I tried to replicate the minimal design of hacker news. A small pet project I wanted to do after getting frustrated with the politics and dumb down conversations the film communities have on X/twitter, instagram and other social platforms have. I'll try to update the landing page with more links, feel free to check it out and judge.
As someone who has garnered much HN karma commenting on film, I'm glad to see an attempt to make a quality film community. It's difficult to bootstrap an online community, let alone one with the quality of HN. You're going to need visitors who (1) visit frequently and (2) have much insights to offer on film. (2) may be more difficult, because you need people who already educate themselves about film from quality sources. [1] Furthermore, you'll need to moderate heavily to enforce an editorial standard and dissuade low-quality reactions.
I share your frustration with existing online film communities. The problems I notice in online film communities (including the film-specific Letterboxd) are:
- knee-jerk reactions that are paltry in analysis (e.g. "old films are better because they were shot on film" or "how dare you dislike that film")
- churlish reactions getting "likes" in part to its humor, not its content
- comments saying nothing more than "look how beautiful/ugly this is"
A couple of questions:
1) This website may become more valuable if it could attract and retain insightful commenters. Is there any plan to achieve that?
2) What made you focus this website on film news? Are moviegoers more able to comment insightfully on news that is in-the-making?
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[1] This may be the root cause of the decline in the quality of film discussions, like with discussion of many other subjects in our age of social media. Most people do not engage with quality sources, which lowers their expectations for discussions in general. One can still find substantial information in publications that enforce editorial standards, such as trade magazines and journals on film studies.
In the same way Hacker News went after founders and developers on the inside of the big co’s, I wonder if it would be useful for OP to go after filmmakers and those employed by the big studios?
Bootstrapping like HN would be ideal, since the users knew each other (YC startup founders) and set the tone for an ideal interaction. I'm not sure if there's a completely analogous gathering for film.
Furthermore, the communities for film appreciation and film making may behave differently on a film news website. While people who appreciate film can candidly talk about films, people who make films have vested stakes. This can make Filmmakers self-censor their thoughts. (e.g. They don't want to openly criticize a veteran filmmaker, since the veterans might have influence in the younger filmmaker's future production.)
On my smartphone only two entries of your page fit onto the screen at a time, with a lot of seemingly unnecessary whitespace, whereas it’s seven or eight entries on HN, despite 125% zoom. So HN’s minimalist space-saving design isn’t quite carried over.
My initial take… make it even more minimal. HN is almost spartan to a fault, just a hair above all text. This is objectively a good this.
Get rid of the white space, reduce the font size, remove the boxes around the posts, lose the italics and make the header a quarter of its size and finally stick to one font. That’ll get you closer to the hn aesthetic…
But all of that will be for not if you don’t moderate. All the graphic design (or lack there of) in the world will not replicate hands on thoughtful compassionate human moderation.
Hn is what it is because @dang is who he is. It’s a fine line to walk and biases will reveal themselves in abhorrent ways. Building communities is as much a spiritual journey for the maintainers as it is a never ending drudgery of minutia…
I like the idea and really liked the Reznor/Ross article on synths. it will be interesting to see if it catches on. are votes and views important now? what do people do w/ HN? comment, read comments, paste links into mixed private chats.
I wonder if it would be worth paying some funny people to kick off the discussions by arguing with each other.
I appreciate the motivation for creating the site. Personally, I like sites with minimal color palettes, like maybe 2-3 muted, unobtrusive colors. The brighter color should be used for highlights or emphasis. But it really depends on how the site balances its layout. Like this one works for me despite not using sans-serif fonts https://longreads.com/picks/
There's also Letterboxd.com. It's like Goodreads but for film buffs. I enjoy that site immensely (I'm a Patron there) and I think this one will compliment it nicely.
Ever since the death of Google Reader and the slow painful death of RSS I've been starved for good aggregation of non-stupid culture writing. This is a decent start.
The idea is both attractive and baffling. Do you hope people might talk politics dispassionately? Perhaps if it had 1:1 ratio of mods to users ... and we could throw religion into the mix too, why not.
Every time a political topic crosses the front page of HN, it receives a plethora of attention and the debate is constructive and informative. These threads are some of my favorite, but I can understand why other HN users have no interest and perceive it as off topic. I’d just like a community that was as informed and thought provoking as HN but focused a bit more on world affairs and a bit less on tech. Reddit, because of its obsession with jokes and memes, will never get there; even in the most serious subreddits
If you want, I'd be happy to have you at https://communick.news. Doubly so if you happen to be interested in helping me bootstrap the movie community on https://metacritics.zone/c/movies (the movie community on the topic-specific instance that I run.)
Media tycoon and proto Rupert Murdoch wannabe Charles Foster Kane (totally not William Randolph Hearst) was the Owner/Publisher of the New York Daily Inquirer (in addition to being a behind the curtain lever puller and king maker).
I used to be super into /r/movies, but then two things happened.
First, the user who used to make weekly box office analysis decided to stop doing it for free. Good for him/her, but that was a big blow for the subreddit.
Second, once you're long enough you realize how the hype machine is always there. From "leaked" picture to teaser to poster to trailer, all negative comments are met with "you can't judge until you've seen the movie" while positive ones are upvoted to the top. Not the only forum guilty of this, but it turns the subreddit into yet another arm of the movie PR industry.
I guess it's the inevitable end of all forums, so maybe this one will capture the magic that /r/movies lost.
It's a proxy for both the movie quality and for where the cinema winds are blowin.
It also adds context to better understand what's at stake for movies based on distributor, producer and genres. When a horror movie costs 2M and a Marvel film 200M, "20M box office" by your favorite director can mean two very different things for their future.
Leaving aside that it's an example and any other movie could be there: Marvel movies have collected multiple awards including 2 Hugo awards, 4 Academy Awards and 2 Grammys. I think you'll have a tough time finding any measure of quality that at least one of their movies doesn't fulfill.
Yeah, it's a pretty long name, but the goal is to discourage average users. Having a long domain name already discourages lots of users. You immediately understanding the meaning behind 'New York Daily Inquirer' gives me hope that other users will be interested in giving it a try, as it's a word-of-mouth project. My take is that if you want to build a good community in any subject, you have to discourage average users; they are poison to the conversation. Lean and mean.
I suppose Hacker News likewise dissuaded average users with its brutalist design, which made users to focus on the content of their post/comment. Furthermore, ycombinator.com is not a domain that seems friendly to the average user.
Like any social networks, the key to this website's success would be retention. I hope you find a way to make users come back often.
Grab HN's stylesheet https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?CEh26wiAG7FUlVHVtVAw and maybe look into an even more info-dense landing page like Brutalist Report: https://brutalist.report/