Making Products More Social
by Courtland AllenNow that meetups are up-and-running, I've finally been able to redirect my attention back to these product pages. Today I finished adding some sorely-missed social features — specifically, the ability to "like" and comment on product posts. You can try it on this post itself!
This is just step #1 of a bigger process of changing the way we share and converse with each other on IH. The forum has some inherent limitations that get worse as it grows. For example, only a small percentage of posts make it to the top every day, and many of the rest get ignored. While that's fine for, say, link-sharing communities like Hacker News, it's not ideal for a community built around as many people as possible giving and receiving help with their businesses.
What's the most useful and impactful community of entrepreneurs online? There aren't any forums that stand out. Personally, I think the answer is Twitter. There are better conversations going on there than anywhere else, and part of that is due to the social feed format. It's superior to a forum in encouraging lots of people to do a lot of talking, and in making it easy to skim through and read lots of posts from the people you care about.
But Twitter has some glaring issues around holding substantive discussions. For example, you can only respond to tweets with tweets, rather than threaded comments. And there is no real niche, so many discussions devolve into arguments and politics.
I hope to turn IH into something better over time, and these product post changes are just the start!
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Testing new comments feature... wow it works! congratulations :D
Seriously though, Indie Hackers is a great place. Lots of inspiration and lots of real entrepreneurs here. I remember wanting to build my own community to connect me with people who can take a look at how I'm building apps and get some feedback.
When I found Indie Hackers, I saw that you've already done this for me and I felt thankful. So here goes: thank you!
Seeing that you want to make this all better is a great thing to hear. The comparison you make with Twitter is legitimate, but we need a discussion platform that goes beyond threads somehow.
How can people discover important posts that people posted along time ago, that got covered quickly with other posts? This is one of the things to ask, and when I get some ideas on what could improve IH, I will share it here.
All the best
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How can people discover important posts that people posted along time ago…
It's an interesting problem, and it affects any conversation-based platform, including conversations in real-life. There's a strong bias toward focusing on what's being said now, even though the vast majority of important conversations happened in the past.
I think part of this is biological — we're wired to care about what's new and what's active. But part of it is practical, too. Finding past conversations requires actively clicking, scrolling, browsing, searching, filtering, etc. Dropping in on recent conversations, however, requires very little effort. A good example is that even though we've surfaced the top conversations from the forum, people rarely click over to that tab.
Books have somewhat solved this problem in real life. They're collections of information organized by topic rather than by date, and they're refined to only include the best info (well, the good ones are, anyway). We're doing something similar with our round table articles, which will eventually consist entirely of timeless posts made by product page owners.
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Summary: tags and allowing others to contribute to IH's code.
Just checked out a round table. I love how one can filter businesses based on some criteria, I can find articles that are more applicable to how my business. Can't comment on them though (by design? why?).
I came here to suggest something that I think already crossed your mind: tags.
There is much about running a startup (even if just a small indie project): from sales & marketing, technology stack, how to find and talk to customers (sales networking), finding and communicating with potential partners, service providers, investors (another kind of networking), building a website, finding images, hiring a designer (HR), freelancers vs interns vs employees, etc.
I already built my product, have a decent site and product (at least that's what I think/hope), getting final approvals for Stripe Atlas, and now I'm at the marketing and sales stage. There are many people here with diverse interests, models, stages, etc.
Their posts don't apply to me at the moment (although I wouldn't mind taking a quick look since I might learn something).
To focus my use of this site, I would love to be able to search for "sales" related posts, for example. Whether they are articles, questions, or even comments, I want to see those in the search. Comments deserve some emphasis here because sometimes they are more valuable than posts.
I then realize that I need to improve my site's design because it's affecting "funneling" stuff on my site. So now I start searching for content with "web design" "UX" "funnels" and or "sales".
Do you ever consider opening IH's code to others? I wouldn't mind contributing to a site that is helping me. Imagine a GitHub repo where IH members (maybe filter by some ranking mechanism and tech experience) can submit pull requests.
Cheers
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