was curious about your opinions about the
site. having the users posting in a place like a group will produce a
different kind of posts from what you find on twitter hashtags. subreddits is
close ofcourse, but it has a taste of a bookmarking site more than a social
network. the gap it might fill is to got to one place to follow my interests,
now you have to go to a lot of places ex: groups/people on social
networks/news sites

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jonathanjaeger
I'm not going to comment on the product itself and whether it's useful (people
are already doing that), but some of the inconsistencies in capitalization and
grammar might put some people off:

1) "Follow the topics you care about, grow your reputation, get notified about
the hottest news as they happen and chat with people like you."

-"get notified about the hottest news as it happens" sounds better

2) Categories are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not: fashion, music,
Gadgets, Health, Most useful Apps, Movies, news -Stick to one structure of
capitalization

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marvy
I agree with (2), but not (1)

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vijayaggarwal
I love the easter egg in browser console. And a very nice design, kudos to the
designer for that. The overall experience is disappointing though. Clicking on
_Learn More About Topic_ did not work. Signup has multiple issues already
mentioned in other comments. Having developed multiple community based
products myself, I know how hard it is to get first users. If you can create
some aspirational value for early users, that can work wonders. For example,
the fact that facebook was exclusive to Harvard made it aspirational for
others. Another trick is to make the entry invitation based, and let every new
member invite a few others. Need for invitation creates aspiration and
allowance of 10 creates social gratification for those who join. Of course,
execution of these strategies is an art in itself.

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crisnoble
The landing page looks very nice. Do you see your main competition as Reddit
(and the vast amount of subreddits) or topic specific forums? In either case
what would be your point of differentiation? Right now it looks to me kind of
like a "reddit with modern css"

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jamesbritt
Playing around, looks interesting, but the inability to post something to
multiple topics is a drag.

Also, getting got this message when I did post:

    
    
        Topic is confused! It hurt itself in its confusion.
    

:(

It's unclear to me how this is better than twitter, unless the "more than 140
characters" aspect is the thing. But on twitter I can use multiple hashtags.

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adventured
You've obviously got a big problem on content creation / content adding.

I clicked on "music" and the newest post is 14 days old, and it quickly drifts
to 70 and 90 days old before you get past the first ten posts. "Tech" was even
worse.

The posts go back about a year, which means in all that time you haven't
figured out how to get fresh content on the site.

I'd strongly suggest you crack that problem asap.

Also, the topic page urls look like this:
[http://www.topic.so/t/32a14b833ff6a0e7013ff81a204d0042](http://www.topic.so/t/32a14b833ff6a0e7013ff81a204d0042)

That's a really, really bad way to structure urls on a content oriented site.
Why isn't that topic.so/tech or /t/tech???

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laurent123456
Aren't all posts at the moment from developers/beta testers? I guess they are
launching the website now and that's when they expect to find new users/posts.

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eli
Onboarding process is pretty rough. I inexplicably got "wrong password" then
"invalid email" then "nickname take" when trying to sign up. Each time it
erased the other fields.

Now that I've signed up, the newest content I see is a month old?

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slater
1) Custom font isn't loading on my side (iMac, Firefox 31b). At least add some
other fonts to your font stack, unless you like Times New Roman? ;)

2) Why should I "grow my reputation"?

3) Wording issues... "Enter topic here" umm... I should enter a topic? What.

4) Still waiting for my login e-mail, and seemingly no way to back out of the
"already a member"/"sign up now!" white overlay.

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jamesbritt
I'm trying to get signed up. I'm at the "Almost there. Subscribe to your first
three topics to get started."

None of the 12 topics shown are of interest to me.

Now what? Must a user pick topics they don't care about?

Consider an offering obvious way to just skip this, and also allow for
searching for topics at this part of the sign-up instead presenting a limited
choice.

~~~
golergka
Exactly. And it's not that these topics don't interest me, they're just to
general. I love music, I write music, but I have very specific music tastes;
the signal-to-noise ratio for me in "music" tag in every information system is
impossible. The same goes for "games" and "tech"; wait, "gadgets" aren't tech?

This wouldn't be a problem if the service asked for my public Facebook profile
and built tag cloud based on the pages I liked or at least gave opportunity to
enter my own topics.

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nailer
This sounds a lot like [http://state.com](http://state.com).

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pbjorklund
It needs content. Seeing posts that are 190 days old really didn't sell it to
me

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notduncansmith
All of these open-ended topic-based "social networks" feel like a variation on
the classic XKCD Standards comic: [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

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alexcason
It seems like a missed opportunity not to have the world cup as one of the
demonstration topics on the front page.

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pgt
Beautiful execution. Inconsistent capitalisation is annoying, but easy to fix!
All the best with this.

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earlyriser
Does anybody know the name of the icon collection that is used on the header?

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yror10
Your parallax effect is nice!

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bdcravens
I know it's a cool domain name, but I might rethink it from a branding
standpoint. ".so" is of course Somalia, and unless this is a Somalian startup,
I don't think you should hand-wave away the connection. Just today there was a
car-bombing at a hospital, so it's still a very live region:
[http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2014/06/18/3704679/car-
bomb-...](http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2014/06/18/3704679/car-bomb-hits-
somalia-hospital.html?sp=/99/321/)

And yes, the same consideration should be made with regard to .ly (which seems
to have fallen out of favor), .io, etc.

