If you're still stuck with a long commute and you are looking for something to build, you could try your hand at a Hacker News replacement. There are certainly enough people here jaded by the toxicity that would make the jump someplace new.
My only piece of advice, if you decide do this, don't post it as a "Show HN". Reach out to smart people privately to beta test it.
So I shut down (albeit people can still sign in) a site called favilous which was a bookmarking site. And recently I read a book called Join Me by Danny Wallace and thought it would be cool to see if that translated to the web so I created www.11kclub.com but got castigated by HN for being unoriginal, for being a rubbish idea and for the manner in which it was posted. I accept people will be negative and won't like everything that's published but I feel the old HN crowd used to seek the positive first and then give their negative feedback which was always done in a constructive way. I'm a young guy who is just trying to follow a passion and work for myself - but I find myself increasingly demotivated but hey Maybe that's more down to me than HN
Hmm, I just pasted the 11kclub URL into my browser. The front page has no info on what this is about, but you still go ahead and ask for some personal info.
I looked at the favilous front page. It looks pretty decent. Good luck.
11k is part of a social experiment to see if people will sign up to something they know nothing about just because it is exclusive. And thanks, appreciate it.
I think that hate and negativity in the face of an obvious bald-faced lie is to be expected. I agree that the negative reaction to 11kclub.com was over-the-top, but also I could have easily predicted that reaction.
Sadly I am starting to believe a invitation based HN would be the only solution to the problem but it comes with it's own set of problems. The biggest being that it would become an echo chamber.
Bruce Perens used to have a tech site (I can't even remember the name of it now), but he shut it down years ago due partly to the degeneration into faction-based sniping and general cliquishness. Hopefully HN won't end up going the same way. There's still time to turn things around.
Then you just end up with the riff-raff who have $50 to blow. Something Awful charges $10 for an account, but there are plenty of moderators who will ban you if you're a shitheel; you then have to pay another $10 to re-activate your account. It works for them, but I think HN is too self-moderating for that to work--imagine if they auto-banned you when your karma dropped below 0, think of the system gaming that would occur to get others banned!
If you're still stuck with a long commute and you are looking for something to build, you could try your hand at a Hacker News replacement. There are certainly enough people here jaded by the toxicity that would make the jump someplace new.
My only piece of advice, if you decide do this, don't post it as a "Show HN". Reach out to smart people privately to beta test it.