Techmeme

Social-news aggregators: lightning in a bottle, gold once caught

Shaan's take on news aggregators like Hacker News, Techmeme, and Lets Run: they're brutally hard to start (you need posters, moderation, anti-bot tech, and content quality), but if you catch the magical network effect they're one of the best things you can own.

“But what I have found with this, okay, so there's Techmeme. Techmeme just automatically pulls headlines based off what's most shared on the internet. And then another example is Let's Run. So let'srun.com, the listener or the owner of let'srun.com is actually a listener of our podcast. And I'm a big fan of let'srun.com. And it's basically the same thing. People submit articles and they comment on it.”