I am thinking of creating a new site and was wondering who thinks a hacker news style site where people post programming tutorials instead of news would be useful?
I think it would be a wrong approach because with a style like HN, articles disappear from the main page and are hard to retrieve very soon. While in the case of a tutorial it might remain relevant for a long time and the order in which they are submitted is not important. While with news, how fresh a news is, is important.
Although this site has "news" in it's name, people post articles, tutorials and other stuff here all the time, which is welcomed by the community. I don't think there's a need for a separate HN clone for a specific topic.
It's not mine but a guy emailed me a week ago about something like this called <a href="http://www.tutzpro.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tutzpro.com/</a> that he launched. I think there are a lot of similar sites though.<p>The major flaw with most of these sites (and especially the "curated X Y Z" versions) are they go out of date or just don't build up a community and wither and die with out of date information. That's the real trick.. not just delivering the information.
One of the features of HN is story churn. On the other hand, to be useful, tutorials typically require extended commitment on the part of the user. Even a very trivial tutorial is going to take ten minutes to digest <i>and</i> require a context switch from browsing the internet to programming. At the very least, I will be hitting F12 in the browser.<p>A good tutorial might take hours, days or weeks of my time. In that time, I am not engaged with your site.<p>Good luck.
I have wanted to do a more general learning concept for my kid with my site <a href="http://nextlesson.com" rel="nofollow">http://nextlesson.com</a> its just been a little busy. My idea was to build curated list of videos/tutorials by category/ topic / users age populated by social likes sort of like how ranker does it with for movies etc.
I think a site like HN will be always a good direction to follow but beware of some 'issues':<p>- HN hasn't annoying ads. (How will you monetise it? Because you must monetise it somehow in the near future and we have already a lot of 'code schools' where people pay a fee to access).<p>- HN is his community. No community and your site will die. Many clones of HN have already died.<p>Anyway good luck!
I think you might have difficulty getting regular content with a site that focused only on tutorials. You might want to broaden the scope to programming projects or programming in general.
I like the idea.<p>Or we could just post some of our tutorials here! This is an introductory one I wrote covering the basics of HTML, jQuery, and making a ToDo app with my database <a href="http://gun.js.org/web/think.html" rel="nofollow">http://gun.js.org/web/think.html</a> .
Not so much programming tutorials, but there's www.growthhackers.com for marketing article sharing. It's divided into categories (Paid, SEO, Content, etc.) though the content of the posted links usually isn't too great.
I'm not sure what potential users would be looking for? Quick tutorials for the "Gee, I've always wanted to try that and have an hour" crowd or something more in depth that someone would come specifically looking for. If it's the latter, a directory supported by a voting system might be a little better. Just my $.02