
Show HN: Meta Almanac – Reddit for programmers - metalmanac
https://metalmanac.com/
======
mdip
Well, ya got me, I bit. I think a small part of me bit because the domain, if
you look at it really quickly, appears to almost be 'metalmaniac'. And while
I'm far from the metal head I was as a teen, there's still a small part of me
that will check out any service that at least _appears_ as though it might be
'metal'.

In all seriousness, though[0], here's a couple of observations:

Where does the 'Reddit for programmers' originate? I was pleasantly surprised
when I visited the site that it didn't feel at all like Reddit. Maybe part of
that was the lack of redditors (no, that was the biggest part -- and a bit of
a selling point, IMO). But I wonder if branding it in that manner is a good
idea. Personally, I have very few positive feelings about Reddit and when I
read that, initially, I _almost_ didn't click the link. That said, I _really_
hate it when people offer criticism without any suggestions for improvement.
Unfortunately, that's me right now. The problem I kept running into was that
the things I wanted to replace 'Reddit' with were things like 'Hacker News'
and 'Stack Overflow', which highlights a different problem -- things like this
kind-of already exist. In addition, Reddit has sub-reddits that cover the
topics you're offering on the site, so _it_ is almost this product.
Fortunately, Reddit does a pretty terrible job. Sub-reddit quality has a
pretty large range, post counts on those subreddits is often low, posts tend
to focus on 'How do I do this really simple thing that (a) was already asked
(yesterday...twice) and (poorly) answered, (b) has a very high ranking
solution on StackOverflow with several (very good) answers, and (c) a quick
google search of two of the most specific words related to the problem yields
more than three pages of (mostly good) posts on other sites?'. Of course, the
answer provided is usually a single-line link to StackOverflow, or a snarky
'Here, let me google that for you' with a google search link. Or it's just
unanswered, the answers are minimalist/unhelpful or just completely wrong. And
since that, also, sounded like my highlighting a problem without offering a
solution: I think a way of _helping_ this problem is to set solid guidelines,
have good moderation in place, and focus on topics that are more niche in the
programming community and are less likely to be riddled with very green
developers providing unhelpful responses.

Looking over the sites features, I really liked the idea of the chat part of
the site. I think with the right participants (and actually _with_ some
participants) this might be a fun feature. That said, I can't _remember_ the
last time I participated in a group chat outside of internal company Slack
channels and I really haven't been all that interested in doing so for at
least a decade when I left my favorite IRC client off of a machine re-load[1].
Chat experiences are ruined by the same kinds of problems -- trolls/jerks --
but instead of having long delays between response/trolling, where moderators
can step in and vote people's poor behavior down (or, in the case of parts of
Reddit, vote it up!), moderating chat is almost impossible. I've been around
these parts long enough that trolling rarely bugs me, but at the same time, I
know I left IRC because valuable 'signal' was so drowned out that it basically
made using it a chore[2]. Personally, short of full-time staff pouring over
and dropping (preferably shadow) ban hammers[3] on offenders, or a
breakthrough in ML that _reliably_ can moderate this, I don't think there's a
good solution to this problem -- the trolling is rapid/real-time.

It's a tall order, sir (or madam), but I wish you success.

[0] And since it doesn't always come across properly in text, I mean this
respectfully -- I recognize that this is a site with a social element, so it's
not going to have terribly much content in the early days, so it may not be
possible for me to pass any form of judgement this early. All that to say,
these are my observations and I offer them as opinion, not as an attack on a
site that I'm guessing you put a lot of time into.

[1] And it's been so long that I can't even remember what my favorite was!

[2] I always reveled in how one could spend such a long time carefully wording
a question so as to avoid taking flack only to have the first several
responses be exactly what was trying to be avoided. After a while I just went
with terse and somewhat rude, which received the same amount of flack but with
less effort on my part. Then I wondered why I was bothering at all when I
could find an answer elsewhere, more easily, and I didn't have to interact
with that kind of individual.

[3] I wrote about a form of shadow banning in a comment on another post a
_long_ time ago that would work well in this case (once you solve the problem
of finding enough moderators to make the banning effective). It works like
normal shadow banning -- stop the toxicity from being received by all
participants but make it appear to the troll that their posts are getting
through -- but take it a step further. Bundle all of the banned participants
together so that their trolling posts _do_ get through to others who are
shadow banned, but don't appear to anonymous or authenticated users. This
provides solid feedback to the troll. Trolls will respond to trolls. And it
also tires them out quickly and, hopefully, keeps them away for good.

~~~
metalmanac
> the domain, if you look at it really quickly, appears to almost be
> 'metalmaniac'

The domain name confuses people a lot, I've actually received similar comments
before. Terrible naming choice from my side.

> Where does the 'Reddit for programmers' originate?

I thought it was a reasonable analogy to describe the site. Since it's
essentially subreddits+chat for programming topics. The other alternative is
"An online community for programmers", which is what I have on the landing
page currently. I'm still experimenting with different taglines.

I agree that there are already (very good) solutions for the problem I am
trying to solve, it's just that it's a broken experience (or so I thought),
jumping between stackoverflow, hn, reddit, irc. I thought there is value in
providing this experience under a single site in the hope that it becomes a
more welcoming place for beginners.

Regarding the chat part, yeah it does allow realtime trolling, but I have not
had much traffic so far. One solution is to just set the tone for the
community and be hard on trolls with shadow banning and even banning. As you
said, having good moderators is also necessary.

Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
mdip
> The domain name confuses people a lot, I've actually received similar
> comments before. Terrible naming choice from my side

Personally, I love it, but I spent most of my teen years as a metal-
head/progressive rock fan (which I've found to be pretty common among
programmers). Meh, name is important to a point, but with all of the 'common
names' taken up, and companies picking goofy hipster names, I don't know _how_
important it really is.

I agree with you about fragmentation ... it would be nice to have a site with
all of these features with the content to go along with it. Maybe it'd make
sense to synchronize relevant Creative Commons documentation that's out there.
As long as it's always up-to-date and not done in a spammy manner, having a
nice source of docs that includes Q&A and chat would be interesting (I know SO
is working on something like that now, too, minus the chat).

It's a neat idea that will require a _lot_ in the way of execution -- getting
users to join/participate, or even _interested_ is going to be the biggest up-
hill battle.

Curious - is the code for it open source and what language is the back-end
done in? It's something I'd consider participating in the development of if
it's in languages I work with (mostly .NET and JavaScript [though I do 90% in
TypeScript these days and try to avoid JS]).

~~~
metalmanac
> getting users to join/participate, or even interested is going to be the
> biggest up-hill battle.

Exactly, getting users to join is hard. It's a chicken and egg problem. It's
not useful until there are users on the platform, so getting the first users
to engage is _hard_.

I've tried doing 2 Show HNs so far and people are just not interested. I
thought it would appeal to hackers, but I don't know what to make of the
underwhelming response.

> Curious - is the code for it open source and what language is the back-end
> done in?

It's Django+Postgres and I use websockets for the chat. The code isn't open
source currently, but I will open source it if I gain any traction at all. All
I can say is, it's brutal trying to get a product off the ground.

