[dsacco]

Agreed, and can we please not make this a thing, actually? Because it happens regularly already and in my opinion it's pretty noisy. We have questions like:

"What is your pain point?"

"What do you wish existed?"

"What problem in your industry would you pay to solve?"

"What is your side project?"

"How much do you earn from your side project each month?"

It just seems obsessive. There is sometimes a fair amount of participation but I don't really understand what people are getting out of it.

Has anyone who has ever asked about industry pain points on Hacker News ever successfully built and launched a solution? Has anyone who has ever asked about side projects for sale ever bought one or aided in one being purchased by bringing attention to another commenter?

Maybe making it a regular thing would help in that it each iteration only turn up once per n days, but otherwise I feel like these questions come up enough already.

[thenomad]

This is radically different to the above questions (which you may not find personally useful, but to the more bootstrap/entrepreneurially minded HNers are often pretty helpful or interesting.)

They are general information/discussion posts.

This post's a direct service connecting HNers with assets to HNers who want to buy them. Assuming there are a reasonable number of both, and the replies in the thread so far suggest there are, it's useful to have it recur for the same reason that "Who's Hiring?" is useful.

As for your question on whether anyone's ever bought a side project from a thread like this - the comments on this thread alone suggest there's a fair bit of interest in purchasing side projects, at least.

[vanderreeah]

I agree there are many similar threads but this one seems different insofar as it's explicitly asking for contributions from people who want to sell / off-load their side-projects.