Introducing ManagedAssembly.com
My two favorite programming-related sites right now are StackOverflow and Hacker News. StackOverflow suffers from a lot of “off-topic” questions that are really fit for a discussion group more than a question/answer site. Hacker News is a discussion and social news site for hackers and startups (with a programming bent) hosted on an extremely well-built web app. While the app itself is nice, the community there is even better.
With a site like Hacker News, the value is the community. They act as a filter. I rarely visit a link that comes across the HN front-page news feed without first reading the comments to see if its worth my time. There’s also value in building a place where you can converse with the same group of people for each new topic that comes up. This sounds obvious, but a common question that comes up on HN is “Does Hacker News steal the discussion from the original site/blog/etc that was submitted?” I don’t see a discussion on Hacker News with people who’s viewpoints I’ve become familiar with the same as a discussion with random people in blog comments. I think this is a big part of what keeps people coming back to HN: quality discussion with people you share a collective context with.
Hacker News also succeeds because of the moderation policies, which I won’t cover in any detail since Atwood did plenty of that recently.
Another site I frequent is DotNetKicks.com to get the latest .NET news. Unfortunately, DNK was not built around facilitating discussions which is apparent from the extremely low number of contents posted there. The ‘Shoutbox’ shows hints of “life” (in a discussion sense), but in recent times it’s gone nearly dormant (possible defection to DotNetShoutOut?).
DNK also suffers from an antiquated ranking system that was borrowed from Digg. Stories need a set number of votes to be published to the home page and there they sit until the next story with enough votes knocks them down a notch and eventually off the home page. It’s really easy to game (although, most social news sites are) and there’s not a culture of moderation that can handle the gaming.
I wondered how I could combine the good parts from these three sites into a site targeted to passionate .NET devs where they could get the latest information, take part in quality discussion and be interesting enough to keep them coming back. Building it myself sounded fun, and so ManagedAssembly.com was born.
Managed Assembly was borne out of my desire to combine the best of the aforementioned sites into a site I would actually want to use every day. It borrows heavily from these sites in the following ways:
Hacker News
It won’t take you long to see the inspiration of Managed Assembly in Hacker News. I started with their UI, jQuery-ed it up a little bit, changed some colors, made some other minor changes and off we go. I did this because I think Paul Graham built Hacker News for the right reasons, to build a community for the sake of the community, not for something else. DNK and other link sharing sites fail at building quality communities because they’re designed to generate page views and ad revenue. Paul took his own advice and built HN the way you would build a social news/discussion site if you were doing it for charity. There are no ads. There’s no frills. It just works.
There will be no ads for registered users on Managed Assembly as long as I can sustain it without it. Freeloaders (those not contributing to the community) and RSS feeds may get ads, but not for awhile.
The other big way MA is borrowing from HN is philosophically. HN believes in the ‘Broken Windows Theory’. HN kills off-topic posts with no remorse. Submission titles are cleaned up. Basically, they keep the house in order. Managed Assembly will do the same.
Stack Overflow
While the rep system on Managed Assembly works pretty closely to how Hacker News does, I want it to be more like the Stack Overflow system when it grows up. Users with more rep will get more capabilities. This has not been hashed out yet.
What I’d really like to borrow from Stack Overflow is the user base. I’ve got some ideas in this area, so stay tuned. We’re also going OpenID-only, following SO’s lead.
DotNetSomethingOrOtherLinkSharingSite.com
The only thing we’re copying from DNK and DNSO(?) is the types of links I want to see submitted: anything interesting to the intermediate-to-advanced .NET developer. This includes general-interest programming subjects. Topics that are too basic will be killed at the discretion of the mod(s).
New Stuff
The site isn’t completely a rip off of the others mentioned. I want to add a live aspect to it for events like MIX and PDC. My first attempt at this is a live Twitter tracker for MIX09 content. I wanted to implement a chat so you could have a place to go to discuss the keynotes as they happen, but I ran out of time before MIX. Chat in some form will be integrated in the future.
I also want to integrate Twitter, both into the Live section and other parts of the site. I find Twitter invaluable for keeping up with the latest .NET happenings as they happen, and that gels nicely with the MA MO.
There Will Be Bugs
The site was made by a single developer (me) in ASP.NET MVC. Since I’ve been putting this together in my spare time, I haven’t had the chance to stress test it the way I would like, so you will find bugs. Email me and let me know about them. I’ve also set up UserVoice for handling feature requests.
Check it out, let me know what you think and let’s build a community.