Show HN: Topic

http://www.topic.so/

by mrwnmonm • 12 years ago

56 27 12 years ago

yror10• 12 years ago

Your parallax effect is nice!

slater• 12 years ago

1) Custom font isn't loading on my side (iMac, Firefox 31b). At least add some other fonts to your font stack, unless you like Times New Roman? ;)

2) Why should I "grow my reputation"?

3) Wording issues... "Enter topic here" umm... I should enter a topic? What.

4) Still waiting for my login e-mail, and seemingly no way to back out of the "already a member"/"sign up now!" white overlay.

krapp• 12 years ago

It feels like twitter except with "categories" replacing tags. Nothing necessarily wrong with that I guess, but I don't see why I would necessarily join. Besides there not being an english translation of the terms and conditions yet, I mean.

The random topic effect is nice but how can I find a specific topic, or set of related topics, if I'm looking for them? Not having them show up as an easy to guess API makes it all but impossible.

meritt• 12 years ago

Twitter hashtags. Categorized tumblr posts. Subreddits.

Yeah.. Not really seeing the value this provides, or even a gap it might fill.

mrwnmonm2• 12 years ago

hi, i'm not the creator, i just was curious about your opinions about the site. having the users posting in a place like a group will produce a different kind of posts from what you find on twitter hashtags. subreddits is close ofcourse, but it has a taste of a bookmarking site more than a social network. the gap it might fill is to got to one place to follow my interests, now you have to go to a lot of places ex: groups/people on social networks/news sites

Springtime• 12 years ago

When clicking the 'Show me more topics' I expected to be able to see all the topics, but rather it's a random assortment with no way to change a URL to find one. There really needs to be human-readable URLs at least for the categories.

The front page could also use an example topic as part of the scrolling page to best illustrate a use case, as there are a vast number of other established sites and forums dedicated to such discussions. The small thumbnail mockup at the top doesn't highlight this enough I don't feel.

If I were to imagine a use for the site personality it might be for off-shoot conversations around something specific that I could link others to, but that would depend on the ease of sign-up.

pbjorklund• 12 years ago

It needs content. Seeing posts that are 190 days old really didn't sell it to me

michaelmior2• 12 years ago

Worked on a product for a while with basically the same value prop. User acquisition is tough when you're essentially competing with a vast array of topic-specific forums scattered across the Web. Many of these have very large existing user bases.

In the end, things didn't work out out. I think part of the reason is that people only care deeply about a small number of topics and they're willing to go where the community is.

mrwnmonm2• 12 years ago

is it still exist? what is it's name/url?

michaelmior2• 12 years ago

Not sure what the status is, but posting has been dead for a while. http://www.joinbunch.com/

liricooli• 12 years ago

I had the same experience and hold the same view.

As software developers, We've been taught that a good solution to a problem is a "generic" one, a "one fits all" solution.

for example, in this case, a solution that would fit "all" people interested in "any" topic.

The thing is, for all non-tech problems, the best solution is usually the specific one, the custom made one.

Most of the time when you try a generic solution, competitors specializing in a specific solution would beat you.

Jeff Atwood wrote about a similar idea and called it rule of the 3 [1]. I vaguely remember that he also wrote that they used this rule when starting StackOverflow.

[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/rule-of-three/

crisnoble• 12 years ago

The landing page looks very nice. Do you see your main competition as Reddit (and the vast amount of subreddits) or topic specific forums? In either case what would be your point of differentiation? Right now it looks to me kind of like a "reddit with modern css"

jonathanjaeger• 12 years ago

I'm not going to comment on the product itself and whether it's useful (people are already doing that), but some of the inconsistencies in capitalization and grammar might put some people off:

1) "Follow the topics you care about, grow your reputation, get notified about the hottest news as they happen and chat with people like you."

-"get notified about the hottest news as it happens" sounds better

2) Categories are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not: fashion, music, Gadgets, Health, Most useful Apps, Movies, news -Stick to one structure of capitalization

marvy• 12 years ago

I agree with (2), but not (1)

pgt• 12 years ago

Beautiful execution. Inconsistent capitalisation is annoying, but easy to fix! All the best with this.

adventured• 12 years ago

You've obviously got a big problem on content creation / content adding.

I clicked on "music" and the newest post is 14 days old, and it quickly drifts to 70 and 90 days old before you get past the first ten posts. "Tech" was even worse.

The posts go back about a year, which means in all that time you haven't figured out how to get fresh content on the site.

I'd strongly suggest you crack that problem asap.

Also, the topic page urls look like this: http://www.topic.so/t/32a14b833ff6a0e7013ff81a204d0042

That's a really, really bad way to structure urls on a content oriented site. Why isn't that topic.so/tech or /t/tech???

laurent123456• 12 years ago

Aren't all posts at the moment from developers/beta testers? I guess they are launching the website now and that's when they expect to find new users/posts.

eli• 12 years ago

Onboarding process is pretty rough. I inexplicably got "wrong password" then "invalid email" then "nickname take" when trying to sign up. Each time it erased the other fields.

Now that I've signed up, the newest content I see is a month old?

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

All of these open-ended topic-based "social networks" feel like a variation on the classic XKCD Standards comic: http://xkcd.com/927/

bdcravens• 12 years ago

I know it's a cool domain name, but I might rethink it from a branding standpoint. ".so" is of course Somalia, and unless this is a Somalian startup, I don't think you should hand-wave away the connection. Just today there was a car-bombing at a hospital, so it's still a very live region: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2014/06/18/3704679/car-bomb-...

And yes, the same consideration should be made with regard to .ly (which seems to have fallen out of favor), .io, etc.

vijayaggarwal• 12 years ago

I love the easter egg in browser console. And a very nice design, kudos to the designer for that. The overall experience is disappointing though. Clicking on Learn More About Topic did not work. Signup has multiple issues already mentioned in other comments. Having developed multiple community based products myself, I know how hard it is to get first users. If you can create some aspirational value for early users, that can work wonders. For example, the fact that facebook was exclusive to Harvard made it aspirational for others. Another trick is to make the entry invitation based, and let every new member invite a few others. Need for invitation creates aspiration and allowance of 10 creates social gratification for those who join. Of course, execution of these strategies is an art in itself.

nailer• 12 years ago

This sounds a lot like http://state.com.

jamesbritt2• 12 years ago

I'm trying to get signed up. I'm at the "Almost there. Subscribe to your first three topics to get started."

None of the 12 topics shown are of interest to me.

Now what? Must a user pick topics they don't care about?

Consider an offering obvious way to just skip this, and also allow for searching for topics at this part of the sign-up instead presenting a limited choice.

golergka• 12 years ago

Exactly. And it's not that these topics don't interest me, they're just to general. I love music, I write music, but I have very specific music tastes; the signal-to-noise ratio for me in "music" tag in every information system is impossible. The same goes for "games" and "tech"; wait, "gadgets" aren't tech?

This wouldn't be a problem if the service asked for my public Facebook profile and built tag cloud based on the pages I liked or at least gave opportunity to enter my own topics.

jamesbritt2• 12 years ago

Playing around, looks interesting, but the inability to post something to multiple topics is a drag.

Also, getting got this message when I did post:

    Topic is confused! It hurt itself in its confusion.

It's unclear to me how this is better than twitter, unless the "more than 140 characters" aspect is the thing. But on twitter I can use multiple hashtags.

earlyriser• 12 years ago

Does anybody know the name of the icon collection that is used on the header?

alexcason• 12 years ago

It seems like a missed opportunity not to have the world cup as one of the demonstration topics on the front page.

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