Future direction of the site

[treygriffith]

As stated on the website, pullup is right now a "featureless Hacker News clone", and it seems like all the things that people are working on are towards the goal of a feature-matching (although perhaps more usable) Hacker News.

For example, my contributions so far have been Voting and Commenting, two exact replicas of HN (and Reddit).

But is that what we want pullup to be? As far as I know, the only real thing that makes pullup pullup is that it's a community of people who all contributed to the source. But what do we want to do with that community? We already have HN, which although it isn't perfect, is pretty good at what it does. So shouldn't we try to do something different?

I don't have any ideas myself, but I think it's something we should discuss so we can all start rowing in the same direction, which doesn't have to be a remake of HN.

[megamattron]

Yes, I agree, a HN clone is a pretty limited goal and we should aim for more. It was fun to have a goal of getting to HN feature parity as it let us work out the kinks in collaborating on the site. Now we've gotten there so much faster than I thought we would, it's already time to think about where we want to go next. We have some thoughts on that but haven't had time to really figure it out (too busy merging, hah). Open to suggestions and discussion.

[megamattron]

One possible next step would be to invite some of our friends in to work on the outstanding enhancements and bug fixes, rather than existing users doing them. That way the community grows a bit while we still have things we know we want to do.

[treygriffith]

I'd agree, growing the community through code contribution should be a priority. Interestingly, a large part of the community aspect has been (so far) on GitHub. I wonder if there is a way to bring that into pullup somehow, or if it should stay separate.

[megamattron]

I guess it's natural that discussion would happen next to the code which is where most of the action has been so far, but it'd be nice to start adding more ways to use the actual site. Maybe if someone does #64 then more general discussion might happen on the site itself. I'd also like to use #64 to post summaries of what's been released and maybe share those out so more people find out about the site itself.

[chall8908]

One of the things we did at my job was make a bit of software that integrates with GitHub to display issues directly on our internal web services. Maybe we could do something like that on Pullup itself so that you can see and comment on what's going on through Pullup directly. This would also allow new users to get a better idea of what the community is looking for so they can contribute faster.

Granted, our implementation is in Ruby and I don't know if there are solid implementations in JS (though, I imagine there are).

[treygriffith]

@chall8908 I actually really like that idea, especially since we already require Github auth to log in. It's an entirely different sorting algorithm from the News (which are recent items by definition), but it would be cool to be able to vote on feature suggestions, and therefore always have a running list of the most popular feature ideas / worst bugs, which would in turn make it easy for people to jump in and contribute.

For Pullup, in some ways the journey (of building a community app) is the destination, so if we can put some of the stuff about building Pullup into Pullup itself, I think that would be cool.

[chall8908]

@treygriffith another plus is that it could allow non-users to still comment on items through GitHub and have those messages show up on the site. That way, new users can take part in the conversation before they've made their first PR. Kinda the reverse of what we were doing, but still an interesting idea.

[megamattron]

Closing since some of what's discussed here has been implemented, we can open new issues to discuss further as new ideas come up.