| I built a topic silo modeled after HN and I've been running it for 2 years so I think I can address some of your statements. It's a problem validation platform[1] called needgap. Problems are the first class citizens submitted as posts. Startup ideas, MVP, Products to solve the problems goes into comments. I modeled it after HN for the reasons mentioned by OP and I wanted it to minimal design wise for reasons made clear below. I built it on top of Kenny Grant's golangnews.com project. It's usually the Entrepreneurs who create posts for validating a problem/need-gap. They and other entrepreneurs comment about solutions or their own product. Consumers who are searching for a solution for their problem visit the respective needgap thread, Check out the products and sometimes make a comment. Insights like number of people visiting a problem, top 3 countries (week/month) and how many will pay for that startup idea in the comment are available to subscribers($5 USD). > to the top is expedited by pushing other people down > it is expedited by driving out expertise Voting is just for platform sanctity at needgap and doesn't add much value to the validation(Views from search, Comments are more important). Further, voting rights(karma) can be gained only by commenting and Downvotes burn a karma. Votes are shown only to the owner. > Nobody has a well informed opinion about most of the items on the front page That's why needgap doesn't rely upon regular user's subject matter expertise but that occasional (often one-time) visitor's expertise about knowing about a problem (or) knowing how to solve that problem. Validation happens through those who might actually need our product and not by a bunch of people in a closed platform like most 'pay for a startup idea' type platforms. Hence minimalism of HN matters, email is optional like HN. Someone who comes to needgap from Google Search doesn't even need to know what needgap is. > there is no way to get to the top of HN Lifetime of posts (problems) is very long at needgap, 2 year old problem still get solutions as the need for solution exists as long as need-gap exists. But since number of problems/day is low when compared to HN almost all genuine problems(i.e. problem != startup idea) gets its way to home page and many stay there for several months. There are about 3500 registered users, almost as many visit needgap every single day organically. [1] https://needgap.com |