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Ask HN: What are your HNs for other domains?
45 points by tamersalama on March 29, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 33 comments
What are the Hacker-News for other domains?


Newmogul

http://newmogul.com/

for business. It has exactly the same user interface as Hacker News.


It's the same platform as HN?


Yes. The HN source is available in the arc distribution.


Academic Hacker News: it's like reddit.com/r/compsci

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/news/


Thanks for sharing the link, I have submitted it.


Thanks for submitting the link, the content there is very interesting.


I use Fluther for Q&A. It has a respectful and smart community, just like this one.

http://www.fluther.com


I started (what I hope will be) an HN for design a few days ago: http://reddit.com/r/designthought/

Existing design link sites are very low level and amateur. I'm trying to create a place for design links with substance.


Just subscribed, good idea.


I don't think subreddits count.


I don't see why they shouldn't.


Because they're on Reddit, which is diluted.


Journalism/News Industry

http://www.jstartup.com


i just use HN for everything. Its a lot more relevant.

There isn't really a HN for "business, management" yet(I don't count the few forums with a few hundred users). I also don't really count newmogul, since a) they too have only a few hundred users and b) most of them are on HN anyways.

And if some time in a future a site will emerge like that, for business owners to post and discuss, most of the content won't really be relevant anyways, since most users will be the brick & mortar/services types(grocery store owners, dentists etc), which face quiet a different set of problems from the web startup world.


Yeah, but what a resource of new product ideas that would be. I for one would love it!!!


As I commented previously, we should consider the formation of sub-HNs:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506181


You could always setup your own (the Arc source is available) - I have a feeling branching out like reddit could dilate the quality here (not that there's that much wrong with reddit (in comparison to places like digg), but it's just different).


There is often a strong desire to sub-categorize online communities, but the result often ends up just fragmenting the group and diluting anything interesting.

I work in games, and as a result of that (and as a result of it being a hobby of mine as well) end up reading a lot of gaming forums.

The gaming forums which have split themselves organizationally into sub-forums like "First Person Discussion" "RTS Discussion" "Mod-maker and homebrew discussion" "retro discussion!" etc, etc, tend to lack in-depth discussion and long-term vitality, and instead focus almost entirely on surface level discussion.

The most interesting gaming forums, the ones which end up being the most full of life, and have a sense of solidity and community and "place," are the ones which just have just one forum, usually called something like "Gaming Discussion." Within that forum, since it's the only place there to talk, unofficial (but well-regarded) rules tend to form and the community tends to self-regulate.

In places where the community comes pre-segmented by the administration (eg into sub-forums or sub-sections of a site) the assumption seems to be that if you're posting content which vaguely fits within one of the pre-defined sub-sections, you're in the clear regardless of how useless your new thread is. This results in 8 billion threads with titles like "anyone played [game x]?" (often with a single sentence post within, saying something like "i havent but my friend says its lame. thoughts?"), or "fans of [genre x] team up and post here!" (even though that is implied, since you're making this post in the [genre x] sub-forum).

In the less stratified, single "Gaming Discussion" forum layouts, however, the community itself is responsible for segmenting and organizing the conversation in the only way they can -- through the actual threads they create. This significantly raises the implied quality requirements for any new thread (as anything deemed "throwaway" or "quick" like "who is a fan of this?" should either be left unsaid, or should be relegated to a single post inside a larger conversation) and tends to result in a forum filled with fewer new threads, each containing deeper, more thought-out discussion, versus the heaps and heaps of shallow threads that you get in a more stratified gaming forum community.

When there is only one place to post, and the responsibility for segmenting the content therefore falls on the community (by creating new threads), the threshold to propose a new sub-discussion area (a new thread) gets raised far higher, and as a result people post longer within pre-existing threads, causing the discussion to actually last long enough to get beyond the surface level comments which plague more pre-stratified and pre-moderated discussions, and that style of conversation eventually seeps back up to the top and carries into the beginnings of the next new thread.

Look at the forums on the gaming meganews site gamespot.com for instance, which is stratified down not just to different genres, but to a sub-forum for each individual game (and is considered a wasteland, consisting of nearly entirely "when is this game coming out?" and "I liked this lol" threads), versus the single-forum communities at www.neogaf.com and the Something Awful gaming forum (which are both stable enough to be populated with fans and developers and press alike all on the same board, and are both frequently visited as sources of news and interesting discussion by all of those groups).

Of course, these are gaming forums I'm talking about, so there is always going to be significantly more idiocy than something like Hacker News. So, to the untrained eye I'd imagine even NeoGAF or the Something Awful forums may look like a wasteland devoid of content, but (with a little investigation) relative to the rest of the gaming community/discussion landscape, their content and vitality speak for themselves.


What are some interesting forums that you go to?


Re: games? I tend to mostly lurk on two of the bigger ones - www.neogaf.com and the www.somethingawful.com games forums, though I also sometimes read the more industry-focused www.quartertothree.com and www.thechaosengine.com forums.


A bit of Ask HN/stackoverflow for startups: http://www.chuwe.com

This is my startup of course, just for full disclosure.


I built a clone for .NET programmers and launched it right before MIX http://managedassembly.com

Explanation for why it was needed: http://john-sheehan.com/blog/introducing-managedassemblycom/


I have often wanted to set up a HN for the humanities.


Start a subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/reddits/create?name=humanities

I guess it's not as impressive as running your own site, but it gets you 90% of what you need and lets you try out your idea to see if there's enough interest in the first place.


What is stopping you?


aswanson, absolutely nothing. Similarly, nothing has stopped me from writing that book I've planned for two years; but, unfortunately, what I intend and what I do are distinct.

abe-epton, it's unfortunate that they do not allow comments.


aldaily.com does this pretty well.


DZone - Programming links

http://dzone.com/links/


RubyFlow ( http://www.rubyflow.com/ ) is vaguely similar in spirit in the Ruby sphere (no voting though).


I used Slinkset to set up an HN for moms/parents at http://www.bababase.com.


This brings to mind an add-on question. Have any Slinksets become important hubs on any domain? I haven't really seen any with a sufficient number of comments & points to "qualify" as HNs. Strange considering how well it works.


Are you asking what HN's users have created as far as news aggregators go?

http://www.gibsonandlily.com is mine.

Its moderated, but I feel like it has a pretty good, pretty tight-knit community :)





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