Hi, I am the creator of OtakuJam, and this is my first post on HN. I am looking for testers to help me test and fine tune my new social network project. I am also offering a contest for active members which ends next month for a $20 amazon gift card as a little incentive to help me gain some much needed testers.

Otakujam is a new social network (built on the buddypress engine) aimed at helping geeks connect with other geeks both online and off. It has entered open beta on 5/27/14 and is seeking testers to help suggest new features and test existing features.

It offers many familiar social networking features such as an activity stream where users can post updates, share photos and videos, and share and comment on other users' activities.

You can friend other users, or choose to follow them instead - the difference being that a follow does not require a confirmation from the other user. Users have complete control over their privacy levels and can choose which profile fields to make public, hide completely, or show to friends only.

The site's main feature is "Otaku Match" which is a matchmaking script that allows users to search for other geeks based on the information included in their profiles. All of the profile fields and data are customized to be of high relevancy to geek culture and include things such as a user's favorite anime, or what books they are reading, or their favorite board games. Users' profile text is automatically converted into hyper links which when clicked, will take you to a page which displays other users who share these interests.

Most recently (in early July) OtakuJam began to focus on curated news content from geeky-related RSS feeds. It also added the ability for members of this social network to add their own articles, game reviews, and editorials which will appear on the site's front page and news sections, as well as in a personal blog that each user can access via their OtakuJam profile. I have plans to add many game reviews and editorials myself over time, but mainly right now, there's a lot of curated news more so than original content. Hopefully as time goes on and we get more active members, this will change and become a more balanced arena for news from the web as well as fresh original content.

Users can also join and create groups or participate in chat rooms or forums with other members. There's also an events section where users can post and search for offline real world events which allows users to search as close as 5 miles or up to 100 miles from any given location.

Users can easily update their OtakuJam profiles by connecting to any of their social media accounts such as importing their instagram or flickr updates into Otakujam, or being able to use twitter to tweet out their OtakuJam status updates. Status updates can include hashtags and mentions which work similar to twitter in that they alert the person mentioned or help index content based on topic tags.

New features are being added constantly and a few upcoming features include the ability to watch streaming anime content and a steam api integration to display your games and achievements.

If any of this should happen to interest you we would love to see you join up on the site. Even if you decide not to join, if you have any feedback to give about the site, feel free to share it here in the comments.

Thanks for taking time to view my post, and have a happy Thursday :)