We can make IH even better, together!
I love Indie Hackers, it has been a consistent source of learning and inspiration for me for the past 6 years. It started with great founder interviews and now it's an awesome community of 100,000+ inspiring individuals building cool stuff. I've been thinking about ways we can work together as a group to keep IH high quality.
The types of awesome content on IH
1. Sharing learnings
Founders sharing their experiences via the early IH interviews where what inspired me to start indie hacking. Now there are a ton of IHers sharing incredibly useful learnings every week.
2. Show IH
One of the best parts of this community is how god damn supportive everyone is. I love seeing people put their products out there and get feedback and encouragement from everyone else.
3. Asking for help
In many ways, IH is like Stack Overflow for indie founders. I often search IH for past posts of common questions. Tip: you can keyword search via IH's search or use Google like "how to market saas indie hackers". It's really important that we try and help where we can in helping answer these questions!
4. Sharing something useful or cool
This is where link posts make the most sense IMO. Like when a great new product/tool for IHers launches or when Steph Smith or Julian Shapiro drops another awesome blog post.
5. Community discussion
These posts are great ways to get a feel for new trends and other new developments that impact indie hackers.
The types of content I wish there were less of
1. Lazy posts that are just trying to link to a product
If you want to share your product on IH, do it proudly with a "Show IH" post and include "Show IH:" in the title. Use it to practice selling your product! Writing low effort posts just to sneak a link to your product (yet again) in the body doesn't leave a good impression. Nothing wrong with linking to your product in a high quality post, I recommend having it at the end of the post.
2. Just dropping a link to your latest blog post
I get it, starting a blog is hard and it sucks writing without a following. But IMO when contributing to a community, you should aim to make the community better. A better solution is to publish your content as a text post, but include a link to your blog at the end if readers want to read more by you. The traffic you get from this will be 100% higher quality, they are readers who are making informed clicks!
Something everyone can do now to help
Every time you go on IH, spend a few minutes looking at the "Newest" posts. Help make sure good quality posts don't slip through the cracks by upvoting them.
The more we help promote and celebrate good posts on IH, the most those users will feel excited to create their next post.
TL;DR
More of these:
- Sharing learnings
- Show IH
- Asking for help
- Sharing something useful or cool
- Community discussion
Less of these:
- Lazy content marketing
- Blog spam
You can help by checking Newest and upvoting high quality posts
These are just my thoughts on the matter! If you have any thoughts on this, let's discuss below!
Agreed with all of these points. To this list I would also add: leave thoughtful comments!
There are so many uniquely interesting and talented indie hackers. I would love to see comment sections become a place where we can reliably learn from each other, and have downright fascinating discussions.
To get there, we need to say more than just "congrats," and shift the commenting culture toward putting our full selves into the comments. That's one of the things I'm working on myself in a lead-by-example kind of way. Been appreciating your very thoughtful comments, too @jkchu!
Yeah totally agree. High quality comments are super valuable.
I think you mentioned this on one of your podcasts, but I love using my own IH comments as a stepping stone for developing content (blog posts, tweets, etc).
The TLDR describes everything I've been thinking. I'm new to IH (literally joined today) but from what I can tell this community has lots of people with diverse backgrounds and wisdom. You don't find that often.
So it's discouraging when I all see people shamelessly trying to promote themselves here. I mean, what do people even expect to gain from it? Sure, IH gets tons of eyeballs, but we're all smart here. We can tell someone is maliciously trying to get our attentions vs. when they have something genuinely interesting to say.
I think of this place like one large room we're all in, and some people are in there solely to market to others, but they make up a minority of people.
The rest of us should be having, at the very least, an engaging experience whether that be by learning something new or discussing an interesting topic. (On second thought this metaphor is too difficult for me to wield but someone else may be able to pick things up and get the ball rolling on it).
I see a lot of great conversations and posts here, so don't mistake this comment for dissatisfaction.
:)
I think the challenging thing for some is that almost all of us have something that we are looking to promote - perhaps the IH audience intersects with our target customer.
I've never really directly promoted my products here much. It's honestly not my style. I'd much rather share my experiences and what I've learned through my journey, and if someone is interested enough in my thoughts and ideas, they can click thru to my profile to see what I'm working on.
More than anything I think the thing I want the most out of IH is the ability to build closer relationships with other indie hackers. You can follow others - but beyond that, when I visit IH, I don't really see much about the people I've followed. There aren't any real call outs directing me to the people I felt I connected with so much that I decided to follow.
And the thing is that unlike Twitter, when I follow someone here, it REALLY means something. I felt enough of a connection to them, I clicked thru to their profile and clicked Follow. I took a handful of steps to follow them, which is more steps than I'd take on a social media service like Twitter or Facebook. I'm invested in this person!
When you look at the front page of IH, a lot of it is pretty clearly clickbait in nature. There's still tons of gems that bubble up to the surface. But a lot of it is the same old stuff.
I'd have to wonder: what if it included updates and content from some of the people I decided to follow? Those people that I felt a connection with.
This could have the net effect of improving overall post and comment quality in general, due to the fact the highly followed would more than likely get more exposure on the front page. Those that contribute more value may get more platform to share what they are building.
Granted, I fully understand this sort of thing is tremendously difficult to get right from both a product and development perspective. Not exactly something you can easily implement. Just me spitballing!
Edit: I just now noticed the Following tab on the front page. Doh! That said, maybe there's a way to present the front page where there's a little less of the popular clickbait type articles, and more of a tailored experience?
Welcome to IH! Glad you are here!
I think it is inevitable that there will be people who self-promote too much. In some ways it is a training ground for new founders to learn the basics of marketing their product. One of the first and most valuable lessons I've learned is to prioritize reaching the right people in the right way.
See you around!
But why, what's in it for me?
Asking for bug-fixes, no response.
Making feature requests, no response.
Whenever I share my opinion on a change on the site, I got called close minded and minority due to analytics.
For a short period, we were able to see a snippet of a popular comment on the home-page which was a great encouragement for writing better comments. That feature disappeared.
I ask a question here and get 10 views, same question gets thousands view with responses in other places. Why would I bother in a place all that matters is to display 5 success stories to daily visitors.
Overall, isn't that easier to find like-minded people and peel them off to your own community and come back here to shamelessly market it. :)
I think it's great that you share your opinions on the direction of IH, I've read a lot of your past comments (I think you had different, older account before?) and it certainly made me think about some things differently!
For us members of the community I think we all benefit if the quality of posts and discussion gets better. I come here to learn and meet new interesting people, I would be really sad if IH didn't exist as a community. I am a part of a lot of other smaller founder communities, which are great but also a lot smaller in scale (I like having both).
I'd say Indie Hackers is to early stage founders as Hacker News is to software developers.
which other communities are you a part of? I sometimes don't like how public IH is.
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I agree with you - I saw a lot of your comments and I like them - sorry you feel bad about being a member here ;(
I appreciate it.
I often fail to explain myself fully so there is nothing to feel bad about. Avoiding the popular feed, living in the newest section does the trick for me. If I learn to write marketing fluff IH can turn into heaven.
Sad part of this story is my expectations from IH doesn't align with who introduced/sold the "indiehacking" idea.
I've seen many people did what this post suggests, yet not many people knows them, they didn't invited to interviews, they didn't placed on top of the feed, they didn't get an answer when they have a question.
Writing 10.000 thoughtful comments won't even yield a simple badge. That's the reason I asked for why. That's the reason all those people who are open to help without plugging what they are selling slowly faded, lost the feeling of belonging. Leave the place to $10K/month people. IH put them above who commented 10 times a day. The latter is my people and I'm happy to hear them out, share my struggles etc.
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For me the biggest flaw is lack of valuable advice for anything beyond beginner level questions. I don't even bother to ask questions here any more as I know I won't get a response.
I like the “Show IH: “ prefix idea! That makes it easy to read and scan titles on the index pages.
Sometimes people ask for help and they get 0 answers - a 'tagging system' would help a lot to quickly categorize questions by type rather than "groups" - i.e. in the SEO group there might be:
But unfortunately no quick way to filter by type, just gotta click and read each one by one, or hope that the title isn't clickbait enough
Yeah, I love your suggestion. I think a tagging system would be really useful. I'd love a way to easily filter to questions I can help answer (or to find similar questions that have already been asked)
There's sort of tagging if people assign the right group...
Agreed! Loved this post Justin. I love indie hackers and I hope it can keep growing.
"3. Asking for help"
This is the big weakness of IH for me. As my journey has matured I still have lots of questions, but they aren't necessarily beginner type questions... and I have found no point in asking them on IH as I never get a response or see responses to other advanced questions.
It would be great if IH could somehow draw out the experts within the community, perhaps offer them something in return for their valuable contributions. I'd happily pay for this advice and have indeed at times gone to Upwork after deleting my post on IH.
I just submitted Indie Hackers for a DuckDuckGo !bang. If it is accepted, you can search Indie hackers website with
!ih <search term>directly in your browser's address bar and Duckduckgo will redirect you to the appropriate indie hackers search result page.Of course you need to be using DuckDuckGo as your search engine. But if you are worried about not using Google, you can use !bangs to search google too. Like,
!google <search term>in your address bar. So you are not missing out on anything by choosing a privacy friendly search engine. :)There are bangs for a ton of websites. Stack Overflow, MDN, wikipedia and arch linux wiki are some that I use regularly. No more going to a website and clicking on the search bar inside the website and typing your queries to get the answers!
I agree. The solution you mentioned is called POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) - https://indieweb.org/POSSE!
But when you are republishing in other blogging/publishing platforms, you also provide a link it to your original post at the end or beginning. This way they can follow you in a platform they want. But if they want it hot and fresh, they WILL come to your website.
People don't like to get redirected like this. And most blogging/publishing platform also let's you set a
canonical_urlthese days to help your original post have SEO preference anyways. Indie Hackers already has an option. So there is no need for doing this.Thanks for writing @jkchu!
The core system of IH encourage the behaviors you don't like.
All the "upvote" system on answers is flawed by design. As soon as you need someone's approval for your answers, you don't just think naturally anymore, you will focus your answer on those potential upvotes.
That's why I deeply miss the days of the Vbulletin type forums. They were chronologically sorted threads. It created a very readable flow of discussion, unlike what you see on IH now.
How many times have I found myself reading a thread 40 times to possibly find answers added later.
You want a real community based on sharing information and not bias? Let's go back to classic dialogue systems and not based on popularity.
Love the suggestion to sort by new, I wonder if all other sorting methods should have a sprinkling of new posts to give them a chance to shine.
Great post, thanks.
I totally agree with this, it is all about a community that we build here.
But one thing I felt annoying is that it takes a lot of time to get posting privelages, I have been here from 2 months and been active and I’m really excited to share my journey and experiences but I’m not able to that as I can’t post 😕, maybe they should improve this
I but it’s based on your points. My account is pretty new too, but my early comments got voted up and then I was quickly able to post. My posts don’t really get upvotes though 😂
Lol, I hope this doesn't happen to me 😆
Ah that sucks, sorry to hear that.
I checked out your comment history, I recommend trying to expand your comment further.
A few ideas:
I hope you keep it up, I am sure you will get it soon!
Wow, those are some great points 😮
Will definitely start implementing it
I think it is ok to plug your products as long as they are relevant for the community or the post in question
I agree, but the way a product is plugged is really important.
Good ways (IMO):
Show IH posts - These are good because it is immediately clear to readers that it is a post showing off an interesting product.
Sharing when someone directly asks for it - Sometimes people post "What are the best tools for X?", if you product solves 'X' then it is perfect to suggest your product (also good to list out some competitors along with it, because it shows you are trying to be more helpful than you are self-promoting)
Too often I see people in comments just plugging their products when it barely relates to the original post and provide no other value to the discussion, these types of comments feel very spammy to me.
True... I am afraid that I am one of those people. I got told off by a mod and I am trying to reduce it now.
Hey we are all learning! I definitely did too much self-promo myself when I was starting out.
Being banned by a subreddit is almost an indie hacker badge of honor 😂
Agree. Take away blog spam. Can't stand with those spammers.
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haha you're totally right, whoops. I should've named it "Recap" or something