> 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.
> 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]).
> 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.
It's almost as if lessons in building a startup are more often than not, learned the hard way. Even people who have read blog posts and how-to books fail to recognise when the lessons/advice they are reading are applicable to them.
Might seem a little far fetched, but Google and FB should offer a way to opt out of being tracked around on the web. The average revenue per user in North America is around $20 per quarter, so charge $80 per year to use these services without being tracked.
The $20 per user per quarter is mindblowing and that number is growing rapidly, no wonder selling user data is so lucrative.
> but Google and FB should offer a way to opt out of being tracked around on the web
In Europe, this is even regulated in the EU data privacy directive, the problem is that FB et al just do not care because there are hardly any consequences.
technically they have to adhere to EU laws because all of them have EU subsidiaries (mostly in Ireland) through which they act in Europe. But the irish government is obviously happy about all the jobs and taxes they bring to a small country without a lot of industry or natural resources, so all the lawsuits kind of go nowhere.
obviously. but they are only in ireland because it fiscally makes sense. there is no real reason for facebook to maintain a presence in the EU any more than they have to have a Seoul office to offer facebook services in south korea.
That's terrible advice. It worked out in their case and we get to hear their story, what about the people who did this and failed? Don't extrapolate what worked for them into generic advice, to say the least, it's dangerous.
I'd probably roll this advice back to the more general case of "don't be afraid to spend money to acquire the first users". The PlanGrid team may have done this by maxing out credit, but that's just one (and possibly the most risky) way to do this.
I think it would be better to focus on getting businesses who use open source software to pay the authors of the software. Businesses have money, most users of open source software don't have enough money to pay for (F)OSS donations or support.
The other issue with the model of paying for support is that it's just not scalable for the authors. What do the authors do if a big corp asks for support regarding something that only happens at scale? It's a huge time sink for the authors.
Here's my suggestion :
1) Get businesses to support authors of the software they use, by paying.
2) Get businesses to contribute to the development of the software. Eg- Have employees work on the code base.
I haven't thought about this enough, but a marketplace which lists software projects and their contributors, and companies can support projects of their choosing by paying monthly or annually. Individual users should also be able to contribute if they want to.
Oss maintainers also need to provide 'commercial' licences that are no different to the normal license, except they come with an invoice. Some companies are happy to pay for free software as long as there is an invoice to keep the accounting people happy. A donation model doesn't work here.
What do the authors do if a big corp asks for support regarding something that only happens at scale?
I don't see the problem here. Presumably a big corp could afford to pay enough for support that a developer would be inclined to help even if said big corp was the only user encountering a particular problem.
I would count consultant as "own team" in this scenario. Someone company controls at that time, knows company code/cases and is available more or less instantly. A lot depends on how much special knowledge is needed to understand open source project codebase etc. Ordering contractors you already know around is easier then ordering someone on other side of the world who has different employer and priorities.
It depends on the specific company, but lots of companies require a Linkedin profile to submit an application and some companies go as far as requiring an FB profile. And in cases where social media profiles are optional, applications which provide them are viewed slightly more favourably than applications which don't provide social media links. /anecdata
>lots of companies require a Linkedin profile to submit an application and some companies go as far as requiring an FB profile
It baffles me that orgs do this despite the insane signal it sends to candidates. You're basically filtering for people who are either 1) so desperate for work that they'll allow their employer to violate their privacy indefinitely 2) playing weird games where they have second versions of themselves set up with fake content (I knew people who did this in college.)
> and some companies go as far as requiring an FB profile.
I personally heard about a few small companies that wanted the employee applicants to submit their resume through fæcebook. And the biggest facepalm was that those were not "social media marketing firms" (whatever that is), but regular businesses.
How many of those will actually bring in meaningful traffic? It would be nice to see a list from people who have successfully launched a product on multiple platforms and have traffic numbers to backup their suggestions.
You should have put up a demo site where users can try out the comment engine. Requiring the installation on a user's laptop/desktop is just too much friction, not to mention mobile users who don't have the luxury of running go scripts.
Edit: sorry, I had to purge the comment list because of an update. From now on, your comment will only be alive for 30 minutes. It'll be deleted after that. This is, of course, only for the demo.
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.