First of all: thanks for writing the post. I was one of the people who asked you to, and I'm glad you took the request seriously. It's much easier to see now what you're up to.<p>Now: I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. What makes HN <i>HN</i> is not, by and large, a function of the software, but rather, a function of the people who happen to hang out here-- who were attracted by something other than the software.<p>So, if you wanted to get an HN-like-community gathered around, say, knitting, you'd need some way to get a large enough community of knitters together together to get the ball rolling to create traction (i.e, the chicken-and-egg problem.) The easiest way to do this would be to have the active, committed involvement of the-Paul-Graham-of-Knitters, whoever that might be.<p>For an object lesson in how this works, take a look at StackOverflow. They were able to get immediate traction because the pump was primed by readers of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Note that they have not yet been able to gain similar traction in any other vertical, and have a lot of VC money working on it.<p>That being said: what is the salient difference between "A Hacker News For The Rest Of The World" and "Reddit"? What can I do with your software that I can't with Reddit? Follow up question: is this advantage significant enough to make up for the enormous head start they have in terms of users?<p>EDIT (I clicked before I was really finished, oops):<p>Finally: <i>"a hacker news of the rest of the world</i>" is not, in my mind, a pretty solid elevator pitch. HN is not a business, and generates no revenue. And, the people who hang out here are not at all like "the rest of the world" in many ways-- in fact, some of us take pride in being outliers. So, I'm not really sure that the notion is solid. If you got traction, I can't begin to imagine how you'd keep the trolls out, or keep the conversation focused in each of the "interest networks".<p>Still, I wish you luck.