Would you be interested in HackerNews for India?

Published on May 29, 2020 ⸱ 3 min read ⸱ 23 views

It's been over four years since I've been a user (lurker) on HackerNews. For the uninitiated, HackerNews is a link aggregation and knowledge community built by YCombinator. YCombinator is one of the more successful, US-based seed funds.

Now, HackerNews is my go to community for all things tech and startups. The quality of the content shared is mostly very high, the comments are mostly smart and thoughtful and the community is thriving. With it's up and down voting features, only the best quality content (links) bubbles up. Moreover, dang, the moderator, does a bang up job.

I love it.

However, there's a big downside to HackerNews - to me at least. The downside being, the content is mostly North American. Which is great, because there's a lot of innovation in US but that doesn't mean there isn't any in India or similar countries.

India needs a Hackernews-like community.

Looking for existing platforms in India bore no fruit. So I thought, why not launch it myself. I sat over the idea for a couple of weeks - to make sure it was not a random itch. After some thinking, I thought of doing a dip stick survey on twitter with it's native voting tool which is 100% legit.

So I tweeted about it, asking folks how interested they would be for such a platform. The results are clear - 59% of 108 people that voted said they'd be very interested.

Along with this tweet, I also posted my reasons, as below, for wanting a HN-like platform:

These tweets did meet with some level of skepticism and constructive feedback. The feedback I completely agree with - that of having a full time moderator.

The replies to this tweet thread showed me that I was just not prepared for what it would take to build a community. And so I reached out to some of the folks that replied to me and asked them to help me build and maintain it. As mentioned in my tweet thread I intend to keep the platform volunteer-led, no paid promotions or such, and lastly, community-driven.

Since that tweet, I've been thinking about my next steps in making this platform a reality. Hopefully I should be able to launch something and it be THE platform for tech in India.

If you'd like to help with the process and become a Core Collaborator with me and some folks, [please reach out](mailto: [email protected]). Your help, in anyway possible, will be helpful and much appreciated.

Will keep posting updates about the platform. Until then...

Onward.

Note: All blogs posts till 2022 were migrated to this platform (react+next+tailwind). While all efforts were made to migrate wihtout any loss, the migration lost some images and broke a bunch of links in old posts. If you spot anything amiss, please notify me?