Ask YC: Need advice on direction of site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115124

by ptm • 18 years ago

3 3 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I launched my site 2 months back (subavatar.com) as a Commenter Avatar + Profile + Comment History + Karma service. Based on the initial feedback I dropped the Karma part and changed the domain name (from ipkarma.com to subavatar.com). making it like Gravatar with profile + comment tracking. Now I'm having thoughts about dropping the avatar part. What direction going forward do you suggest I take ?

wastedbrains• 18 years ago

I looked around the site, and thought it was confusing. I saw the avatar stuff, but I didn't see much about the comment tracking which is more interesting to me.

I like the idea of co-comment and integrating to work with any comment system, but ti seems to fail often.

Disqus and Intense Debate are cool, but I don't really want to have to switch over my blogs and other systems to just get comment tracking. I don't care as much about the karma of comments I guess.

So I would perhaps focus on that, because as a blogger and someone writting an app, I am unlikely to change the code of my systems to support your avatars, I would be happy if the comment tracking worked by default. Then I might point out the service to readers on my blog or make a link by the comments like "track these comments with subavatar"

On your page I would show example screen shots of the avatars and comment tracking in action on some site. I couldn't get a very good feel of what the avatars were like. Perhaps have a link to your own avatar to let people see what the whole profiles look like.

Good luck

ptm• 18 years ago

I realised by analysing user feedback that the comment tracking is the main USP of the site. Subavatar supports fallback avatars, if you only want to use the comment tracking feature with your current avatar service.

My profile http://subavatar.com/user/6e00c923a13ce323523d417e40c1537e

The initial release had an elaborate system generated avatar system (Identicon), but found them very cold, inhuman and controversial (some of them looked like swastikas). I've converted them to a simple color coded placeholder now.

PS all avatars are linked to their profiles.

8en• 18 years ago

I don't know what an avatar service is. Is it a picture of me? I think other people might not know what an avatar service is either.

Ask YC: Need advice on direction of site.

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