Ask HN: Has anyone built a platform for sharing stuff online (curating)

[candlestables]

For several years, since getting into publishing online and working on blogs and a lot of other projects, I haven't found something quite simple yet unavailable.

I want to be able to curate and share the good things I find online. For example, I want to collect the cool podcasts I find every half year, organize the news stories I find several of daily in a few categories of interest, share interesting websites I find.

I've used WordPress a ton, and all the big social media platforms, but none of these do it.

I want basically to be able to search the web as usual, and when I find a story I want to include, click something, have it fetch the post info, edit the title / description / image if I want, or not, and pick the category I want to include it in on my page, or the section of my page I want to send it to, and that's it. I also want to be able to fine-tune it from its own back-end / admin, and give others access.

To the user, it would appear like a news front page, with categories and the most recent articles I've sent there, as well as sections for podcasts, music, film, blogs, nice websites to check out, etc.

If there were a platform like this, I think a lot of people could use it to curate web content, and it would be easier to find people who's tastes were like your own and follow their interests on their page.

Anyone built one already / one in the works?

[cgi-joe]

http://are.na - check it out

[unrealornament → cgi-joe]

Yeah are.na is great!

[ju]

im lookig for the same thing, this are.na thing from the comments look promising. the other tools just dont have the same idea in mind, they are for collectiong but not that friendly for sharing

[jstarfish]

> and all the big social media platforms, but none of these do it.

What were the shortcomings you experienced with del.icio.us or stumbleupon?

Lots of people I know are using Pinterest for much of what you describe.

[candlestables → jstarfish]

These are fine for sharing, but you have no ability to organize the stuff you're curating into a website-like presentation. You also can't control how its arranged (default chronological). I think there's a big opening for something like this, that lets people curate stuff they find and arrange the presentation.

Also, if you're using a platform like FB or Twitter or Pinterest, you can't monetize, so basically you'll never invest too much into it, plus it can all be deleted at any time if its on their platforms.

[adventured → candlestables]

> plus it can all be deleted at any time if its on their platforms

No service like that will ever be big (ie mass consumer), if it involves installing and operating the infrastructure yourself. There are no exceptions, there never will be.

There's a reason automatic / SaaS blogs smashed the self hosting market. Handling all of that yourself is wildly obnoxious, if not entirely impossible, for an average person. Wordpress.com is far larger than self hosted Wordpress at this point. Movable Type died for this fundamental reason (they failed at the transition to being a SaaS, and died in the self-managed fire). Then you have Tumblr, et al.

There's a reason nearly all content publishing occurs on centralized systems. And a reason why basically all efforts to decentralize that have failed.

There's a reason decentralized social (eg that might compete with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit) has never taken off and will never take off.

99% of all potential users do not want to operate their own setup and they never will. Decentralize-everything is the ultimate fantasy (you'll see it in nearly every thread about social media on HN going back to the beginning). It's a near universal failure, because it's echo chamber thinking that ignores what 99% of end users actually care about. It's typically an engineer confusing what they want or care about versus what the larger market cares about.

My suggestion: do not, under any circumstances, go down the decentralized content publishing path. It's the path of failure and tears, without exception.

[candlestables → adventured]

Right, while 99% of people online prefer sharing/social networks to post stuff, content creators / businesses only use those to interact, while they host their content self-hosted.

What I'm trying (perhaps with not great success) to describe is something similar to WordPress, but made more for curation / organizing material found online and shared on pages designed yourself. And also easier to use just while doing regular stuff online (reading, finding stuff, watching videos), rather than having to go into the CMS of WordPress and "create a post"

[brogrammer2019 → adventured]

Agreed, also very well written!

[ecesena → candlestables]

> you can't monetize

you can't add your own ads, but you can become an influencer and monetize quite well.

[candlestables → ecesena]

It's a popular idea right now, but not viable for most businesses, I think. It's good for people who want to make themselves a sort of mini star, and people will send them products and then when they're really big also send them money. Seems so mickey mouse.

[tmaly]

I have really wanted something like this. Right now I am just using Google bookmarks, but it sort of feels like I am just dumping links into a giant black hole.

I find it hard to locate something I added over 6 months ago. The tagging is minimally useful, but I think there has to be a better way of organizing these links for easier retrieval.

[50]

Oak Studio's Dropmark (https://www.dropmark.com/)?

Also, check them out at https://oak.is/, they are a great bunch!

[bradbenvenuti]

We’re actually working on an MVP very similar to what you’re describing. You can check it out here: http://getnextup.com

We’d love to hear what you think about it.

[deadcoder0904]

Well yeah, checkout https://awesome.re

Or in a pretty format checkout https://prettyawesomelists.com

[RileyJames]

I feel like this is pretty close, create a newspaper style page from your curated content.

https://paper.li/

[sukhadatkeereo]

Try Pocket https://getpocket.com/

[wizzerking]

here is this guys list 15 Places You Should Be Sharing Your Blog Posts (Other Than Facebook And Twitter) https://www.searchenginejournal.com/15-places-sharing-blog-p...

I saw nothing new except scoop.it

[bertomartin]

Maybe this site: https://del.icio.us/

[j45]

Check out diigo.com, they're approaching this problem from a few unique angles.

[lawrencewu]

Isn't this basically tumblr?

[codegladiator]

Bookmarks with multiple folders ?