maxucho

Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider "intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of your genetic material.

It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to genetics and nothing else.

I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.

(Full disclosure: I'm the developer for this site).

You make a really interesting point, and I think the reason for this is that each college's solution is different in tiny ways. In my opinion this is not an insurmountable problem, as seen with Facebook's success. Clearly not every single person has the same exact needs with a social network, but the key is 1. Facebook is typically "good enough" for most people and 2. Everyone uses Facebook, so people look over tiny inconsistencies with their own usage to be on the same network as their friends.

However the difference, as I see it, between Facebook and something like a Craigslist for campus, a campus chat board, or campus event system is that there is only pressure to use it within distinct communities. For instance, if our site grows to dominate this space at Penn, then only students at Penn feel the pressure to use the site. A student at college X will have different classes, different events, and different needs, so even if all his/her friends at Penn use it, they would get no utility out of hopping onto the College X version of our site, if no one at College X used it.

What we have there is a situation where instead of Facebook's virus-like growth, you have distinct bubbles that need extensive, personal attention to break into. You can't just launch to a new college and immediately have users rolling in, you need a personal "in" for each college, someone (ideally multiple someones) to get real students to use it. This, naturally, requires much more effort and a lot of connections, and it's to this that I'd attribute your observation that no one product has grown to dominate this space.

For now, we're considering our site a simple experiment for Penn, and if we do end up expanding, it would only be if we could justify-—with profit from the site—-the effort needed to expand to other colleges.

Yeah, this is something we're concerned with as well. The reason we have it the way it is now is because we're concerned about having too many category-specific criteria. For instance, price would be nice to show on the front page, but we're hesitant to put a price input on the new post form, because it wouldn't be relevant to many posts (for instance posts about events or groups on campus).

For now, we're focused on keeping the posts as general as possible with only Title, Text, and Category options. In future I could see introducing different parameters for individual categories (price for selling something, location for events, etc.) but for now our priority is in making the new post process as frictionless as possible.

Thanks for the input though! I really appreciate another pair of eyes on a new product.

Yeah we found that library posted on HN a few days ago, and figured since we have very low traffic right now we'd have nothing to lose with a library like this (even with the additional requests it sometimes incurs when a user hovers but doesn't click). It's so fast now I'm not sure I could ever bear to build a site without it ever again.

I'm the developer for this site, and we're using Node.js w/Express, MongoDB, and deployed on Heroku. Mongo might not scale super well for this kind of thing, but for ease of development you really can't beat it.

Hmm that could be just an issue on my site, not necessarily with the plugin. I've been experiencing some strange load times with it even before using InstantClick.