Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.
Nice work!
And the focus is like all on 1-person indie projects with very little content from professional/AAA devs
(I'm trying to do 3D stuff in Rust. The number of people who do hard 3D stuff in Rust seems to be very small, which is frustrating. There are many obscure bugs in the graphics stack and not enough people to exercise the stack, find the bugs, and get them fixed. 3D game dev in Rust is below critical mass. Retro-looking 2D is doing fine. But most 2D Rust work could be done in HTML/CSS/Javascript, or could have been done in Flash.
About half of my time goes into graphics stack problems. This is not fun.)
I think one of the things that makes HN HN is that experts can choose to have only incidental open internet engagement with their areas of expertise. Most or all of their time on HN can be engaging with other topics that they are less familiar with.
The attractions of an HN-for-X include engaging with an unfamiliar-X that experts are already familiar with.
There’s a cohort of marketers on Reddit that profit off of beginner-aimed content. Lots of “oh I just built a successful game doing this”, link off to a blog. So the shepherds in those subreddits are not really elders, but sadly, grifters. In turn the beginners sort of stay perpetual beginners. It’s horrific if you go to the /r/startup type subreddits, the grift is super strong there.
Makes you really appreciate HN, good shepherds (not perfect, but good).
It's a no memes, no marketing subreddit for C# Godot.
(I am the Mod)
1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.
2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.
3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.
4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.
As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.
HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.
There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.
From my observations, I see that most influencers are consistent. A few will flip flop to chase the trend of the week, but most simply have hard, clashing stances. And of course, those clashes creature flames
Sadly, talking about games is rarely civil. You need to find a quaint community and/or do a ton of moderation to keep the conversation from tilting off.
> Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer.
Yeah, that was definitely a contributing factor to me leaving Reddit. Only so many times you can try and reason "well yes, costs have grown for these larger games. Maybe a 16% increase after 15 years is justificed" and are counted by "but the market is bigger! You sell less games with higher costs"... sigh. I know they can't see the pocket books, but companies are still breaking records with $70 priced games. Come on.
Also just a real shame how much those gamers ignore the japanese market. They focus on COD and claim to just want to buy games. meanwhile Nintendo has never put MTX nor battle passes in their games, and they are chastised as bad for completely different moving goal posts (ahh yes, because lawyers remove mods... because Nintendo games disproportionately have a huge modding community. Population maps anyone?). Maybe a bunch of cosmetic DLC at worst, but all those western tactics are relagated to Mobile in Japan (which this audience couldn't care less about).
They have options to branch out to, but never do. Can't make the horse drink.
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.
Their verification method already seems to be enough of a gatekeep.
>if you don't know (or can't find) an existing_user from whom to request an invitation, you can make a public request for one. This will display your name and memo to all other logged-in users who can then send you an invitation if they recognize you.
And they ask for some personal website to verify as well that is visible. Given the volume at this scale, this could have been a manual verification by the creator for a while until there's enough scale to rely on invites (similar to Tildes).
I even submitted for an invite but clicking submit triggered no notification or anything. I don't have the energy to look at the network request to confirm
But I respect the choice, nonetheless. It just simply does fit my ideal style where I could find at least 1-2 interesting posts when I check twice a week. Having niche interests can be a curse.
Isn't game development already discussed here?
I actually built a side project that categorizes front page articles so I can filter for topics. Here's an example for recent gamedev content: https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/d57360e8-1eb1-4800-a711-f0d5...
So far the most active community seems to be gamedev.net, but I feel it's in a long decline.
Starting one is easy, but maintaining both quality and popularity is hard - here, HN is a rare exception.
it's a bit sad seeing such a derisive comment about self-hosting on HN
I'd say not really. Not in the detail that this site aims for. At least on the front page.
I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.
I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).
//js code here.
```
And it formats as js, say. Formatting stuff on here, reddit, and other sites that support only partial markdown is painful for me.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
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.
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.
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
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
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.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
The choice of colors is also rather unconventional and not exactly appealing.
It's the old school magic of nested <table>'s.
[0]: https://saint11.art/
The storytelling, the accessibility options, chef's kiss
Requested.
I'd love if there's more "hacker News like" sites. You could probably use the format for many things, a hacker news for writing?
IMO for a site like this to succeed it needs to offer something HN doesn't. Chat, subforums, personal promotion section, something.
Depending on where you're reading, it's Hacker News that's a subset of just about anything else.
If HN is a subset of other sites (though arguably its approach to UX and moderation offer something different), a site targeting a subset of HN's users seems unlikely to get much traction.
The things this site used to offer was there might be an article about a security breach, a brand new highly anticipated feature in a major product, a historical article about a long forgotten but major technological achievement.
Then a key person from that story would chime in with their take about what the article got right or wrong, offer to answer questions. And that is assuming they didn't directly make the post.
Nobody actually wants to read self promotion blog spam, besides other people pretending to be engaged so they can do the same
But the invite only structure is limiting. I like the mentality behind it, but for so, so, so many of the communities I browse, the issue arises from size before any of the problem invite only solves.
And I don't need crazy frequent posts. Just something where I check after 2-3 days and it's not just 1 post with zero comments.
Congrats on launching! That's an achievement.
My confirmation link was a link to Tentacle Typer's steam page.
edit: thanks for the invite.
That takes a lot of effort, and the right curators, to do well. Invite only websites seem like a poor replacement for this. Are there examples of invite-only websites that reach the quality of HN at its best?
Maybe by definition they are harder to point to.
No thanks.
This isn’t a commercial project, and it never will be. We’re curating the site for a very specific vibe and high-quality content, which is why we’re invitation-only and why we aim to grow the community slowly and intentionally. I also want to ensure our server can handle the traffic without issues.
I’m slowly working through the invitation queue, so please bear with me!
2. How is this different/better than something like https://gamedev.stackexchange.com? More discussion-based vs Q&A?
[0] : https://saint11.art/
Something similar would be great
HN is too VC focused for a lot of gamedev stuff to break through
Is there any way to see the top posts? It's really helpful when I'm trying to catch up on things. I know HN doesn't, but I can usually use hn.algolia.com to find the top posts.
At some point, I wonder if `dang` would support this? It seems like a good idea. For more topic-specific higher volume news items.
1. Background texture is distracting (background textures need to be very subtle to not be distracting!)
2. You gotta hack the lobste.rs source to allow signup without an invite (Note: if you start getting spambots, try reCAPTCHA in the signup flow and maybe cloudflare DNS for the whole site, that seems to reduce spammers by quite a lot)
3. Widen the page to match HN on desktop, 900px looks incredibly small on desktop monitors.
4. Page header scrolls (left/right) on mobile, scrolling elements on mobile are bad because usually the user doesn't realize they can be scrolled. Maybe beg/borrow/steal a magnifying glass icon to replace the "search" link.
Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.
And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.
My point is that it would be really nice to have a gamedev instance that is able (but not required) to federate. Instead of creating yet-another discussion forum that is completely isolated from the wider network, they could simply set up a Lemmy server with federation disabled.
After the community is somewhat established, they could then start whitelist federation. Perhaps, they could open only with programming.dev. Then they could perhaps open federation to the Mastodon instances that are focused on indie developers/gamers.
The only way to get rid of this (current) scenario where Lemmy is only for frustrated tweenagers and keyboard warriors is by cultivating the alternatives in the Fediverse.
But I know what you're talking about, because every time I go there, I'm logged out and I have to see the front page. If I make the mistake of reading it, I'm horrified every time.
Then, I refresh the page and I'm logged in, and it's basically just a well-tended forum again.
Also, yes, there's a bug that shows me as logged out, but if I ctrl-shift-R, it refreshes with me logged in again. A regular refresh doesn't do it. I cannot imagine what that bug is, and nothing I've done has cleared this in my Firefox. So weird.
I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad.
But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting. Malicious.
I used less and less Lemmy since then.
This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.
I also have had bad experience with Mastodon, but this reply is already long.
The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].
[1]: https://join.piefed.social
I'm exploring zero-budget marketing approaches. Currently experimenting with daily news posts for SEO[2] and converting them to podcasts too.
Would appreciate any suggestions on effective no-budget marketing strategies, or feedbacks!
but why do I see "41 hours ago" on one of the posts? it feels unintuitive to measure a time longer than a day in hours
In the long run, that's not HN though.
The ultimate problem is that there's just an abundance of people doing game development or game tool (engines, tools etc) development. The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?
Of course this is more like an aggregator of game dev content so now you can observe the "0 views, 0 comments" phenomenom on content that itself has "0 views, 0 comments". ;-)
Tangentially related to this, in the -80s there was the video game crash and a bunch of games were even buried in the ground.
It's incredible to think about that today we're already way past that and essentially the cost of any game is about 0. Of course that's not quite true, the market is bimodal where you have the games that cost nothing (because user's would not pay for them) and then the triple A level games.
Unfortunately in the former group creation of the games still costs something so now any studio with paid workers has to rely on secondary avenues for revenue since the user's aren't willing to pay up front to pay the game.
I'm really not sure if this is a healthy market anymore.
to hope for that 10 views and one quality response, I suppose.
I mostly just want community though. It's a crapshoot advertising a game, it's just nice to get to know other ambitious, talented people working in parallel with me. It's a shame that the only way to really find that is through industry itself.
Discord works too, if you have time for open source contribution. I'm sadly still in this circus of a job search right now, though.
Because Lemmy is a bit too much like social media and kinda bloated for me. I wanted something simpler so I hosted it.
The only other website I know is https://lobste.rs, and this website looks like it uses Lobsters' software
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/
Also I just remembered that rateyourmusic apparently have their own forum too: https://rym.fm I've never taken a deep look at it, but it's surprisingly... active?
> You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license
From here: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters#:~:text=You%20are%20fre...
P.s. Why does it have the Lobste.rs favicon?
