We in Africa are just as geeky as anywhere else in the world, but we tend to face problems unique to living on the continent. An HN-like site should yield some great "uncanny valley"-esque discussions :-)
If most mobile designs were better than this, then yes. Sadly while I do most of my casual browsing on a mobile device, I usually wish the web devs would stop trying ... just lower the bandwidth of the original site (I want this anyway) and give me that.
WAP! I had totally forgotten about it until you mentioned the 3210. It's an interesting take though, because there are technologies that are effectively abandoned that might still be pretty useful in certain areas of the globe.
Hackernews isn't that active, it has a very big user base that view but the number of people actively contributing (comments, submissions) is pretty small. During the last 6 minutes there has been 30 comments on HN, for reddit there has been over 100 in the last 10 seconds. The new queue is a good place to look to decide if creating subcategories would be a good idea, most submissions don't seem that great and giving them air time would be more inclusive, but would it be for the better?
Also for me personally I enjoy that HN is just one big list of submissions centred around one goal ("Anything that good hackers would find interesting") it means it's easy enough to discover new fields of interest I'd never have thought to search out, whereas on reddit discovering new fields of interest is much more difficult.
It might be too few buckets for too many things to talk about. Maybe jedberg will pop up and answer if I ask what Reddit looked like before subreddits.
This would actually be extremely useful. Even a basic tagging system would make the site a lot more useful to me (though who gets to tag and whose tags get taken seriously would probably have to tie into the rep system, so it'd hinge largely on how interested the most active users here were in accurately tagging entries).
I've thought this for a while. At least having subcategories for /programming and /startups would solve a few issues that people have - if you only want programming related links, only read /programming.
Though personally I think there should also be categories for /illinformedrants, /pointlesstechdramaoftheweek, /motivationalfluff, etc. The people who like that kind of stuff can have it, and the people who don't like it can not have it.
It would be interesting to discuss and share some news in a different language other than English. I had in the past stopped my self to publish some interesting stuff because I am too lazy to translate content.
It doesn't need one. Leave the password field empty when logging in. This is a site whose user base is very technical. Figuring out password resets is not really big of a deal.
Makes me wonder when web fora will go all the way and simply recapitulate everything Usenet has allowed since the 1980s, by pushing all the complexity involved in threading and filtering into the clients and making servers just big, dumb message storage bases.
That way, all of these discussions would be rendered moot because threading/no threading and subreddits/no subreddits and troll filtering/no filtering and so on would be under the individual's control, as it should be.
As a South African, I am excited by the prospect of this. That said, I'm often frustrated by the signal-to-noise ratio that so often accompanies discussion about technology and entrepreneurship in Africa. Often, I hear substance-free palaver [1, 2] about how X can be done to solve some problem or alleviate some woe in Africa. As a result, I hope that this site will focus on real entrepreneurship - like M-pesa and the Silicon Cape, and less on enthusiastic but ultimately futile or non-actionable content.
It's not optimal? Why, what would you remove? I can't see anything further you could take away without starting to detract from the content, so it seems pretty much optimal to me.
This really does not sound like a good idea. I come from a third world country/region too and I would hate having an HN for my own region. What is the purpose? I want to hang out with the best and the best are here in HN not in some backwater forum that none of the top echelons of HN will visit. It will just become a ghetto. Who in their fucking right mind would want to live or hangout in a ghetto.
Unless your purposes is something else this is just a terrible idea. But if your purposes is really something else why the heck call it a hacker news.
This is a good initiative and something I have had on my todo list for a while. If I understand correctly, you are trying to target the african tech/startup community. I wouldn't want to see it become yet another political forum as some of the posts are pretty off-topic. The true value of hacker news is in the community and building that out for Africa is the real challenge/opportunity here. Would be glad to help where I can.
Anybody here willing to prepare video tutorials (or text) on how to code a HN clone on Google app engine for me?I always wonder how HN works. Its design appears pretty simple for a beginner coder like me.
Also, I'm curious to what degree Africans reject being grouped in the monolithic term "Africa". That's a billion people. Cape Town / Nairobi / Lagos / Cairo are completely different places.
This has nothing to do with race. Africa is a geographical location, not a skin colour. Tech in Africa has a different set of challenges than the hugely US-centric Hacker News crowd- not to mention networking opportunities, etc.
We in Africa are just as geeky as anywhere else in the world, but we tend to face problems unique to living on the continent. An HN-like site should yield some great "uncanny valley"-esque discussions :-)