

Ask HN: Why do the collaboration websites always fail? - Skywing

I know the topic is a little vague, but I didn't want to make it a super long one.<p>Everyone has seen those websites that try to connect developers with other developers based on projects they want to work on. There have been many attempts at them. I don't think any have been terribly successful, though. I could be wrong, of course. I'm not really talking about elance.com, or monster.com - those are more freelancers strictly looking to get paid for their services. I'm talking more like openinvo.com, except without the upfront fees.<p>Why do most of these sites seem to have such a tough time being successful? It's definitely something I feel most developers or web designers, etc, would find useful. I know I always hear people complain about how tough it is to find people to work with on ideas of theirs.<p>I think most of these types of sites end up becoming just a deadpool of "want ads". It's not very fulfilling to post an ad saying you're looking for a project to join, or post an ad saying you're looking for people to join your current project.<p>So what do you think? How can these types of services be made better?
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_delirium
One hypothesis (not sure if it's correct) is that there isn't actually as much
of a matching problem as people think, but instead more of a supply problem.
When you're a lonely open-source developer who can't find a second or third
contributor, if this hypothesis is right, then it's not because they're out
there, itching to write code, but unable to find your project in the noise of
the web. Rather, it's because they don't exist, or their time is already
spoken for. If that's true, a matching marketplace will just result in a bunch
of unanswered want ads from lonely open-source developers, because the supply
of willing hands is already taken. At best, it'll result in a zero-sum
switching of developers from some projects to others.

It seems for that scenario not to be the case, either: 1) there has to be a
bunch of unused latent supply due to a real matching problem, i.e. lots of
people who _would_ contribute but cannot find anything to contribute to; or 2)
the existence of such a site would have to actually increase supply itself,
perhaps if it generated a bunch of positive PR and reached previously
unengaged people.

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zephyrfalcon
I think github is a "de facto" collaboration site, but the process is
different... You start working on something you find interesting, and if
others feel the same way, they might contribute.

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pmiller2
I agree completely with this. The best way to find other people to collaborate
with on a personal programming project is to do something other people want to
do. Talk is cheap. Take a look at the number of "projects" on sourceforge that
consist of a name and a description and haven't released a single byte of
code. I'd be willing to bet they outnumber real projects.

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Aqwis
Haha, I own one of those. Code's been sitting on my drive for 5 years, but
it's far from ready enough to be uploaded. I'm surprised SourceForge doesn't
purge the empty projects once in a while to free up project names.

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notahacker
Obviously you've got the problem of _people that are good at doing things_
being fewer in number and less likely to need to actively hunt for
collaborators than people looking for others to do things for them, which
skews the typical site visitor towards those that post ads rather than reply
to them.

This could be a problem for StackOverflow etc as well, but the difference is
that people are both happier giving free advice to strangers than embarking on
large scale projects with them, and more likely to stick around and answer a
few questions on a site that might help them on frequent occasions in future
with other issues.

 _Even if they work_ , sites catering for people making big one-time decisions
like finding a cofounder are always going to end up looking like a ghetto. The
people that find what they're looking for don't need to come back.

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jacquesm
Not all of them fail, its just that people like their collaboration to be
'thin', not 'thick'. Stackoverflow is a nice example of a success story.
Casual, 'thin', very effective.

People are pretty set in their ways and by forcing them to completely shift to
some new platform the majority of the collaboration platforms misses the point
that we don't actually want to do that. Collaboration is more about
communication than it is about anything else so whenever a collaboration site
is successful it usually is because it leaves people free and solves a
communications issue.

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sdizdar
I think the reason is that internet is full of trolls and if you don't put
significant effort into making community / collaboration clean and vibrant
then the collaboration site is destined to fail.

For example, compare Quora and Yahoo! Answers. I don't thing Quora is
successful because they have very good UI (it does not hurt), I think they are
successful becasue they are very serious about making they site clean and
without trolls. On other hand, Yahoo! Answers is 'troll heaven'.

