There is something wrong with IH
There is something wrong with IH
Lately, I have seen more and more posts without comments. It is sad. Think about it. Someone (probably) worked hard, tried to bring here and nobody cared.
But I get it, because most of them are "asks": Rate my homepage (something I will be asking soon), how do I grok market? etc.
Asking is totally is fine, after all, this is the one reason this community exists. But maybe there is an imbalance of people asking and people answering and that may hurt the herd. I believe IH lacks some rules. Sorry to point this way. I compare with Stackoverflow where there are a ton of rules and someway I believe those rules ARE the product.
With my two cents, I'm not a hug fan of posts appearing as overlays. For some reason, it makes the posts seem more skimmable and less like an in depth discussion/forum.
I think the problem is not with contributors but with the current IH's structure.
Before the first tab has topics sorted by date, now it's "Top" and it's not clear what goes there, and when but definitely it's not just sorting by a number of comments or rating.
That's why many good posts and questions remain invisible - people just don't realize that they should go to the "Newest" tab.
FYI, @csallen :))
I totally agree with you. After recent IH changes, it is hard to find new posts. Some posts are popping up even after days. Last week, I posted a question and no one responded because it never made to "Top" category. It was not the case before on IH.
Another important change is the removal of post title. Without title, it is hard to predict what the post is about. I think @csallen should bring back the post title at least. There is a reason why HN and Reddit still have post titles.
I got really confused by the no post title. I created a previous post only with the title and had to delete.
It happened with me too.
I totally agree the problem is not with people. There is spam, but the problem is in design. And I do not think there is a simple answer. I really believe it is a case of test and analysis like all startups should have.
Online forum design is a solved problem. Indie Hackers looks nice, but has never really been easy to use.
It's a list of posts in sorted chronologically based on the date we added them to "top". Our goal is to just try to add good posts. It's 100% curated by us at the moment, but we do take things into account e.g. the number of likes on a post, so liking posts in "newest" is very helpful. In the future I'd like this to be a bit more automated based on community behavior such as likes, comments, and post views.
The "newest" tab is actually quite popular. It's the fourth-most visited page on the site nowadays, behind the homepage, products directory, and interviews list.
As the community grows, this firehose of all the content on the site will eventually become too much of a blur for anyone to read. It's not exactly scalable. The same will become true of the homepage if we add too many posts too often. I think the solution is to spread the traffic around to different spots on the site instead of trying to concentrate it all in a few places.
The downside is that things seem to look a little bit deader than they are. When you see a few posts stuck to the top of a common area that have 30 comments, you conclude that the site is really packed. But when you see lots of posts with just 3 comments, you conclude the opposite. Still, I think the latter is a healthier state for the community to be in, as more people get responses.
Yes you are right! The product hunt also has some amazing startups in the NEWEST category and there are some cool projects there, though other people consider only those in the TOP category...
A few weeks ago I made some big changes to the site. One change was to organize top posts on the homepage chronologically rather than to stick the best ones to the top for an extended period of time. The goal was to help spread the comments around, rather than to keep the extreme winner-take-all system in place. Here are some stats:
It seems to be working! Of course, I want that number to be as close to 100% as possible, so there's still a long way to go.
Adding rules to the site is an option worth considering. I've always been fairly careful about introducing rules, as they can be intimidating to read and turn people off from posting. Ideally, I'd like for the rules and norms to be obvious to newcomers, as it's great when people can easily learn by example. But that's easier said than done. Perhaps I'll settle for some very minimalist rules and expectation setting.
Another thing to consider is that as a community grows in size but the available screen real estate for viewing posts stays the same, there becomes more competition for that limited space, and a smaller % of posts get seen and responded to. A remedy here is to introduce new spaces and spread the traffic out. Doing this actually help solves the other problem, too.
For example, we now have the Landing Page Feedback page that includes any post with the landing-page-feedback hashtag. It gets a decent amount of traffic every day. It's a prescriptive and self-explanatory page that requires minimal explanation or rules, so people automatically know how to use it well and follow each others' examples. And it has a very high reply rate, too, something like 83%.
My plan at the moment is to keep introducing new spaces like this one.
I understand the problem is complex. Still, I like that you are careful with rules. I, for example, really hesitate to participate in groups or communities that have many "strict" rules for various reasons.
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Yes I think it's about keeping rules very lightweight. Sometimes rules make communities worse, as you get veteran members screaming at newcomers to "read the rules," which isn't pleasant for anyone.
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I understand why you are careful with rules, but IMHO they are the solution. I have seen an interview with Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) where he talks about how, in the end, what made stackoverflow work were the rules created. I know SO is not the model for IH (at least I hope not), we need more free discussion, Discourse is a better analogy. But I do believe there are a lot to be learned from their experience.
Wouldn't this be an argument against strict rules rather than for them? SO was a far more pleasant place in its first year or two before tightening the rules so much. AFIK, many of those changes were more for SEO reasons than actually helping people learn in real time.
IH purpose is different than SO, so maybe a different set of rules. Look, nobody likes rules, me included, but sometimes they are necessary. We have to find a way to prevent spam. For instance, maybe we should have a rule that someone should have commented a post before creating one. Another idea is to have some kind of points like HN karma.
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It is a tag, and it works just like every other tag, but I just gave that tag page a custom user interface and simple URL. I can offer the same treatment to any other hashtag, too.
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StackOverflow has the "meta" tag to discuss the rules, etiquette etc. of the main forums - these are a great way to help encourage the community to grow in a way that matches the vision of the platform. Something similar with IH could be useful
...on S.O. they have a points-based barrier to entry to join in the meta discussions; I guess this is a simple way of giving weight to the most active users.
<3 this idea
+1 on this idea. One of the ways a community grows is by creating a sense of belonging. We need to feel this is our place, not Stripe's nor @csallen (who in my opinion does a great job, but will eventually become overwhelmed by it)
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Totally agree with Fred and I am not a fan of opinions about @csallen being god. The power of an internet medium are its users and only its users. If people leave IH, @csallen will be alone, thus powerless and lonely. (The guy does a great job, not doubt about that). But please, stop deifying him, not, it is definitely NOT his house. It is our house.
P.S: @csallen this has nothing to do with you, it's just how the internet works.
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Someone once posted about IH etiquette. One ‘rule’ was to leave no post behind with no comments. I think with the spam problem, Top algorithm changes, and Weekly not showing all posts by popularity, etc. There are some kinks to be ironed out. Yes and also the issues you mentioned and people not searching for questions already answered.
I remember the "leave no post behind" discussion I liked it, I tried it, eventually I failed. Too many posts.
The week/month/all-time tabs are broken. Should be fixing them soon.
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I don't actually follow what you mean. Break things up how?
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