I highly suggest you curate the quality of your posts, users and comments. Perhaps, even at the expense of potential users. I think reddit is a prime example of how badly quality can deteriorate. I know there's no metric for 'good' vs 'bad' comments we can appeal to but I think we can all understand that all the 'true' subreddits[1] denote the fact that once you get far enough on the adoption curve[2] quality will start to suffer as I contend occurred on slashdot, followed by digg, subsequently reddit, and now HN. It will deteriorate into Eternal September[3] -- filled with one line quips and memes. I don't want to make any value judgments on this specific community but I'd like to say I miss the edw519s.
Good examples of communities that have managed to maintain quality well are /r/askhistorians and lobste.rs. Ask Historians managed to do it by ruling with an iron fist. Lobste.rs by heavily curating which members are able to join. Another interesting example of retaining long term quality is visible in private torrent sites- many of which employ both an invite system and strict rules.
Finally, what made Hacker News so good ~4 years ago was it was originally populated by people within the industry with decades of experience. You yourself said this was for the financial industry-- trying to pick up early adopters here makes about as much sense as trying to pick up adopters for a medical industry community on an economist forum.
Retained its character at the expense of being stuck in the mid 2000s. For a modern aggregator they have a shit layout to be honest. A site that gets as much traffic as they do and they still have flat comments?? Inexcusable.
I think you bring up an excellent point. With traffic, content certainly tends to deteriorate, or at least change. Like you've noted, most things are their best at the beginning. This being said, how do you try and stay on the cutting edge of the best sites in their early stages?
I'm honestly too young to have an experience with this myself, and don't expect finding out the best new sites to be easy or quick, but what tips from your experience can you offer?
As someone who's spent most of their career in professional finance, my strong advice would be to avoid the proliferation of "contributor" sourced sites.
These sites typically allow anyone to write financial articles, trading recommendations etc. and get paid for page views. There is little to no verification of the content, let alone diligence on the credibility of the authors, and the quality of the discussion is extremely poor.
Unfortunately, given the volume of content they can produce through crowd sourcing, they are also extremely popular. Examples include Forbes, Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool.
EDIT: Assuming your question was in relation to financial news.
Agreed. Also, in the name of "understand your market" - what did early HN readers get from reading HN that they wouldn't elsewhere and how does that translate to finance? Would HN be successful if some random dude had started it instead of PG? I admittedly wasn't around in the early days, but back then I would imagine that the expectation was "wow, generally people who post on here are legit" as a direct consequence of that association.
I'm not familiar with the author - is he/she someone baller enough in the finance world to draw quality discussion? Are people going to break away from WallStreetOasis and minesweeper for this? Is there useful industry-relevant information? (My impression from friends who've gone into finance is that technical skills matter for jack shit as long as you're competent, and relationships, positioning, and sounding like you know what you're talking about rule the day. Is that something you can vaguely convince yourself you're getting better at at while wasting office time on a finance hacker news clone?)
Unrelated, I've always thought it would be fun to hem up a corpus of SeekingAlpha articles, use some rudimentary NLP to look for clear short-term bullishness or bearishness on some specific security, and see if you can either (a)find anyone who's demonstrably worth reading and following (and maybe trading based on them), or (b) more likely point out that everyone is full if s, most of them are convinced of their own s, and in the end it's all clickbait with charts and important-sounding finance words.
The problem with this approach is that given a sufficient population of contributors, a random distribution is going to give you individuals that consistently out/under perform purely by chance. This can be seen in the professional asset management industry, where:
there is strong evidence that chasing managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records is actually harmful to your portfolio health [1]
I think what made Hacker News so good ~x years ago was the intentions of the users - people were here to share and learn, now many people are here to get traffic to their blog or startup or news site.
In finance I expect this will be much more aggressively pursued because AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.
Is there something specific about finance that makes AdSense more valuable besides traffic? And if you already have traffic, seeding it in a brand new forum doesn't seem like a good way to get a big boost. From what I understand, there is a reason why high traffic blogs like Instapundit are supported more by Amazon affiliate type programs than AdSense revenue. AdSense will make you a bit of money, but I don't really know of anyone who uses it as their primary income.
Re: lobste.rs, Every time I go on there, I don't see a bustling community and interesting discussion, I just see dead silence, no comments, and a few upvotes. Take a look now: https://lobste.rs/ The links are good, but that's about it.
I think that's a problem with the invite only way: it can be too exclusive to build enough critical mass to create a community in the first place. It's easy to argue that there is no noise if there is close to no signal.
For context: I'm sat on a trading floor in the City of London right now.
I had a similar idea (inspired by Slashdot) about ten years ago but, like so many of my great ideas (e.g. time travel, teleportation), I never got around to implementing it.
A site like BoredBanker.com will almost certainly be targeted by wannabes, trolls and banker-haters. If you don't keep them off the site, real bankers will be turned off by the low SNR and abuse.
If it were my site, I would put in place a mechanism to filter them out at registration. People registering with the site would be required to supply an email address. Anyone who could provide a Bloomberg account (i.e. an email address @bloomberg.net) or an email address at a domain on a whitelist of known financial institutions (e.g. morganstanley.com, citi.com, gs.com, etc.) would automatically be accepted (and potentially given downvoting rights straight away) and so would anyone they invited/recommended/vouched for.
Anyone else would either (a) go into a queue for approval or (b) be given "on probation" access. If (a), someone would need to review the applications (presumably by checking the domain name of the applicant's email address (and, if appropriate, adding that domain to the whitelist) and/or reviewing their LinkedIn profile. If (b), there could be a feedback mechanism that would automatically hellban the user if they received enough downvotes (or were flagged by a moderator), or promote them to "approved" if they received enough upvotes.
You could also allow "approved" users to hide comments from "on probation" users (similar to how Slashdot used to - may still do, for all I know - allow you to set a minimum karma limit).
That way, you make it really easy for legitimate finance professionals to join, while putting hurdles in place to make life difficult for the trolls and Occupy-ists. And you also generate a bit of scarcity-desirability through the invite mechanism.
Of course, as soon as it becomes successful/popular, you'll probably find that the site gets flagged for filtering out by the web proxy filters the banks use. :-/
Related to this, take a look at how lobste.rs handles new members: you either need an invitation from an existing one (and your behaviour is associated with that person in the public tree of membership referrals) or you go into a member-visible queue until someone who knows you and is a member can invite you personally.
It sounds snarky, but I don't mean it that way. I like the guy who runs lobste.rs and I'm happy he published the code, and I'd really like HN to have some real competition. But, sorry, nobody uses lobste.rs. It's a ghost town.
For what it's worth, I think the answer to site quality isn't pre-filtering users; it's having a simple process to nuke bad users. Lobste.rs put a big bet on pre-filtering; it hasn't worked out. I'm not surprised; one thing I look for on great HN threads is the random first-party (owner of company, primary author of package, &c) commenter who joins just to comment on that story, which is something that can't happen in the pre-filter model.
One alternate mechanism (there could be several) sure to ruffle feathers is to qualify users by their GMAT score (e.g. 700+ only), assuming such information were easily verifiable.
Such a 'qualification club' is inline with my own view of the type of exclusivity sought after by sterotyped or caricature B-school personalities.
I take it you have very little experience with the GMAT. It is impossible to verify that a certain GMAT score belongs to an email. The only easy way to verify a GMAT score is to be a b-school and have applicants select your school for score reporting.
For you and me maybe, but not for GMAT. It is my experience that the primary motivation for big organizations is to get their beaks wet. GMAT charges for additional score reports after the initial 6(?) that are included in the test fee.
The above suggestion is an idea. Understood that today GMAT might not allow such functionality, but the organization has the data internally to send score reports.
Correct, not supported today, but feasible with business development.
How is GMAT going to monetize the easy score verification? And is that effort going to be worth the additional revenue? I can't imagine there is a big market for GMAT score reporting outside of b-school apps. I think most employers just accept self reporting or a copy of the score report in pdf.
I wouldn't think it'd generate very much money to directly monetize easy score verification other than as an additional data point for advertisers.
However, I do believe easy score verification could be part of an overall strategy to increase the GMAT business. The thinking is that if society started using indicators of intelligence for various reasons (e.g. entry into an exclusive online forum, government civil servants employment, running for Congress...) the indicator of intelligence that is preferred by society could sell more tests. GMAT could create an advantage in the marketplace by being the easiest score to electronically verify.
I do not think the GMAT is a good indicator for civil service positions. Certainly no better than any of the state civil service exams and at the federal level the civil service exams were deemed to cause problems with affirmative action policies. The military has the ASVAB and I can't imagine anyone saying the GMAT is superior to the ASVAB. The small "d" democrat in me finds exams for public office abhorrent and I would hope that they would run into many legal challenges.
I scored a 720 on the GMAT. I do not think you should make any assumptions about my performance in a government position from that test result. All that the 720 indicates is that I am a skilled test taker.
Interesting! I was skeptical of the GMAT until I studied and took the test. My personal opinion is GMAT is a very difficult test and studying for the test sharpened my own writing, logic, and reasoning skills. I am very impressed with the cognitive ability of the test takers in the very highest percentage.
For testing logic and reasoning I think the LSAT is the best as far as the popular standardized tests go. I think the ASVAB is the best all around test for getting a general idea of an applicants skills.
So, if not tests, then how? (just curious). Personally i'd prefer a system where u need to pass a difficult academic test to get into the govt, rather than have connections etc. (Yes, IMO if no testing criteria is involved, its all up to connections).
I think the best example of recruiting good members is the SumZero model. SumZero is a buyside investor site, where buysiders can exchange and rank investment ideas with each other. It was started by Divya Narendra of Facebook fame.
When I first signed up for SumZero, the application process was pretty extensive. It involved a phone call with Divya or one of the other co-founders to check you out and make sure you weren't just some wannabe, that you actually worked at an investment fund.
I actually think was critical early on to make sure the membership base was high quality and acted as a self-reinforcing mechanism to continue to attract good members.
Since bankers know who other bankers are, a system like the mod_virgule that powers Advogato [1,2] would solve this problem, though the site would need some tweaks [3] .
The attraction of the system is that, if you keep an eye out for clever attacks against the model (i.e., something like security fixes), and if certification activity by "good" users is essentially sane, then such a site needs no ongoing moderation by the site owners.
[3]: The codebase hasn't been touched, and there's a form of attack that, while it is known how to solve it, has not been fixed on the main site; also the UI has some cruft and doesn't support an HN-like leaderboard view - the codebase is fairly simple, though, and lots of people have hacked on it over the years.
I think you'd have to have a policy to avoid particular items that get Compliance reaching for the BLOCK IT button - eg strict policy against people offering trading recommendations, for example.
it's not a coincidence of the audience and the topic that the top comment is basically just scheming of ways to make it more elite and exclusive instead of how to create a self-policing meritocracy.
why do you think HN is successful? did they limit registrations to @yahoo.com, @redhat.com, @microsoft.com, @google.com, @venturecapitalisthere.com? is that why the SN ratio is high?
and besides, doesn't bloomberg already have forums and chat for this exclusive bank crowd already? what is the point of recreating that on the web if someone like me can't see it?
Good ideas, but I wouldn't give pre-screened users the keys to the kingdom right away. I think it's an unwritten law that trolls and sockpuppets are going to exist in every industry, and just because someone comes from company X doesn't mean that they're going to be a quality user. You could relax the requirements to attain full membership perhaps, but I sure wouldn't give them the means to easily manipulate the system at-will with nothing more than an email address.
I actually love this as a name. I was originally going to say "just stick with Financier News", but Banker News is perfect.
I actually like the idea of this site. I spent a few years consulting in financial services and always found the world fascinating. I could see myself browsing it on a regular basis.
Another vote for Banker News. Three syllables vs six. That, and Financier News might attract pastry chefs in addition to your target audience...
As a member of your target audience, I'd suggest focusing on the discussion side since that's where you likely to be able to add value. Finance professionals already have content professionally curated and ranked by the various paid news services - Reuters, Bloomberg TOP, READ (ranked by views) etc., but there is no discussion there.
I'm also a member of your target audience. Change the name to something else from "Financier News" && "Bored Banker". Site looks good - have bookmarked.
That is true: I was going for a funny and short name that's easy to remember, but I realize now how boredBanker comes across as lazy and not conducive to interesting discussions.
EDIT: I am currently considering changing the domain (and the title)
BoredBanker is an excellent name - memorable, amusing & not overly long. There's already enough dry, grey, "serious" content associated with this industry - having an offbeat and slightly subversive name will be part of your appeal.
People who tell you they won't use the site because of the name are being disingenuous - if the quality of news & discussion is good enough they'll come.
Exactly, Windows "Vista", the "Xbox", the "Wii", the "iPad".. and more were all ridiculed as stupid names early on but all became serious brands. You couldn't move online for jokes about the "iPad" being a female hygiene product for a while around the launch..
Bored banker here. I think it's a great name. It shows that even though a lot of people look at the finance world as high-energy and lucrative, in reality it's a bunch of overly-confident young guns looking at spreadsheets all day. I felt like the domain was calling my name..
If hackernews was called "bored programmer" I would be reminded I was bored every time I visited. From a marketing standpoint, sounding cool and compelling is a thousand times more important than being literal and accurate.
My first reactions to:
"Hacker News" = "Whoa, hackers! This is what hackers read!"
"Bored hacker" = "What kind of hacker is bored? I want to go where the cool up-to-date hackers are."
"Bored programmer" = "Man, fuck those guys."
I think name matters less than you think. Otherwise sites with names like "google", "yahoo" or "reddit" could never make it. If it's good, they will come, whatever the name is (within reason, of course).
As someone who's tried starting a new HN for business news (forlue.com, now defunct) after New Mogul left us I found the most difficult thing was getting a niche community to consistently submit stories.
If you know of a small group of people (ideally in the financial/money industry) who'd be interested in this, get them to use it amongst each other to trade stories during the day.
I still believe there's a market for this. It just needs to start in the hands of small group of people who'll constantly use it throughout the day to communicate with each other about business-related stories.
If you get people to consistently submit good stories, readers will follow, and then some time after, albeit slowly, commenters.
If you'd like to add a full-text search feature, Searchify.com would be happy to power it for free, to get you started. It's a pretty simple search API, and it gives you lots of control over ranking results (you can combine upvotes with text relevancy, for example). I'm the founder, feel free to contact me chris at searchify.com.
For those interested in this area, I find The Whole Street's "Quant Mashup" reasonable. It aggregates blog posts from a broad group of quant oriented blogs:
No, there is everything about HN rather than the horrible UI. If you start new HN, go ahead and fix at least that. Make it a responsive site (among other things). I am sure the financial sector would appreciate that more than the 90s feel of this website.
I like the minimalist UI, but a lot of the things seem broken. Reply doesn't work if you take too long to make a comment, the "next page" button often doesn't work, the reply button sometimes doesn't appear, the upvote button disapears when you press it so you can't take it back, there is no inbox, no way to collapse threads, etc.
I wonder if people would be interested in an HN style site, but one that is fantastically designed, and scales to all sorts of media (phones, tablets, desktop). I think that's what it needs.
You can't simply download the news.yc, make a new colour header, give it a name, and then set it off into the net.
I think you need to distinguish yourself and really just use news.yc as a base to build on.
Member of your target audience here; some others have done similar styled sites (up voting, but no discussion). Check out [0]. Might actually be run by someone who follow HN.
This is cool, and I hope it catches on. Despite its flaws and quirks I think HN has something nice going on in terms of the overall submission and discussion quality, and I don't think it should be restricted to just 'hackers' (or startup founders, software engineers, enthusiasts, etc). Just like how there's a whole ecosystem of Stack Exchange sites for a variety of interests, maybe there should be more HN-like sites as well, fulfilling a cultural role that (e.g.) subreddits alone can't. Plus, the software (minus some of the ranking algorithms) is out there already for anyone to use.
Stack Exchange is an interesting example. they have a complex nomination and incubation system in place to figure out what sub sites to add. this ensures that they only sites when is a proven community to jump in.
They have a very mature software stack that relies on a complex point system to automate curation. HN is much more of a one-man show
It would be really interesting to see a follow-up post showing the number of sign-ups you got in each 5-minute (or whatever) period subsequent to posting this on HN. I think it's a great idea and long overdue.
Hey! Awesome job. Can you please tell me how I can do this, albeit for the natural resource and conservation sector (which really needs disrupting)? Is there some off-the-peg software that I can use?
Awesome. It seems like there are very few comments. Have you considered advertising on economics forums? Grad students tend to like posting on sites like this, an HN has a very good format.
The scarcity of comments is explained away by the fact that the website has been made public only very recently.
But thank you, yours is a good suggestion
Why continue the HN way of commenting, once a post gets past 50 comments its impossible to follow where new content is landing.
Maybe look at Discourse or something similar...
Not a fan of the name. Bankers are only a small portion of finance folks, and I don't want my boss to see me browsing a site with connotations that I'm "bored". Why not just "Finance News"?
Great execution though. I wanted to do something like this, but now I'm glad I didn't because you've done a bang-up job. As a finance person I will definitely contribute.
Small suggestion of the bikeshed variety: I think you should strongly consider to make the top bar height the same as the one on HN. I believe there are design reasons for why it is the that specific height - symmetry, contrast, margins, leading your focus etc. That is: if you are not a professional designer and have a good reason to make it otherwise, leave the top bar as it is.
I think the idea is very interesting. Though, unlike the HN community - which is mostly tech audience - I don't think that using HN's design is a good idea. Programmers really don't care about the design as long as it serves the purpose well and is simple. I think you need to customize the design a little bit. Overall, it really is a great idea. Goodluck!
surprised to see zero working class backlash or jokes just because its for bankers. i'm sure that says something about the 'class' of people who frequent HN...
good work though. whether or not its useful it works and its finished, and those two things are worth a lot. :)
I am working on a StackExchange style of subject oriented news communities with Digg like content curation but I am having trouble thinking what will be substantially new in my idea that will differentiate it from (sub)reddit.
I love how the the HTML source generated by news.arc sets it apart. It has no boilerplate. It's literally: HTML tag, news.css, favicon, upvote JavaScript, title, humongous table.
Hosting something like this would be very cheap. A $40 a month VPS could handle it for a while and if it outgrows that then it will be worth something.
That is a REALLY interesting idea. You'd need to add something to encourage highly valued contributions. Like perhaps the comments are paid for with points (purchasable for money) but the submitter of a story gets "paid" 25% of the points spent on comments unless another person submitted the same story within 6 hours (in which case no one gets paid). Posters of comments also can get back the cost of their comment if it receives more than N upvotes (tweak N until it works).
At the expense of a few rep points, this site is going to fail not because it isn't a good idea, but because finance people are just so frequently miserable human beings.
I highly suggest you curate the quality of your posts, users and comments. Perhaps, even at the expense of potential users. I think reddit is a prime example of how badly quality can deteriorate. I know there's no metric for 'good' vs 'bad' comments we can appeal to but I think we can all understand that all the 'true' subreddits[1] denote the fact that once you get far enough on the adoption curve[2] quality will start to suffer as I contend occurred on slashdot, followed by digg, subsequently reddit, and now HN. It will deteriorate into Eternal September[3] -- filled with one line quips and memes. I don't want to make any value judgments on this specific community but I'd like to say I miss the edw519s.
Good examples of communities that have managed to maintain quality well are /r/askhistorians and lobste.rs. Ask Historians managed to do it by ruling with an iron fist. Lobste.rs by heavily curating which members are able to join. Another interesting example of retaining long term quality is visible in private torrent sites- many of which employ both an invite system and strict rules.
Finally, what made Hacker News so good ~4 years ago was it was originally populated by people within the industry with decades of experience. You yourself said this was for the financial industry-- trying to pick up early adopters here makes about as much sense as trying to pick up adopters for a medical industry community on an economist forum.
[1] /r/trueaskreddit, /r/truereddit/, /r/truerreddit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Metafilter is another example of a website which has maintained its character. They ask for a $5 lifetime membership fee.
Retained its character at the expense of being stuck in the mid 2000s. For a modern aggregator they have a shit layout to be honest. A site that gets as much traffic as they do and they still have flat comments?? Inexcusable.
You're writing this on HN?
I think you bring up an excellent point. With traffic, content certainly tends to deteriorate, or at least change. Like you've noted, most things are their best at the beginning. This being said, how do you try and stay on the cutting edge of the best sites in their early stages?
I'm honestly too young to have an experience with this myself, and don't expect finding out the best new sites to be easy or quick, but what tips from your experience can you offer?
As someone who's spent most of their career in professional finance, my strong advice would be to avoid the proliferation of "contributor" sourced sites.
These sites typically allow anyone to write financial articles, trading recommendations etc. and get paid for page views. There is little to no verification of the content, let alone diligence on the credibility of the authors, and the quality of the discussion is extremely poor.
Unfortunately, given the volume of content they can produce through crowd sourcing, they are also extremely popular. Examples include Forbes, Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool.
EDIT: Assuming your question was in relation to financial news.
Agreed. Also, in the name of "understand your market" - what did early HN readers get from reading HN that they wouldn't elsewhere and how does that translate to finance? Would HN be successful if some random dude had started it instead of PG? I admittedly wasn't around in the early days, but back then I would imagine that the expectation was "wow, generally people who post on here are legit" as a direct consequence of that association.
I'm not familiar with the author - is he/she someone baller enough in the finance world to draw quality discussion? Are people going to break away from WallStreetOasis and minesweeper for this? Is there useful industry-relevant information? (My impression from friends who've gone into finance is that technical skills matter for jack shit as long as you're competent, and relationships, positioning, and sounding like you know what you're talking about rule the day. Is that something you can vaguely convince yourself you're getting better at at while wasting office time on a finance hacker news clone?)
Unrelated, I've always thought it would be fun to hem up a corpus of SeekingAlpha articles, use some rudimentary NLP to look for clear short-term bullishness or bearishness on some specific security, and see if you can either (a)find anyone who's demonstrably worth reading and following (and maybe trading based on them), or (b) more likely point out that everyone is full if s, most of them are convinced of their own s, and in the end it's all clickbait with charts and important-sounding finance words.
The problem with this approach is that given a sufficient population of contributors, a random distribution is going to give you individuals that consistently out/under perform purely by chance. This can be seen in the professional asset management industry, where:
there is strong evidence that chasing managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records is actually harmful to your portfolio health [1]
[1] http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/guest/BP-130108-Track-...
So you should short-sell managers with strong 3 and 5 year track records, then?
On the flip side, though, Seeking Alpha is extremely handy for stock alerts and earnings call transcripts.
I think what made Hacker News so good ~x years ago was the intentions of the users - people were here to share and learn, now many people are here to get traffic to their blog or startup or news site.
In finance I expect this will be much more aggressively pursued because AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.
> AdSense clicks are probably worth lots.
Is there something specific about finance that makes AdSense more valuable besides traffic? And if you already have traffic, seeding it in a brand new forum doesn't seem like a good way to get a big boost. From what I understand, there is a reason why high traffic blogs like Instapundit are supported more by Amazon affiliate type programs than AdSense revenue. AdSense will make you a bit of money, but I don't really know of anyone who uses it as their primary income.
Re: lobste.rs, Every time I go on there, I don't see a bustling community and interesting discussion, I just see dead silence, no comments, and a few upvotes. Take a look now: https://lobste.rs/ The links are good, but that's about it.
I think that's a problem with the invite only way: it can be too exclusive to build enough critical mass to create a community in the first place. It's easy to argue that there is no noise if there is close to no signal.
For context: I'm sat on a trading floor in the City of London right now.
I had a similar idea (inspired by Slashdot) about ten years ago but, like so many of my great ideas (e.g. time travel, teleportation), I never got around to implementing it.
A site like BoredBanker.com will almost certainly be targeted by wannabes, trolls and banker-haters. If you don't keep them off the site, real bankers will be turned off by the low SNR and abuse.
If it were my site, I would put in place a mechanism to filter them out at registration. People registering with the site would be required to supply an email address. Anyone who could provide a Bloomberg account (i.e. an email address @bloomberg.net) or an email address at a domain on a whitelist of known financial institutions (e.g. morganstanley.com, citi.com, gs.com, etc.) would automatically be accepted (and potentially given downvoting rights straight away) and so would anyone they invited/recommended/vouched for.
Anyone else would either (a) go into a queue for approval or (b) be given "on probation" access. If (a), someone would need to review the applications (presumably by checking the domain name of the applicant's email address (and, if appropriate, adding that domain to the whitelist) and/or reviewing their LinkedIn profile. If (b), there could be a feedback mechanism that would automatically hellban the user if they received enough downvotes (or were flagged by a moderator), or promote them to "approved" if they received enough upvotes.
You could also allow "approved" users to hide comments from "on probation" users (similar to how Slashdot used to - may still do, for all I know - allow you to set a minimum karma limit).
That way, you make it really easy for legitimate finance professionals to join, while putting hurdles in place to make life difficult for the trolls and Occupy-ists. And you also generate a bit of scarcity-desirability through the invite mechanism.
Of course, as soon as it becomes successful/popular, you'll probably find that the site gets flagged for filtering out by the web proxy filters the banks use. :-/
Related to this, take a look at how lobste.rs handles new members: you either need an invitation from an existing one (and your behaviour is associated with that person in the public tree of membership referrals) or you go into a member-visible queue until someone who knows you and is a member can invite you personally.
That's very clique-y.
And This appears to be the lesson from the life cycle of High Signal to Noise ratio sites.
Initially there is the bleeding edge, and then there is the long noisy end.
Net result: nobody uses lobste.rs.
10 points to Gryffindor!
It sounds snarky, but I don't mean it that way. I like the guy who runs lobste.rs and I'm happy he published the code, and I'd really like HN to have some real competition. But, sorry, nobody uses lobste.rs. It's a ghost town.
For what it's worth, I think the answer to site quality isn't pre-filtering users; it's having a simple process to nuke bad users. Lobste.rs put a big bet on pre-filtering; it hasn't worked out. I'm not surprised; one thing I look for on great HN threads is the random first-party (owner of company, primary author of package, &c) commenter who joins just to comment on that story, which is something that can't happen in the pre-filter model.
I agree, a similar system is put in place at Quibb, it works quite well.
One alternate mechanism (there could be several) sure to ruffle feathers is to qualify users by their GMAT score (e.g. 700+ only), assuming such information were easily verifiable.
Such a 'qualification club' is inline with my own view of the type of exclusivity sought after by sterotyped or caricature B-school personalities.
I take it you have very little experience with the GMAT. It is impossible to verify that a certain GMAT score belongs to an email. The only easy way to verify a GMAT score is to be a b-school and have applicants select your school for score reporting.
There's such a massive opportunity there for an organisation like GMAT to use PKC for this kind of thing.
For you and me maybe, but not for GMAT. It is my experience that the primary motivation for big organizations is to get their beaks wet. GMAT charges for additional score reports after the initial 6(?) that are included in the test fee.
Well, they could charge for signing your public key...
The above suggestion is an idea. Understood that today GMAT might not allow such functionality, but the organization has the data internally to send score reports.
Correct, not supported today, but feasible with business development.
How is GMAT going to monetize the easy score verification? And is that effort going to be worth the additional revenue? I can't imagine there is a big market for GMAT score reporting outside of b-school apps. I think most employers just accept self reporting or a copy of the score report in pdf.
I wouldn't think it'd generate very much money to directly monetize easy score verification other than as an additional data point for advertisers.
However, I do believe easy score verification could be part of an overall strategy to increase the GMAT business. The thinking is that if society started using indicators of intelligence for various reasons (e.g. entry into an exclusive online forum, government civil servants employment, running for Congress...) the indicator of intelligence that is preferred by society could sell more tests. GMAT could create an advantage in the marketplace by being the easiest score to electronically verify.
I do not think the GMAT is a good indicator for civil service positions. Certainly no better than any of the state civil service exams and at the federal level the civil service exams were deemed to cause problems with affirmative action policies. The military has the ASVAB and I can't imagine anyone saying the GMAT is superior to the ASVAB. The small "d" democrat in me finds exams for public office abhorrent and I would hope that they would run into many legal challenges.
I scored a 720 on the GMAT. I do not think you should make any assumptions about my performance in a government position from that test result. All that the 720 indicates is that I am a skilled test taker.
Interesting! I was skeptical of the GMAT until I studied and took the test. My personal opinion is GMAT is a very difficult test and studying for the test sharpened my own writing, logic, and reasoning skills. I am very impressed with the cognitive ability of the test takers in the very highest percentage.
For testing logic and reasoning I think the LSAT is the best as far as the popular standardized tests go. I think the ASVAB is the best all around test for getting a general idea of an applicants skills.
So, if not tests, then how? (just curious). Personally i'd prefer a system where u need to pass a difficult academic test to get into the govt, rather than have connections etc. (Yes, IMO if no testing criteria is involved, its all up to connections).
Is GMAT an American thing? I'm in Australia and have never heard of it.
I think the best example of recruiting good members is the SumZero model. SumZero is a buyside investor site, where buysiders can exchange and rank investment ideas with each other. It was started by Divya Narendra of Facebook fame.
When I first signed up for SumZero, the application process was pretty extensive. It involved a phone call with Divya or one of the other co-founders to check you out and make sure you weren't just some wannabe, that you actually worked at an investment fund.
I actually think was critical early on to make sure the membership base was high quality and acted as a self-reinforcing mechanism to continue to attract good members.
Is SumZero a community? It looks like a broadcast medium for research reports.
Since bankers know who other bankers are, a system like the mod_virgule that powers Advogato [1,2] would solve this problem, though the site would need some tweaks [3] .
The attraction of the system is that, if you keep an eye out for clever attacks against the model (i.e., something like security fixes), and if certification activity by "good" users is essentially sane, then such a site needs no ongoing moderation by the site owners.
[1]: http://svn.dprg.org/viewvc/mod_virgule/trunk/
[2]: http://www.advogato.org/
[3]: The codebase hasn't been touched, and there's a form of attack that, while it is known how to solve it, has not been fixed on the main site; also the UI has some cruft and doesn't support an HN-like leaderboard view - the codebase is fairly simple, though, and lots of people have hacked on it over the years.
I think you'd have to have a policy to avoid particular items that get Compliance reaching for the BLOCK IT button - eg strict policy against people offering trading recommendations, for example.
it's not a coincidence of the audience and the topic that the top comment is basically just scheming of ways to make it more elite and exclusive instead of how to create a self-policing meritocracy.
why do you think HN is successful? did they limit registrations to @yahoo.com, @redhat.com, @microsoft.com, @google.com, @venturecapitalisthere.com? is that why the SN ratio is high?
and besides, doesn't bloomberg already have forums and chat for this exclusive bank crowd already? what is the point of recreating that on the web if someone like me can't see it?
Good ideas, but I wouldn't give pre-screened users the keys to the kingdom right away. I think it's an unwritten law that trolls and sockpuppets are going to exist in every industry, and just because someone comes from company X doesn't mean that they're going to be a quality user. You could relax the requirements to attain full membership perhaps, but I sure wouldn't give them the means to easily manipulate the system at-will with nothing more than an email address.
I'm not a member of your target audience, but I can't imagine BoredBanker is a very motivating name for people to start interesting discussions.
Banker News
While that is no doubt a valid name, I find it extremely amusing for some reason
edit: Probably too much time spent on hn
It is close in pronunciation to 'wanker news'.
Maybe 'Broker News' or 'Teller News'?
I actually love this as a name. I was originally going to say "just stick with Financier News", but Banker News is perfect.
I actually like the idea of this site. I spent a few years consulting in financial services and always found the world fascinating. I could see myself browsing it on a regular basis.
5?
I'm not sure what you're asking?
Thank you sir. Banker News is a great name! So simple, yet I hadn't though about it
Another vote for Banker News. Three syllables vs six. That, and Financier News might attract pastry chefs in addition to your target audience...
As a member of your target audience, I'd suggest focusing on the discussion side since that's where you likely to be able to add value. Finance professionals already have content professionally curated and ranked by the various paid news services - Reuters, Bloomberg TOP, READ (ranked by views) etc., but there is no discussion there.
Bankstering
BackerNews
That could work for investors...
Needs more Silicon Valley ring to it....maybe BankrNooz.io. (I joke).
I am a member of his target audience, BoredBanker is not a very motivating name for me to start interesting discussions.
And thats a big shame, because I was recently lamenting the lack of Slashdot/reddit/HN for the finance industry.
I'm also a member of your target audience. Change the name to something else from "Financier News" && "Bored Banker". Site looks good - have bookmarked.
It's the first thing I noticed about the site, and this was my thought exactly. I hope OP reconsiders.
Nor is it a good name for word-of-mouth. "Hey, I saw an interesting article on BoredBanker."
The creator needs to buy boardbanker.com as well.
Why? Who owns hackernews.com?
board banker, as in a typo. I think he's implying people will misspell it a lot.
I feel bad but I sometimes forget ycombinator and google hacker news when I'm away from a device I own/have HN bookmarked.
Kinda like how you forget your wife's phone number.. I know I should know it but I always click her name in the address book :)
That is true: I was going for a funny and short name that's easy to remember, but I realize now how boredBanker comes across as lazy and not conducive to interesting discussions.
EDIT: I am currently considering changing the domain (and the title)
Don't !
BoredBanker is an excellent name - memorable, amusing & not overly long. There's already enough dry, grey, "serious" content associated with this industry - having an offbeat and slightly subversive name will be part of your appeal.
People who tell you they won't use the site because of the name are being disingenuous - if the quality of news & discussion is good enough they'll come.
Exactly, Windows "Vista", the "Xbox", the "Wii", the "iPad".. and more were all ridiculed as stupid names early on but all became serious brands. You couldn't move online for jokes about the "iPad" being a female hygiene product for a while around the launch..
Bored banker here. I think it's a great name. It shows that even though a lot of people look at the finance world as high-energy and lucrative, in reality it's a bunch of overly-confident young guns looking at spreadsheets all day. I felt like the domain was calling my name..
Boredom brings me to HN and boredom makes me wanna learn new things. I think it is a great name.
Plus broad audience, I have only met a few bankers that are not bored with their jobs...
Has links to some nice articles btw
If hackernews was called "bored programmer" I would be reminded I was bored every time I visited. From a marketing standpoint, sounding cool and compelling is a thousand times more important than being literal and accurate.
My first reactions to: "Hacker News" = "Whoa, hackers! This is what hackers read!" "Bored hacker" = "What kind of hacker is bored? I want to go where the cool up-to-date hackers are." "Bored programmer" = "Man, fuck those guys."
Well, one of the biggest financial websites out there is called Fool.com...
I think name matters less than you think. Otherwise sites with names like "google", "yahoo" or "reddit" could never make it. If it's good, they will come, whatever the name is (within reason, of course).
But those names you cited are all easy to pronounce! Bored Banker is a lot longer and "stiffer" in my opinion.
As someone who's tried starting a new HN for business news (forlue.com, now defunct) after New Mogul left us I found the most difficult thing was getting a niche community to consistently submit stories.
If you know of a small group of people (ideally in the financial/money industry) who'd be interested in this, get them to use it amongst each other to trade stories during the day.
I still believe there's a market for this. It just needs to start in the hands of small group of people who'll constantly use it throughout the day to communicate with each other about business-related stories.
If you get people to consistently submit good stories, readers will follow, and then some time after, albeit slowly, commenters.
The working solution (proven by Reddit) is to create a ton of fake accounts and post stories from them, and have them talk to each other in comments.
have a source on this?
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of...
thanks, interesting stuff!
No chicken? No egg? use bots!
I like it.
If you'd like to add a full-text search feature, Searchify.com would be happy to power it for free, to get you started. It's a pretty simple search API, and it gives you lots of control over ranking results (you can combine upvotes with text relevancy, for example). I'm the founder, feel free to contact me chris at searchify.com.
Just published an app to the Google Play store for your site. It's called Banker News and is available here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattyork.b...
It is also open sourced here:
https://github.com/MatthewYork/BankerNews
An iOS version will be available soon. Great work! I love finance, so I hope the site does well.
Something similar that didn't make it (shut down in May 2013): http://quant.ly/
For those interested in this area, I find The Whole Street's "Quant Mashup" reasonable. It aggregates blog posts from a broad group of quant oriented blogs:
http://www.thewholestreet.com/
For a more academic bent, Quantivity on Twitter provides curated academic quant research:
https://twitter.com/quantivity
Do you have ideas about why it failed?
Wow, I'm deeply involved in the industry and I've never heard of the site.
A quick poll of 20 people on Bloomberg chat indicate that no one else had ever heard of it.
No wonder it didn't do well:) If your target audience has never heard of you, your going to have a hard time getting going:)
Kudos to everyone doing a "HN for this" but I feel like there is something else about "HN" that makes it "HN" than just the simple UI. So, I dunno ...
No, there is everything about HN rather than the horrible UI. If you start new HN, go ahead and fix at least that. Make it a responsive site (among other things). I am sure the financial sector would appreciate that more than the 90s feel of this website.
I like the minimalist UI, but a lot of the things seem broken. Reply doesn't work if you take too long to make a comment, the "next page" button often doesn't work, the reply button sometimes doesn't appear, the upvote button disapears when you press it so you can't take it back, there is no inbox, no way to collapse threads, etc.
I wonder if people would be interested in an HN style site, but one that is fantastically designed, and scales to all sorts of media (phones, tablets, desktop). I think that's what it needs.
You can't simply download the news.yc, make a new colour header, give it a name, and then set it off into the net.
I think you need to distinguish yourself and really just use news.yc as a base to build on.
I made this HN reader app for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly...
Source code is here: https://github.com/manmal/hn-android
Would you be ok with me porting it to BoredBanker? It seems that you copied HN's DOM pretty closely, so that might be a technical no-brainer?
Certainly! go ahead
I'm glad you installed the actual HN lisp source rather than using telescope. This layout is so much better.
I think its a matter of CSS customization that can make telescope pretty useful as well, I don't think it should be discounted.
Member of your target audience here; some others have done similar styled sites (up voting, but no discussion). Check out [0]. Might actually be run by someone who follow HN.
[0] http://www.streeteye.com/
+1 streeteye.com is pretty awesome.
This is cool, and I hope it catches on. Despite its flaws and quirks I think HN has something nice going on in terms of the overall submission and discussion quality, and I don't think it should be restricted to just 'hackers' (or startup founders, software engineers, enthusiasts, etc). Just like how there's a whole ecosystem of Stack Exchange sites for a variety of interests, maybe there should be more HN-like sites as well, fulfilling a cultural role that (e.g.) subreddits alone can't. Plus, the software (minus some of the ranking algorithms) is out there already for anyone to use.
Stack Exchange is an interesting example. they have a complex nomination and incubation system in place to figure out what sub sites to add. this ensures that they only sites when is a proven community to jump in.
They have a very mature software stack that relies on a complex point system to automate curation. HN is much more of a one-man show
It would be really interesting to see a follow-up post showing the number of sign-ups you got in each 5-minute (or whatever) period subsequent to posting this on HN. I think it's a great idea and long overdue.
Hey! Awesome job. Can you please tell me how I can do this, albeit for the natural resource and conservation sector (which really needs disrupting)? Is there some off-the-peg software that I can use?
https://github.com/wting/hackernews
exactly
As someone who doesn't know LISP or any LISP-based languages, the source is surprisingly easy to read.
Please let me know once you get this up. :)
You might want to check out Telescope: http://telesc.pe
Nice. Let me zoom in 200% like I do it in HN. Why make headlines so tiny?
I can't edit parent comment. So I'm posting an image here to illustrate the difference:
http://imgur.com/e3iCOoz
Awesome. It seems like there are very few comments. Have you considered advertising on economics forums? Grad students tend to like posting on sites like this, an HN has a very good format.
The scarcity of comments is explained away by the fact that the website has been made public only very recently. But thank you, yours is a good suggestion
Why continue the HN way of commenting, once a post gets past 50 comments its impossible to follow where new content is landing. Maybe look at Discourse or something similar...
There is also NH for agriculture, in case anyone is interested: http://news.agfunder.com/
Not a fan of the name. Bankers are only a small portion of finance folks, and I don't want my boss to see me browsing a site with connotations that I'm "bored". Why not just "Finance News"?
Great execution though. I wanted to do something like this, but now I'm glad I didn't because you've done a bang-up job. As a finance person I will definitely contribute.
Small suggestion of the bikeshed variety: I think you should strongly consider to make the top bar height the same as the one on HN. I believe there are design reasons for why it is the that specific height - symmetry, contrast, margins, leading your focus etc. That is: if you are not a professional designer and have a good reason to make it otherwise, leave the top bar as it is.
I think the idea is very interesting. Though, unlike the HN community - which is mostly tech audience - I don't think that using HN's design is a good idea. Programmers really don't care about the design as long as it serves the purpose well and is simple. I think you need to customize the design a little bit. Overall, it really is a great idea. Goodluck!
I don't understand how copying a website almost feature by feature can make it to the front page of HN
Hacker News is open source; I'd imagine they're just literally running the same code.
Interesting, it's only based on user submissions, or do you also import from sources?
We have something similar at Theneeds, in the Money area [1]. I'd happy to talk more if you'd like.
[1] http://www.theneeds.com/money
surprised to see zero working class backlash or jokes just because its for bankers. i'm sure that says something about the 'class' of people who frequent HN...
good work though. whether or not its useful it works and its finished, and those two things are worth a lot. :)
I am working on a StackExchange style of subject oriented news communities with Digg like content curation but I am having trouble thinking what will be substantially new in my idea that will differentiate it from (sub)reddit.
I still miss nickb's former www.newmogul.com. Bring it back, pg!
Since it was operated by nickb, why're you asking pg to bring it back?
And, whatever did happen to nickb? Is anyone still in contact with him? Is he doing okay?
Still no word after all this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775507
Nickb is Satoshi Nakamoto!
Old Hacker News joke(?). Nickb is pg.
I love how the the HTML source generated by news.arc sets it apart. It has no boilerplate. It's literally: HTML tag, news.css, favicon, upvote JavaScript, title, humongous table.
Not first time that somebody tries to make quant news: http://quant.ly/ . Wish yours site has more luck that this one.
I'm curiuos what pg thinks about this or if he cares at all.
Nice work! I made one for Cryptocurrency fans! http://www.cryptocurrencylive.com/
boredbanker.com is not a very good name considering a large portion of your target audience will likely browse the site from work.
I can't believe the level of detail that went into making this site look similar to HN. Even the login page looks the same.
It's the same source.
Interesting. If I may ask, what is the business model? Or is there one? If not, what's the motivation?
There is none. I have made this website because I wanted something like Hacker News for finance and economics and there wasn't one.
How long/how much does it cost to run this? I'm curious. Well done with it. Other than a name change, I think this is very useful.
Hosting something like this would be very cheap. A $40 a month VPS could handle it for a while and if it outgrows that then it will be worth something.
True, but thats also because your target market has dynamics very different from your average hacker and even your early adopters behave differently.
It always comes down to community.
I think you have something here. Like others have mentioned, find a way to filter out the crap posts.
There are couple of HNs for other industries as well, I remember... can anyone list them??
Is this targeted at bankers? Why are people going to leave wallstreetoasis for this?
Please make it an API. Much easier to create custom clients for different platforms.
I found the website really useful and registered. Just wanted to say thanks.
Does not have an option to flag a submission. First thing i missed.
The height of the banner at the top is just a little off. ;)
Oh that's done on purpose :) I always thought that the HN banner was a little too small, so I decided to make mine a little larger
love love love the name. not sure why the domain name (which is the one I like so much) does not align with the title tag?
This has got to be the best trolling ever.
Are you going to open source it?
The HN source is already available: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/how-to...
This is great.
open source it op
So it's like HN with more bitcoin?
Bingo!
It would be great if it would completely run on bitcoin microtransactions.
Charge 0.01 mBTC per comment (to limit spam).
Charge 0.01 mBTC per vote, pay a portion to the commenter.
Integrate tipping.
That is a REALLY interesting idea. You'd need to add something to encourage highly valued contributions. Like perhaps the comments are paid for with points (purchasable for money) but the submitter of a story gets "paid" 25% of the points spent on comments unless another person submitted the same story within 6 hours (in which case no one gets paid). Posters of comments also can get back the cost of their comment if it receives more than N upvotes (tweak N until it works).
fucking jesus, I hope it's the opposite
I feel out of the HN clones, designer news is the best because it didn't copy HN. Love to see better design on boredbanker.
Also, is it illegal to copy the HN design?
It comes with the ARC script does it not?
Although (incredibly late) that does raise the question of how closely you could copy the HN layout in an implementation in another language?
Since when are banks an industry ?.
Ah ok, they produce debt, that sounds industrious.
At the expense of a few rep points, this site is going to fail not because it isn't a good idea, but because finance people are just so frequently miserable human beings.