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.

> 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.

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.

ublock.org is controlled by Chris and is meant for his now unmaintained uBlock extension.

Note to everyone : use uBlock origin only which is built by gorhill. ublock.org is not related to uBlock origin in any way.

> Break the rules. Max out your credit.

Survivorship bias?

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 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.

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

Just curious, what are the specs of your VPS?

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.

I agree with you. The site is still very, very early and I am currently focusing on the UI and UX to make the site memorable. Thanks for the honest feedback!

My hypothesis is that 99% of the people who use Stackoverflow only visit the QA part of it and things like the community wiki and chatroom receive minimal traffic. From talking to a few dozens of users, most people don't even know that the chat room and wiki exist!

The current number of users in the Stackoverflow chat rooms

> with 100 users currently talking in 57 rooms.

The usage of the chat is shockingly low.

I think there's room to provide a better learning experience for developers and providing chat rooms for developers is a low hanging fruit IMO. People here on HN know about IRC and how to use it, but we represent a very small fraction of the population interested in programming, so the idea is to tend to the general population eventually.

That's what I am currently working on. The home page will primarily focus on explaining what the site is about. I am thinking about using gif+text to explain how the site works.

This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the site is about.

The idea is this :

* provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programming language/framework/platform and what are the best resources to use.

* provide a Stackoverflow like QA section for users to ask and answer questions.

* provide a forum to submit and discuss learning resources (like HN)

* provide a chatroom to replicate the IRC experience

As you can see this I have completely failed to convey this. So that's what I am working on now : to convey the purpose of the site and improve the UX and UI. Reason for completely failing at this : I focus too much on the tech, the backend, unnecessary optimizations and time wasters like load testing.

Getting the first hundred users in itself is not hard, post to forums where your users hang out and you'll be at 100 users fairly quickly. The hard part is getting users to keep coming back to your site aka engagement.

The best advice I have come across to get your initial users : do things that don't scale [0]. Yeah, everyone read that post by PG but a surprisingly small number of people actually apply it to their own projects/startups. Practical example : I am building a community for programmers [1], so to get some initial feedback I posted to a Python subreddit and got the first 50 users. I got a lot of valuable feedback, but users hardly came back to my site after a couple of days. So I decided to follow up individually with users who had signed up and started a conversation about my site. I explained to each user what the site is about, how to use it and asked for feedback. I also asked them what their first impressions of the site were and how it can be improved. I learnt that people did not even understand what my site was about, and I knew that I need to focus on conveying the essence of the site to new users. (Still working on it) You gain a lot of insight about users by having conversations with individual users. I managed to help 3 people with their Python related problems so far, in the chat room https://www.metalmanac.com/topics/python/chat/

Once you get a small number of users who are passionate about your project, continue talking to individual users and ask them to share it with their friends and offer to guide each user individually, it works very well. This is obviously not scalable beyond a few hundred users, but getting those passionate users initially is critical. I am currently at this stage.

Once you have a group of 100 or so passionate users, you can share it with a wider community of users (eg- PH, HN for tech projects) and continue focusing on having conversations with individual users.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

[1] https://www.metalmanac.com/

Can you share a link to the site?

After realizing that there is no common platform for people interested in Startup School (founders and spectators), I decided to start one on my site. The idea behind this community is to bring together people who were accepted into the MOOC, people who were not accepted and people who just want to watch the action as spectators. The following are some features available to this community:

* A wiki like document that will be updated as each lecture is posted with links to the video and lecture slides.

* A chat room

* A question and answer forum

* A forum to discuss resources i.e submit a link to an external resource + a comments section

Note : This is an unofficial community. Since YC has not indicated that they will bring together all Startup School enthusiasts onto a single platform, I decided to start one.

The campaign is against all encrypted apps and they just happen to use WhatsApp as a scape goat since it has the largest user base. Targeting Signal or some other obscure encrypted messaging app wouldn't be as effective.

There's Algolia https://www.algolia.com/

This is what HN uses for search.

Hey guys, I put together this guide to help anyone getting started with machine learning and deep learning. It's a work in progress, so you can send edit requests (like pull requests) by clicking on the "Edit this page" button at the bottom.

I'm also trying to build a community of ML and DL enthusiasts on my site, so you are welcome to join. The cool part : there's a chat room to discuss ML and DL topics, so signup and start chatting! Chat room is is here https://metalmanac.com/topics/machinelearning/chat/

There is no point in speculating whether it will scale or not, take a data driven approach and load test your setup to find out.