For the developer, it seems like a good way to learn more about web development.
Aside from learning or novelty value, I would probably just fork the Reddit repo on Github if I was looking for a clone, as the reddit.com site code is already open-source:
I checked out lobste.rs and I liked it. Thanks! I also noticed that Lobster github repo currently has 22 contributors. Comparing Lobster to a 1 man project is not fair :p I'll keep working on Whoaverse though, who know what may come out of it :)
I wasn't comparing, leepowers said if he needed a community site he'd probably just spin up a reddit (which has even more contributors, six of which look to be really active).
I am a 2nd year CS student and this is my side project. The point of the project is to help me better understand asp.net mvc, jquery, sql and all the other bells and whistles that are required to develop something like this. So far, about 90 man hours have gone into this project (only 1 developer). I am constantly improving it and I would love to hear your comments. Go easy on me :)
ps. the site is running on a rather limited VPS instance which costs me about $15/month.
As far as I knew, HN was not hugely popular. I was wrong. For a brief moment my post reached HN frontpage and the visits peaked at 70. I tried browsing the site during this peak period and I noticed no difference under this "load".
For the developer, it seems like a good way to learn more about web development.
Aside from learning or novelty value, I would probably just fork the Reddit repo on Github if I was looking for a clone, as the reddit.com site code is already open-source:
https://github.com/reddit/reddit