As a result, any geographical-based version of HN ends up either duplicating 90% of the articles on the main HN, which fragments the conversation, or it doesn't post the most interesting or useful articles so becomes irrelevant. Even a language-based subcommunity is largely pointless, since most of us speak English - it makes more sense to read knowledgable comments in broken English than amateur comments in perfect German.
In the end, HN is not Reddit. I don't see that it needs, wants, or would benefit from subcommunities.
1. We decided to build something custom. Which means we have to respond to feature requests, keep things secure and maintain the system. In hindsight a subreddit may have been a better idea. (like http://www.reddit.com/r/EuropeStartups/ I'm not affiliated.)
2. It was a side project. I think in order to maintain an engaged community there has to be a core of very active users and submitters. We were not really. I tried for a while but the platform we had built did not really lend itself to interaction. Many people used it as a news feed for European startups and tech news rather than a place to interact. The site never gathered critical mass to have enough submitters and commenters to keep things moving.
3. It was our first community project and we were inexperienced. We made a few mistakes early on, spread ourselves too thinly and didn't come up with a good way for others to participate.
4. It fizzled out. The other guys went on to other things and while I kept running it on one of my boxes for a while nothing happened (which makes sense considering there were very few submissions and almost no participation)
Overall I would say we didn't have enough experience and time to make it a great community. We also made early mistakes that made things more difficult down the line. Sorry it just went off the air at some point without notice, by that point visits were down to a handful of people per week. Maybe r/EuropeStartups will have more success!
DON'T USE IT
Edit: I've sent the site op an email
I came from italy, where with other guys, we have built hackingintalia.com(fork of lamernews) for italians hacker. In Italy the culture of hackers often have not a global point of view, maybe for language issue and other reasons.
But for Germans as many Anglo Saxon, the English is not a real Problem, so it looks like "yet another news hub" with no something of much valuable than HackerNews
I have lots of contact with Germany, go there frequently and speak passable German but when I have people with me that don't this is never a problem and not because I'm translating.
The Germans that don't speak English are usually either quite old or are from rural areas. City and < 60: you can basically assume they speak English, and if you try German first they'll switch to English if you can't find your words unprompted.
This goes for most of Europe by the way.
I was not counting for BHN to be on the front page so I am trying now to fix all the small things that pop up.
Edit: As I mention in te FAQ this is an experiment and if people continue to contribute I will try to push it into a direction that makes it valuable for everyone interested in Berlin.
That's an understatement.
Superficially things are posted about America, but usually that's more a problem with the site that's linked to being written for an American audience - the majority of articles that make it to the front page are about things that have global impact. Actual content within HN is pretty much entirely for a global audience - Show HN is usually about startups/projects with global reach. Ask HN is usually about things that affect an individual. Hiring threads are very often for remote jobs where people can work anywhere.
Example: "2 years are now a long support cycle for phones as most people get carrier upgrades every 2 years anyway" (from the Android Browser vuln thread. This is only valid in the US because most people in Europe, Africa, Asia, India, etc. buy their phones seperate from their contract, so there is no "automatic" upgrade.
Another example was in the Popcorn-Time threads the "Who needs this if you have Netflix?" – Netflix doesn't even exist in most countries, and where it does exist, they only have like a dozen series, nowhere near the US version, so it provides no benefit. Hell, here where I live even DVD rental is still used, even Amazon provides DVD rental here.
Most of the people in the comments assume that everyone is in the US and a Hacker-News without that would be great.
I refer to it as "Silicon Valley News"
https://web.archive.org/web/20130218061649/http://hackful.eu...
Never gained any traction and it wasn't even Berlin-centered.
I wish you all the luck but we really don't need HN clone for Europe and certainly not one focuesed on Berlin.
edit: fix typo
But I agree; looking at the HN front page just now, I only see a couple of things that could be said to be US-specific (or any-country-specific), one of which is a job posting.
But I do think hackernews should consider making some articles locality specific. For example, a user logged in from Berlin could be shown an article of geographical interest. You can take this a step further and hsow articles to a user based on their interests. For example, a developer might be more interested in coding articles and a product managaer or vc might be more interested in new products.
It helps when people get personalized content, because a greater diversity of articles might get read by the community, and then truly interesting ones will become front page.
Considering who´s behind the site, if they thought HN needed more features there would be more than enough financial and technical resources to do so.
It´s simple, minimalist , and it just works.
Anyway, I fail to see the reason behind this. Especially since the startup scene in Berlin (and London) is mostly driven by business graduates and less by techies. If you want to find similar people, you can use meetup or similar.
<input id="user_password" name="user[password]" type="*password*" />Password in cleartext.. really? Everyone around me at St. Oberholz can see my passworrd now.
Moreover one should keep in mind that there are just way more hackers in the US, so there's no need to worry that there isn't always a post about Berlin on the front page... ;) It's rather a reason to cheer when there is one more success story from Berlin...
You are overrating (Berlin) bcz you are from Berlin. Don't worry about your concerns too much ;)
> cheer when there is one more success story from Berlin...
I will search HN for news from Berlin now (not aware of any recently): "Berlin Hacker News": Some "Ask HN", no products.
A HN in German would have made slight sense. A HN for Berlin?! Sorry, bye, bye :). You are not PG.
My thoughts about what happened - and what will eventually and inevitably happen to any similar community - is that unless you offer very specific content about the area you want to "represent" there is no point in being location-specific in the first place. And the tricky part is that this content is rarely in the form of a news piece or a sideproject submission: it's mainly opinions about things happening in that specific location (eg: I live in Berlin and I am interested in what is being discussed about startup taxes). So in the end you have to actually offer the things that one can't find in Hacker News anyway (eg: information about events, jobs, etc). And then, why build a hackernews clone?
Would be great to hear Berliners' opinion on what'd they'd like to see there next.
One thing though, is there an RSS feed?
