That way there's (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments. Before long, new real users would start to participate, e.g. by replying to doppleganger comments. At that point, it's inevitable that the new site would start to get traction as long as those new users keep coming back, which they should because the frontpage is interesting.

This could only work if someone had the balls to actually deploy the currently-released Arc 3.1 version of Hacker News, though, rather than rolling their own version in Rails. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to clone HN's featureset, but it's interesting to note that not a single one of the HN knockoffs successfully cloned HN's entire featureset. Most of them were a halfway implementation.

Anyway. Just a fun idea.

EDIT: I just stumbled across a dump of HN from April 24, 2008: http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008...

It contains a snapshot of the first 172,575 items (submissions/comments) and a snapshot of the profiles of the first 6,519 users.

Have fun! Maybe someone can use the data to put together a cool visualization or something.

EDIT2: Just to be clear, this idea is firmly tongue-in-cheek.

EDIT3: Statistics time! According to that snapshot, when HN was 558 days old there were 38,693 submissions and 133,882 comments. The snapshot claims there were only 6,519 users. That would be an average of 20 comments per user and 5.9 submissions per user.

Now, I try to log in at least once a day or every other day and post an "HN-worthy" article if I come across one, or at least try to contribute to the discussion of an article.

My "Fix HN" suggestion: apply a different "decay" rate to the "Ask/Show/Tell HN" posts so that they stay on the front page longer. They're usually more focused on HN-oriented material, and posted by people who post on HN semi-regularly (at least). I'd also lower the flagging threshold to something like 3 or 5 so that people don't abuse this for general news articles.

What makes HN work isn't the software, it's the behaviour of the community, which vigorously votes up and flags spammy or off-topic posts. I imagine that a community of tech-minded hackers are the most suited for this activity. I imagine that a large majority of those visiting a fitness-related site would be less tech-savvy and logically-minded.

You are very likely to get a LOT of spam from advertisers, and if the community does not moderate it then you'd need super-users to do it. Maybe digg would be a better model?

This is a good point. The chances of a "rate my startup" or a good discussion around a startup business idea making the main page are a lot less than they were a year ago. I've seen submissions roll off the new page within 30 minutes when the site is humming, drowned out by mass-market non-hacker stuff. That's simply too fast for HN'ers to spot and upvote good stuff -- and the number of upvotes required to have staying power on the main page has increased as well, compounding the problem.

ADD: The problem is, with a loose definition of hacker-worthy news and an increased audience, the field of potential material broadens immeasurably.

It's the same problem with humor: I love to make a joke or read something funny once a day or so. But if 10 thousand people each joked on HN once a day, the place would completely change character.

At some point, this paradigm simply doesn't scale. To me at least, looks like pg and others have been tweaking things under the hood for a long time. We might be reaching a natural limit.

Of course, the HN guidelines are all in play as well as all the secret sauces for voting rings, anti-spam, user flagging, and the front page crapshoot.

There are perhaps better alternatives for high quality engagement with your audience because few audiences are going to be exclusively a subset of HN users.

This means that some of your audience will have to create accounts to participate. And new users will tend to be less familiar with HN community norms.

An HN thread sounds just as reasonable an idea as any other.

In the meantime, HN is merely one specific kind of community, and it has specific rules which, if people want to participate, they have to follow. Those rules are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They're not hard to follow for anyone who wants to.

Paul Graham has said, "he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community" [1]. Hacker News launched 12 years ago in 2007, it's a testament to Graham, the moderators, the algorithms behind it, and the community members that HN has been able to keep its system for high quality intelligent discourse from devolving over time.

If HN doesn't resemble most other social media systems -- so much so that people have to ask -- this is why. Establishing such a system is hard to do, and even harder to maintain. So far HN has been an exception, not the rule.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

I think you're right that we have to accept the change in communities' interests over time, but don't forget that one of these interests hackers have is to improve their own community.

After reading HN for years I only created an account recently, shamelessly because I wanted to submit things related to work I am doing.

But the fire-hose of submissions means that links to articles, results and papers I'd like to share just get swept downstream in minutes. It actually makes one feel a bit paranoid, that there's a "conspiracy of suppression" against challenging ideas going on here. I don't seriously think that, rather that there's just too much competition for attention, and too little real attention being given.

Where does that leave us? It's discouraging for researchers and authors who would like feedback from a more general audience to submit here. There is a temptation to be an asshole and repeatedly submit materials until they gain traction, but that just feels cheap and anti-social. Meanwhile the same old popular stories that are circulating on other tech/hacker sites seem to get recirculated ad-nauseum. This lowers the quality and perception of a community of ideas that HN has enjoyed.

Something needs doing to rate limit and filter the input here. But I don't know what. Probably what is good for researchers like me is bad for some other group of interests. However you cut it there's a kinda tragedy of the commons going on where low attention is creating too much velocity and shallowness.

These types can quickly dominate the threads. That repels the smarter people who have no interest in such threads. This is how HN could fall into a death spiral. Worse, the risk grows as the site grows, because then more people are attracted to it for wrong reasons. (Right reason: curiosity. Wrong reason: hearing the sound of one's own voice, or making others do it.)

I think the only way you could sustainably have a forum of the kind you describe would be to close it off from the public internet. We're not going to do that with Hacker News. This arguably does leave the site "a little flat"—I've made the same point in the past using the word bland instead of flat. But better flat than dead.

Sad to see it is not happening, but I'm not sure what to do about it - like most people I don't have time or inclination to create a site and hustle it over the hump and reach critical mass. what to do!?

Now: I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. What makes HN HN is not, by and large, a function of the software, but rather, a function of the people who happen to hang out here-- who were attracted by something other than the software.

So, if you wanted to get an HN-like-community gathered around, say, knitting, you'd need some way to get a large enough community of knitters together together to get the ball rolling to create traction (i.e, the chicken-and-egg problem.) The easiest way to do this would be to have the active, committed involvement of the-Paul-Graham-of-Knitters, whoever that might be.

For an object lesson in how this works, take a look at StackOverflow. They were able to get immediate traction because the pump was primed by readers of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Note that they have not yet been able to gain similar traction in any other vertical, and have a lot of VC money working on it.

That being said: what is the salient difference between "A Hacker News For The Rest Of The World" and "Reddit"? What can I do with your software that I can't with Reddit? Follow up question: is this advantage significant enough to make up for the enormous head start they have in terms of users?

EDIT (I clicked before I was really finished, oops):

Finally: "a hacker news of the rest of the world" is not, in my mind, a pretty solid elevator pitch. HN is not a business, and generates no revenue. And, the people who hang out here are not at all like "the rest of the world" in many ways-- in fact, some of us take pride in being outliers. So, I'm not really sure that the notion is solid. If you got traction, I can't begin to imagine how you'd keep the trolls out, or keep the conversation focused in each of the "interest networks".

Still, I wish you luck.