[blockwriter]

It's difficult because there is not a lot of news or pressing issues in fiction. Contemporary fiction is not robust enough for it to be the basis of an aspiring writer's study. Canonical works are. This is distinct from coding, where new methods, and news about developments in technology, are directly applicable to the best work being done. You would need to create a sense of urgency about literary criticism, but this requires an abundance of reading on the part of the user base.

[PuppyTailWags]

> there is not a lot of news or pressing issues in fiction

Are you sure about this? One of the biggest publishing houses is being sued by the DOJ to stop a merger. Publishing houses have recently started splitting advances into thirds and quarters over 2-3 years. There's an unprecedented quitting of agents, leaving many authors afloat with no rep. Barnes & Noble recently and suddenly changed how they market hardcover childrens literature which will likely sink debut authors.

This was all subjects within the last 2/3 weeks btw.

[svnt]

Writers are adjacent to journalists. They do not want for news, and realistically their perspective is over represented in media currently, unlike software developers.

[karaterobot]

This is confusing to me. It almost sounds like you're saying that because journalists write articles, that makes their articles relevant to journalists, no matter what the article is about. By that logic, all articles are related to writing, because they're from the perspective of writers. This can't be what you mean, but that's what I'm inferring, and I'm having trouble figuring out a different interpretation.

To my knowledge, coverage of the journalism industry isn't a huge part of the news cycle, certainly not as much as coverage of the software industry is!

Anyway, there's plenty of stuff on HN that isn't about software development: in the top 10 front page articles right now, there's a news story about an Albanian cyberattack, a link to WikiHouse, a warning about a potential privacy breach on virtual meeting software, product announcements for YC Summer 2022, etc.

It's more "stuff that may be of interest to people in the software industry", and I have no trouble imagining how you could fill a link aggregator with "stuff that may be of interest to writers".

[svnt]

You may be right, but I think the general news stuff comes after people have gotten value from the met need.

It could be that a wave of similar sites will emerge for a bunch of niche topics and it just so happens that hackers were on the internet first. That hypothesis matches the data too.

[PuppyTailWags]

What do you mean writers do not want for news? Are you sure? Are you aware of Publishers Marketplace?

[svnt]

I mean there are people with arts degrees who went through adjacent if not identical accredited programs and early careers, now working professionally in journalism and writing fiction. The broad perspective, if not the specific niche of the perspective, is well-represented.

This is functionally not the case with engineering schools. Are there any experienced CS or CpE majors working as journalists for major mainstream media organizations? There may be, I honestly don’t know, but they are at least rather hard to find.

Hacker news exists and has value in part because what we had before were predominantly press releases and wikis run by often a single person. Writers with very few exceptions didn’t have the depth of practical experience necessary to provide insights and context, while technology needing commentary was rapidly emerging.

A lot of the early would-be peers such as slashdot and ars got absorbed by media companies and now they are not the same. It helps that HN does not have to make money, and from what I have seen is extremely well moderated.

[PuppyTailWags]

I have no idea what your logic is right now beyond making a point that's spoken from a place of complete ignorance of an industry one doesn't work in and, upon being confronted with that ignorance, doubling down with even less logic.

The original point of issue was the claim that industry-specific news pertaining to writers isn't needed. Whether or not computer scientists are writers has nothing to do with the incorrect claim, which I've given examples to portray its incorrectness.

[svnt]

I think some of our definitions are different. I guess to translate, my point is this: a news site for fiction writers may be wanted, but a news site and a community like HN are different things. The community is not a given even if people want news. In addition to the necessary components I mentioned in another post there are sure to be significant others: e.g. a large number of people are profitably employed as developers and spend a good portion of their workday looking like they are working while browsing online. I assume science fiction writers probably spend a lot of time online, but also that there are far fewer of them than successful engineers/developers.

You have given an example of people in a specific subfield wanting to spread awards around, unless you’re referring to something else. I’m not denying the reality of that. That is very different from what we are discussing as well.

You think it will work, I’m skeptical it will work. That’s ok.

[svnt]

Or maybe your position is it already exists and is called Publisher’s Marketplace? I ran a quick check and it looks like there are around two orders of magnitude difference in traffic between HN and PM. I don’t think it could support/be supported by a community.