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?