Hacker News for Gamedev

> Isn't game development already discussed here?

I'd say not really. Not in the detail that this site aims for. At least on the front page.

Gamedev is discussed here but honestly not very often if you enjoy it more then the more popular HN topics.

My first check on any "HN for X" is: does it look and feel almost the same. If not I get frustrated because apparently I’ve been promised something else.

I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.

For me, "HN for X" sounds like a "Reddit channel with a sense of grandeur".

Starting one is easy, but maintaining both quality and popularity is hard - here, HN is a rare exception.

> I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.

With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.

Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.

This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.

The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!

Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.

I had an idea last week for a dutch version of HN, only to realize that dutch people already use HN

>Isn't game development already discussed here?

ofc sometimes game dev is discussed here, but imo I don't see it enough here that I wouldn't want a hackernews just for gamedev.

also very useful side project

As a sibling commenter said, I think the background texture is the most distracting.

Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.

Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.

> hacker news aced it with the clean look

It's the old school magic of nested <table>'s.

It would certainly help being able hide tags easily, as a guest. They add way too much visual noise without adding much in terms of the ux.

The choice of colors is also rather unconventional and not exactly appealing.

Yup, I think the background texture needs to go away and the font color of the posts needs to change.

I just use browser extensions to get a dark theme.

A few colour changes and it would look fine. I don't know if it's the same software as lobste.rs, but it looks almost identical apart from the colours.

This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people.

All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.

While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.

So it is more lobste.rs than Hacker News

Color theme sucks. Not enough contrast.

Seconded on a HN-style site for writers. I would love that. Aside from tech, I am also an aspiring author and seeing what others are up to helps me develop my own voice.