In June of 2009 I helped to buy DotNetKicks. The site wasn’t really moving forward and I had noticed traffic was dropping mostly due to infrastructure issues so I banded together with two other people to form DotNetKicks LLC and buy DotNetKicks. For the last six months we have been working on a huge update to the site including an all new skin, a karma system, drop kicking and much more. For more information on the update check out over on the new DotNetKicks Blog. For why I got into it, keep reading.
Lately I have realized that I rarely read blogs anymore, I get the majority of my news from Twitter or from Hacker News. Hacker News is an incredible community and I wish we had something like that in the .NET community. I think DotNetKicks is the closest thing we have to it, and my goal over the next year or so is to build it into a Hacker News like community. The changes you saw launched today and the changes you will see in the future will all be towards the goal of building a strong community of excellent .NET developers.
In this release we added a karma system because it will help us control the spam problem and it will help to recognize the people who have contributed to building the community.
We added the ability to down-vote because it will let those recognized members of the community help decide what shouldn’t reach the front page, you won’t be able to just get 5 of your friends to kick a post to the front page. The front page should be a reflection of the community and right now it isn’t
We also reduced the page load of the site drastically to make it easier and faster to use the site.
So what else is on the way? My next goal is to increase the amount of comments on the site, so we are going to add threaded comments, allow up and down votes on comments, and make it much easier to leave a comment.
I would love to hear your feedback on the new changes and what you would like to see in the future.
-James
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow. Great upgrade. Good work to you and your team!
Sounds like you are almost making it Digg-esque. Looking forward to seeing it grow James.
I like the new features and speed, but it looks too much like a clone of digg now. I would like to be able to scan the stories quickly, something that the extra padding and boxes prevents.
It’s good news that DotNetKicks update is coming – the things you’ve mentioned are much needed. However over the past two years or so while DotNetKicks has been “asleep” most of its community – like myself – have moved to DotNetShoutout – the crowd is larger there, though that site itself is really far for being perfect.
The new design looks promising however I definitely don’t like the fact you’re putting a nofollow on links to the sites not giving the blogs any google juice. DotNetShoutout doesn’t add nofollow – another reason I’ll be submitting my articles there first.
Otherwise good luck with executing plans for this year!
You should change the DNK badge to reflect the new graphic
Thanks for all the great feedback, we are going to try and make it easier to scan the stories in the future and eliminate some of the boxing.
We have to fix the spamming problem before we fix the nofollow issue, both of those should be fixed in the next release.
Thanks again!