Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

It feels like a lifetime ago, but one of my first online projects included discussion boards for literature and movies. You can still browse them:

Literature: https://www.gnooks.com/discussion/

Movies: https://www.gnovies.com/discussion/

There must be around 100k forums in there. It was a pretty crowded place back then with a lot of cool people. Moderation was a full time job though. And very stressful.

As ads became less and less of a way to make an income online, at some point it was just too much work to justify continuing it. So I closed them.

I still fantasize about reopening them one day. Maybe with paid memberships. That would allow to keep the work under control (because fewer people sign up) and to pay someone to do the moderation.

PS: Man, I haven't looked at the discussion boards for years. Now that I do, I notice how archaic it is to not have suggestions in the search bar. You have to type the exact author name to get to the right board. One moment, let me implement typeaheads ... I'll be right back ... done!

Whoa! You're the author of Gnod?

I've used your site gnovies.com and gnoosic countless times and recommended it to friends! Really great tool and I discovered both movies and music I otherwise wouldn't have found.

Example I input: Bladerunner, Inception, and Ex Machina into gnovies and discovered a movie called Upgrade that I thoroughly enjoyed, and otherwise wouldn't have known about. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/)

Appreciate your work, thanks!

PS What do you work on in more recent times?

Upgrade gets recommended so much and it amazes me. It's the most basic version of a movie with that premise with extremely straightforward plot and acting. There's little difference between watching that and Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo (2002) or really a bunch of other movies. Now, I generally get liking a polished simple movie but recommending it as something special at the level of Ex Machina and Bladerunner is bizzare to me.

Hah I agree completely. I saw it as a B movie take on Bladerunner x John Wick(?). It definitely wasn't a shining star but was at the same time entertaining.

Bladerunner & Ex Machina are both in their own league.

I was just pondering yesterday "What would a sequel to Ex Machina look like?" "What would it be called?" "What sort of story line would be interesting?"

Heya, nice to meet you!

Gnod is still my main project. Combined, the Gnod projects for music, movies and literature are used by about half a million users a month now. I just closed the discussion boards because they caused so much work.

Other projects are Product Chart, which is a new type of product discovery tool, and illubots, which is an illustration agency where all illustrators are neural networks.

Congrats on your success!

That makes sense re: discussion boards. Moderation is a tough problem. Years ago I worked at a regional newspaper and had to deal with the comment section on news articles, total mess. They eventually shut them down.

How did you get started, anything come before Gnod?

How do you plan to monetize illubots? Could see a use for that as an api for e.g. "generate collection of random but similar avatars"

Before Gnod, I mostly used computers to do explore generative art and all kinds of other experiments.

The idea of illubots is that it provides the same service you would normally get from an illustration agency. For example a book cover. That means that the human work of selecting from the robot output, inpainting, outpainting, upscaling etc is included in the service. I am still fine-tuning the concept.

And what are your plans with sqwok? Feel free to shoot me an email or connect on Twitter if you like.

I was not very impressed, entered Fight Club, Heat and Still Walking (Japanese family drama/comedy) and all movies I got recommend were Japanese, completely unrelated to first two movies, most of them I knew, the free I didn't were not interesting or straight up anime.

Upgrade is pretty mediocre forgettable movie, bit difficult to regimens l recommended good scifi movie, those are rare. From less known Mr Nobody, Her are decent.

> There must be around 100k forums in there.

Do you mean 100k posts? I wasn't able to grok the links, they had a search box that seemed to show individual messages without context and a general "closed" message.

It looked more like a guest book than a forum from my casual perusing.

Cool projects. I've always wanted to run something like that. What made moderation stressful?

It is hard to keep the discussion friendly and on-topic. And mod actions very often result in someone becoming angry. Which is not only stressful but now you have to deal with off-topic meta discussions about the mod actions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com