Forum Suggestion
Just wanted to raise this quickly. IH is gaining momentum, which is awesome, and we're starting to see more 'check out my product' type posts.
These are great and I read every one of them. But it also seems that hacker to hacker posts are sometimes buried. A few months back, the forum has a more conversational vibe and I wonder if we (csallen) should recommend splitting out the new product posts with the hacker posts?
Just a thought. Thanks to everyone for making the forums great; I read everything.
Hey JBit! I've noticed this as well, and it's been something that I've been turning over in the back of my mind for the past couple weeks.
I think my overall plan for the forum is relevant here. I launched it knowing that I wouldn't have much time to manage it in the first few months, because I still don't have the rest of the site (interviews, sponsorships, podcast, etc) streamlined yet. I have some exciting ideas to make the forum much better than it is now, but I doubt I'll have time to start implementing them until early February-ish. Regardless, I felt I had to launch it early anyway, because it takes months for a community to build up to critical mass, and I want it to be close to that point when I get the time to focus on it.
With the particular issue you mentioned, I haven't quite thought of a solution, but whatever the fix ends up being, I want it to accomplish two things:
First, I want to foster as much hacker-to-hacker discussion as possible. I really don't want these posts to get buried under everything else, because the casual conversations that happen there are the most valuable part of the forum in my opinion. This might just come down to moderation of some sort, and adding a "boost" to these types of posts. Or maybe it will involve splitting off the "New Project" posts to a different place like HN does,.
Second, I like that people come to the forum to show off their new projects and ask for feedback. I think it'd be awesome if people could post here and reliably expect to get high quality feedback on their projects. The big challenge here is incentivizing people to actually comment and leave feedback, because there's sometimes a "what's-in-it-for-me" vibe, and often posts get 0 comments. If I'm not careful in how I split these posts off, I might inadvertently discourage people from posting them at all.
Open to ideas!
Yup... Maybe a wait and see attitude is best?
I remember when twitter came out and it was the users that invented the hashtag. Maybe we'll see something happen on the forums that will be obvious and will make sense. I think the fact that you have some of them 'categorized' with a few badges might be a step in the right direction.
Anyway, these are great problems to have because it means something is working right. I go to the forum daily and it's just great that we're seeing all these various types of posts.