Y Combinator’s Slinkset Launches Hosted Reddits For The Masses

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/14/y-combinators-slinkset-launches-hosted-reddits-for-the-masses/

by nickb • 18 years ago

60 36 18 years ago

From HN to YC to TC to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140841 Congratulations SlinkSet team. Hard work pays off.

EDIT: I just spent more time at SlinkSet and I think they definitely have a business model in hosting their app as a HELP FORUM (excatly like the one they have on their site).

Writing a FAQ is very hard and you always leave some questions out. By hosting this feature for small businesses, they can also gather a lot of information about those businesses and their customers.

brett3• 18 years ago

Thanks.

And, yeah, we've thought of a few options for targeting businesses. Help forums is definitely one.

yangyang42• 18 years ago

Congrats, Brett! remember not to break the chain, ok?

keep up the good work!

ojbyrne2• 18 years ago

Totally off-topic (except that it's linked from the article) but techcrunch's reddit clone is hilariously and pathetically empty.

More on topic, I'd like to see more options to customize the "editorial policy" of your site - how many votes to get promoted, how user karma works, how sites get blocked, manual overrides, and so on.

I find when I compare HN and Digg, I'm struck by how the sites have come to reflect the personalities of the people who founded them. Here it's hyper-technical and it makes you think twice about commenting frivolously, because of the potential for what seems like infinite downvoting and its effect on karma. Digg is pretty frivolous and all over the place, perhaps because karma is not visible to users, and downvoting doesn't have the same direct effect on karma.

My point being that the personalities behind the site shape the content - even if the engine is "democratic", the constant tweaking of that engine represents an editorial policy, just as much as a newspaper's.

gruseom• 18 years ago

I'm struck by how the sites have come to reflect the personalities of the people who founded them

It's fascinating how companies (and other creations) tend to carry the personalities of the people who started them. In our world, Microsoft, Apple, Google are good examples... one could go on endlessly. There aren't many general principles that seem to hold up as well as this one does.

byrneseyeview• 18 years ago

I don't know anything about Larry and Sergei except through what they do at Google. So it's almost a tautology that their company would reflect what I know about them. I guess Jobs is a little different, but he's still synonymous with Apple to most people.

Can you think of any business whose founder is independently famous, and who reflects your theory (e.g. a musician with a talent for improvisation, who started a company that constantly changes its business model)?

brett3• 18 years ago

More on topic, I'd like to see more options to customize the "editorial policy" of your site - how many votes to get promoted, how user karma works, how sites get blocked, manual overrides, and so on.

Definitely. We've got a lot of ideas and plans along these lines. I think you're right on about the personality of the site admins shaping the content. Though in more ways than just choosing how the engine works.

ojbyrne2• 18 years ago

Though in more ways than just choosing how the engine works.... I was being diplomatic. See my profile.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

Have it scrape your blog/website and auto-post any new links as if they were user submissions.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

It already does that (I was in their beta). You just go to Settings -> Feeds. Input your blog feed. Done.

dominik2• 18 years ago

Excellent! I've been waiting a long while for something like this :)

Some suggestions: - When adding a feed, include feed detection code, so that I can type in a URL and have the feed auto-detected, instead of having to find the exact feed URL - Allow a threshold for downmodding like HN... only submitters with X or more karma can downmod.

This looks great and I look forward to seeing it evolve and get better!

rms4• 18 years ago

http://features.slinkset.com/

LukeG• 18 years ago

Nice work guys.

jerry52• 18 years ago

Someone please explain to me how your personal reddit, hosted or not, is different from any other forum software such as, say, phpBB2, just as an example. Maybe other forums aren't quite as focused on the voting aspect (though it does exist). Some people see that as an advantage, though. I guess the whole point of having your own social news a.k.a. forum site is so you can dictate what can be posted and what not, to keep the quality and focus on a special subject of your interest.

omouse• 18 years ago

Threaded comments? That's a big deal though you could add that to forum software...

r7000• 18 years ago

Forums treat all threads as equal. Usually they are listed by the time of the last post. You can get any thread back to the top by "bumping" it. Within threads all posts are equal and listed by time of entry. In a long thread the only way to see the best comments is to read the whole thing. Voting mechanisms are either poorly implemented and almost useless or not available.

For many subjects a 'social news site' style of threading is probably a better fit than traditional forums. Right now everyone knows how to use a forum. Despite Digg, reddit etc. social news sites are still a niche. But I have often thought when using forums that I'd like to be able to vote up a comment or thread. Over time, a 'social news site' interface might become a widely used alternative to traditional forums.

jerry52• 18 years ago

You are right as are the other commentors. However it seems that the difference between a 'social news' site and a forum aren't huge, i.e. forum software could be spruced up with a few lines of php and they'd be the same.

Andys• 18 years ago

I still participate in some old-style forums/bulletin boards (as well as Reddit and HN).

The other day I found myself wanting to vote on threads and feeling irritated that I couldn't.

adrianwaj2• 18 years ago

Great Work

omakase• 18 years ago

nice work guys. can I browse the slinksets that have been created? I saw typehype.slinkset.com on the homepage and thought it was cool -- I wonder what other ones have been created?

dominik2• 18 years ago

I've made an Internet Law slinkset: http://ilaw.slinkset.com

adrianwaj2• 18 years ago

Have just setup a Slinkset board:

"Room.YC Blogs" - Aggregating 120 Blogs of Hacker News' top users.

http://roomyc.slinkset.com/

jrockway• 18 years ago

In the future the site hopes to integrate drag-and-drop widgets and ad placement, but with a company that currently consists of only two co-founders, these are probably a ways off.

Yeah, that sounds impossible for two people to implement. rolls eyes

rms4• 18 years ago

Yeah... this was an odd Techcrunch review, it sounds like they were negative just because they couldn't think of anything obviously positive to say. Techcrunch has mostly stopped covering startups at Slinkset's level, but Y Combinator is interesting.

bobhoward3• 18 years ago

If you ask me, TC's proclivity toward reviewing very early stage YC startups is a bit questionable; what about those startups that are just as interesting, yet didn't have the good fortune of being part of the YC lineup? I guess that's what your 2-10% buys you, beyond the seed money.

jackchristopher• 18 years ago

I wanted to mess with reddit (open source), and it's been a pain.

This is great.

But why do you required login before the test drive? Was this a technical issue?

DaniFong3• 18 years ago

I am now using this as a task/bug/idea tracker internally. It could work out really well. :-)

brett3• 18 years ago

I would love to hear how it does.

DaniFong3• 18 years ago

Honestly so far it seems to be really good. The voting enables anonymous feedback, which already, only one day in, has lead to some surprises in how we perceive our priorities. For example, I thought I should do a mipmapped particle system, but it turns out at least two people disagree with me.

Also, it's as easy to use as basecamp (and an order of magnitude easier than bugzilla or trac) so lots of people are using it.

DaniFong3• 18 years ago

This software is super great.

goelp• 18 years ago

I like slinkset, it fills a void between the techies (who can use reddit os) and the non-techies.

http://design.slinkset.com/

Enjoying it.

Y Combinator’s Slinkset Launches Hosted Reddits For The Masses

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