Tell HN: I just launched a reddit clone for financial/economic news | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I just launched a reddit clone for financial/economic news

moneyadvisor.com

36 pointsstanleydrew28 comments

Since NewMogul, these are the other forums:

http://www.markenomics.com/

http://www.viewsflow.com/

Excellent! I think it's a great field, and I think that there's room for a bunch of different economic social news sites out there. And, all those different sites tend to have different flavors right now.

http://www.viewsflow.com/ Strikes me as being more from a journalistic sensibility, so the vibe I'm getting from them is that the list of articles that is curated/edited by high reputation people on the site. I think it's an interesting take on the social news site, and it leverages the founders backgrounds in print journalism. I'm interested in seeing what they end up with.

http://www.markenomics.com/ Its a HN clone that's devoted to financial and economic news. There's some good stuff posted, but it doesn't seem like there's a great number of people involved on the site. I really wish you guys the best. I loved NewMogul when it was around. I was sad to see it go.

http://newsley.com is my baby, and it's where I'm putting all of my spare attention for the next year or two. Right now, it's a bare bones social news site. After the site and community gets to the point where it "lives" on its own, we're going to be spending a lot more time building different types of recommendation and following systems into the site.

My hypothesis is that when a site gets too big and passes dunbar's number, the sense of community and camaraderie on the site slowly dwindles, and trolls start to run rampant.

So, if you can segment the community members of a site into smaller groups via recommendations and following, you can sub-communities and sub networks that still are under dunbar's number.

That's the theory at least. We need more active users before we can test some of this out, but I'm pretty excited about the prospects. We've been growing at a steady clip the last 3 months. If people are interested, I'd be happy to post our traffic stats.

is there a git of HNs code?

I don't know how recent it is (I'm assuming that it is fairly recent, since nex3/rntz has had recent activity over at arclanguage.org), but http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

Yes it's active. Here's the latest version released by PG and rtm: http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/official/news.arc

Some hopefully constructive criticism: you absolutely need to enable login using openID/FB connect. I'm not going to create an account on a site where I've not yet decided if I'm going to spend more than 5 minutes. You're going to fail to convert a huge percent of potential users at that step.

On the positive side, your design/stylesheet is much better than HN, IMO. (For example, on HN I keep voting up/down when I mean the opposite because the damn arrows are too close to each other.) Having 1-2 line summaries of articles is also very useful.

I disagree on openid/fbconnect. If registering logs people in, and if it's barebones email+password, it takes me as many keystrokes to register as it does to login with openid. Add in the ability to read without logging in, and I don't see the point of building openID.

OpenID is not a bad idea, but I think it's non-essential. What am I missing?

The issue is a new ID (not so much) and a new password (the big issue). The password is a show stopper for me as I am not going to re-use one of my existing passwords because I have no idea how this site secures passwords. And the last thing I want right now is a new password. It would be much better to just use OpenID/FBConnect.

I use password composer. (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/PasswordCompos...)

But the point is, most people don't care about reusing passwords. Even most people on HN.

This is just another example of us techies getting distracted by things we care about. The goal is to build something people will use. Privacy just doesn't matter. (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_It_Just_Doesnt_Matter....)

Thanks for the feedback, man. I really appreciate it. I'm really not a fan of openID, however. I think it's too big of a pain in the ass for non-geeks. I'll have to look at doing something with FB connect, though. I just started noodling around their api's this past week.

And,thanks for the kudos on the design. I've been tweaking it quite a bit the past month. I've found the summaries useful as well. I have a hunch that one of the reasons that Digg has outpaced Reddit for quite some time, is that Google has more text to index with Digg's summaries, and is therefore more Google friendly and gets more organic search traffic. We'll see how that decision pans out.

http://www.viewsflow.com/ is my thing--good explanation of what we are trying to do. I admit that we don't do a great job on the site right now--i am working on that as we speak.

The plan is this: * watch thousands of people sharing content through Tw, Del, Fb, etc. * build up an influence model--who is a good discriminator on stuff about China? Or about tech industry? * present an aggregated view of what the 'top discriminators' recommend in each of the fields they are genuinely good at * anyone can become an expert--based on how good your content recommendations are (as evaluated by our algorithms) * make it bigger

the community stuff is teetering around--hasn't yet taken off. we have some ideas about how to make it take off, and am open for your suggestions.

I really like the different take on how you guys are solving the "what to read" problem. Keep up the good work. Ping me, I'd love to chat.

There is one more - http://tipd.com/ It's based on Pligg.com.

thanks Prakash. Come and log-in again dude. Code releases every day, we are trying to make it better for everyone.

the problem with all of these is the chicken/egg problem. I do not come to hacker news primarily for the articles (many of which show up on my other feeds). the primary value is the intelligent comments I read here.

Tipd.com started with Muhammad Salem as the community builder (a power Digger) so they have now over half a million visitors monthly...

Hope your site does the same in one year...

While I agree with you, I also find HN's frontpage to be the most interesting list of links available on a given day.

I'm happy with Markenomics for now and I hope others decide the same thing because being split up like this hurts the collective effort.

Is there any intended difference between this and Markenomics?

What can you offer me that any of the many subreddits on the same niche can't?

Nothing, except that this is likely to become a hangout for Princeton Economics PhD students given my history and friends. They usually find some pretty interesting stuff and make good comments.

So, what can you offer me that any of the many subreddits on the same niche can't?

That is, in fact, something. I could see how well educated and knowledgeable people would prefer yours to reddit.

I would suggest a more neutral color scheme, btw.

↓ Have to agree on the colours. The green is too bright to be "money colour" and the cyan "first visit" was jarring.

Are there any HN-like sites (news aggregators?) for science news? Tried Reddit/r/science but there isn't much traffic there.

[I know finance is more sexy these days. Call me old-fashioned but I still believe in basic science]

Please let me know if you have any issues. It's on a bit of a small slice right now, which could change depending on how things go. Also let me know if you find any glaring mentions of reddit.com that I might have missed while skinning. Thanks!

There's a reference to "reddits" on the preferences page.

Also, I am randomly getting 404s and other server errors when loading the homepage.

One thing, I think the name is misleading. Money advisor sounds like you give advice about money.

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