zlacker

>>jjcm+(OP)
Congrats on the hard work, and the idea is fine, but the problem is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect. Add in the upfront subscription model and failure to launch is basically assured.

When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!

>>root_a+Ih
What is it about insanely great user experience design that's hard to "open source" in the same sense that engineers are able collaborate on software, like Linux, and achieve massive distribution?

>>bradge+m41
The difference is that you can see it. If you have two highly skilled contributors with very different programming styles, they can still collaborate within the same codebase given a goal and the end-result is the same for your users. When a code contribution is marginally better or worse in its approach than another the difference is negligible to the project as a whole. By contrast, users notice when a single color is different for design elements. And they complain extremely loudly about it.

On the contributor side:

- Visual style guides require much more time and skill to create (relative to style guides for code) and still generally fail to achieve anywhere near the aesthetic unity of a single great designer with total control.

- If you commoditize your design elements to the point where it is easy to contribute them, then it is no more difficult to do it yourself to begin with.

- Delegation of design work still requires that you funnel it somewhere to be judged on qualitative measures, rather than the pass/fail nature of code

Generally the best you can do is collaborate very, very tightly and then funnel it through a single person in the end anyway a la Python's BDFL in a very trial and error fashion.