Appreciate you sharing it. I get the appeal of a Europe-focused feed (and I think it's needed), but I am wary of the "HN for Europe" framing and the "signal over noise" pitch for a pretty specific reason: it usually hides a bunch of unexamined value judgements behind neutral-sounding words; at least that's my interpretation.
> Is the "HN for Europe" framing fair, or misguided? :)
HN seems to work partly because it tolerates a wider spread of content and lets the community do a good part of the pushing back. The way I see it, that variation is a feature. A community that can argue, disagree, and call out nonsense (even when the shared content doesn't technically break rules) tends to be more resilient than one optimised around one person's definition of "good" or "interesting".
> What would make it genuinely better?
I argue that it would be the same thing that makes Wikipedia reliable and durable: the community having real ownership and real tools. If you want this to be more than a curated pipeline, you need to make it more democratic; give people ways to shape it, build on it, and contest it. Provide APIs, enable community tooling, and let the community participate in governance rather than just consumption. Let them make it their own, so to speak.
Regarding the "signal over noise" - for that to mean anything other than your own taste, you need mechanisms to deal with bad actors. The community should be able to not just criticise but actively flag predatory companies, dodgy employers, and self-promotional spam, and yes, even ban repeat offenders from using the platform to launder their reputation. You alone won't be able to police this little society, it needs to be able to police itself (with some limits and guardrails, for sure).
And on the "no PR/fluff/noise" point: saying that up front reads like you have already decided what's acceptable and what's "interesting", without consulting anyone, and maybe without being willing to accept your own judgement could be wrong. That is exactly how all gatekeeping platforms present themselves when they start. So I'm not sure this is a better alternative yet, versus just another gatekeeper - only Europe-based this time.
To put it differently, if you're serious about avoiding that, build the structure so the community can disagree with you and still win. Otherwise I think most people will be fine with HN or whichever next platform that happens to attract a number of sufficiently cool people to create the magnet effect.
Edit: to say that after I became disillusioned with the best-known social media platforms, I simply stopped creating accounts on the contender platforms like Bluesky, Threads, bla-bla. Different names, but they're basically owned or funded by the same dodgy people having the same dodgy incentives, and operating the same business models. I think we've had enough of those.
