Turning Hacker News into Spam | Hacker News Reader

Turning Hacker News into Spam

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

37 pointsraganwald21 comments

Big Giles fan - as he well knows - but the constant beating about how the newspaper format is "better" than vanilla Hacker News grates on me. Better for him (and a bunch of others, I'm sure) and his reading style but I far prefer the vanilla HN site.

I don't want to use a client that's arbitrarily censored at the whim of whoever built it - that's what the upvotes and flagging are for. Further, the newspaper site doesn't seem to properly laid out horizontally (all the cells seem to have differing, inconsistent widths) so it's even harder to scan than HN's simple list (which isn't perfect, I know).

You can tweak it here: http://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper

It's a cool spin on the HN look and feel but the value HN brings to me is the comments users post.

The whole point for me is seeing the conversation that takes place on HN after an article is posted.

I know what you mean, I will often check the comments here before following the actual links. More often than not the comments provide more facts and better commentary to the issues.

I've been doing that since my slashdot days. I completely agree that the comments are generally quite a bit more interesting than the actual page being linked to. Quite often I don't even bother following the link, because I know what I'll find, but I still read the comments.

A suggestion for Giles would be to link back to the HN conversation of each link. I think its not the foreign content that people find useful on HN, its the conversation around it. (fjabre also pointed this fact out.) Especially considering that the majority of content on HN derives from a few websites - something which I think should be a goal to change. Personally, I love the fringe stuff and being introduced to new blogs that I don't normally come across. Through these fringe postings, I have found some very interesting people that I now follow. Alternative insights are awesome.

I'm pretty sure that not participating in the conversation was one of the goals for Giles. I think I remember him saying that it's a huge timesink.

If that works for him, more power to him, but I probably wouldn't even bother visiting this site without the discussions.

I find myself in various states of agreement and disagreement. Sometimes I find the conversation really valuable, other times, I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm talking about comments in general, not HN specifically. I still feel HN is generally worth it. We'll see.

In general I agree with you. Youtube comments, for instance, are almost always completely retarded, and I'd be happy never to see one again.

"A story on Hacker News which comes from codinghorror.com or techcrunch.com will never appear on Hacker Newspaper..." - this made me actually laugh out loud.

You know Hacker Newspaper does look nice :-) http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/

I just poked around for a few minutes looking at the css grid he used for making it. It's interesting stuff. I think that what the newspaper layout does is make the newspaper readable while you walk by, over someone's shoulder, from various distances, etc.

These are newspaper problems. They don't exist when you're reading a screen. Novels or magazines aren't formatted this way. Why should sites be? It's not about content. It's about how/when you read it.

That said, I have learned something about how to layout a page in a way that looks like news. I suspect the main value of this is creating a mental association with a newspaper.

That and the filters. It's kind of interesting to think about those posts that appear on HN but not on reddit.

Sure. The filtering may be added value though it feels like it goes against the concept to me. The newspaper snapshot is almost a representation of the zeitgeist. Using those associations and filtering at the same time seems almost like propaganda.

I was talking about the layout mostly though.

I find Hacker Newspaper uglier and less legible, because it's non-linear and harder to visually scan/skim through the items. However, as a non-linear format, it is inferior in design to newsmap: http://newsmap.jp/#/t/us/view/

Throwing another hat in the ring, I've been working on a lightweight Hackernews reader. The major goal was to reduce tab overload for light browsing: http://hnaddict.com/

It's a bit green but fairly usable.

Give me the option to hide uninteresting stories (maybe ones I've already clicked), and I'll use this.

Minor suggestion:

A better format for the line below a link title would be:

   9 Points  |  2 hours ago  |  5280 Comments.

b/c the comment link is the only one that's clickable, and the whole site is dominated by passing your attention back and forth across the frame boundary.

EDIT: What about some kind of sparkline for points & comments?

Thanks for the suggestions. I popped in the change for that comment reformat. I'm currently looking into adding filters and visited link hiding.

I'm curious, why do you open the comments in a new window? I would have thought that you'd want it all in one tab (since that seems to be the goal).

Originally, I was thinking it would be a bit grey area to frame everything. But I suppose loading it within the frame would still keep the HN branding.

I've updated the comment links to load in the main frame.

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