What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit? | Hacker News Reader

What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

jaanix.com

29 pointshashtable40 comments

I'm a founder of jaanix. Just a bit of background - jaanix is not a regular social news site. First of all everything is personalized - and not just by tweaking some settings or selecting your favorite tags, but in a machine learning way - the system tries to guess what you will like and acts accordingly. It uses implicit feedback too, so it tracks your clicks and tries to learn from it, but you can always see how it learned and what it thinks about you in the sliders.

The main purpose of the site is to let you find stuff that you will not find on other popularity based systems. I find stuff that is on the front page of digg or reddit almost 100% noise, at the same time, the posts that I care about are buried or ignored by the majority. jaanix is not a democracy, it is more of a trading place for links. Your reputation matters, your feedback matters, the quality of the links matters. In return jaanix will try to give you stories just for you.

Those are my two favorite paradigms for social news sites:

1) A machine-learning engine which gives you recommendations based on your behavior/tastes.

2) A focused community where articles revolve on the same topics, ordered by popularity and freshness.

Whereas the first one seems intuitively more powerful (I'm currently experimenting with Tiinker and Jaanix), the second one (for example Hacker News) has given me better quality content so far.

jaanix can be both - for example: http://jaanix.com/security or http://jaanix.com/rails are pretty focused.

Loving the concept. I had always imagined that sliders or dials would provide a much more intuitive and accurate feedback mechanism than simple up or down votes.

Still, a slider is not as fast as a click, so curious to see how that affects user participation.

I'll give it a whack for a few days and see how I like it.

On jaanix sliders serve two purposes - they let you know where you are and why the system is showing you stuff on the left, at the same time they let you quickly change your view of the world.

It's cool, I have used it before but stopped after a while because it didn't have critical mass (enough users contributing links). I hope you would be able to gain that mass or already have. Would you share something like the number of active users and how old is the site?

Edit: Have you considered importing bookmarks from del.icio.us and voting from digg, reddit, news.YC? Facebook style. This can really boost the site's content and would give the learning algorithm plenty of data even for new accounts.

As of today about 1000 unique visitors a day. ~100 people are posting. But I'm sure the site can bootstrap from that, as it can be useful even if you have just a few friends there.

Jaanix has been running as a closed system for almost a year. Opened up in December last year. Usable UI is less than 2 weeks old.

yes, del.icio.us import was there, people were importing thousands of links, had to turn off due to too high post to user ratio. I'd prefer less links but higher quality for now. Once more users join will let more stories in.

Looks neat.

I think after voting you should replace the up with "jaa" and the down with "nix" because I didn't understand the name until I read the explanation that will presumably not always be on the fp.

Absolutely! Not only that, but it lends itself to the kind of memetic repetition that can make websites really popular (e.g., "Digg this", "Reddit this", etc.).

My, news.yc is becoming a who's who of the new web.

There is an interesting idea growing bigger and bigger in recent months.

Some say that proliferation of feedback-based recommendation engines and machine learning algorithms for predicting "what I may like to read next" is bad for our society, because eventually people will be revolving in their own little narrow worlds of interests, reading/watching/listening same stuff without exposure to anything new, disruptive and mind-stimulating.

Many Americans are already largely ignorant of what's going on in the world partly due to CNN+friends that have been doing somewhat similar "content suggestion" for years and now the matter will get only worse. People are being enabled to build these "walls of ignorance" around themselves.

From personal experience, it is especially noticeable with music: if it wasn't for my friends who introduce me to their music, I'd still be listening to the same old stuff (or similar, coming from suggestions on sites like Pandora)

Agree, this is why I do not use pandora or findory.

If you teach jaanix that you like new and mind-stimulating things, it will find things that are new to you. It even lets you stretch the limits of your comfort zone with sliders.

This is only true if the recommendation engine is primitive. There must be a relationship between the stuff you currently like and subset of "new" stuff that you like because it's disruptive and mind-stimulating.

But I don't want a news site to figure out what articles I will like. I just need it to filter out the stuff it knows I definitely dislike so I have less crap to filter through.

The learning algorithm could find others that have similar tasts and use their recommendations too, though maybe this just pushes the problem up a level.

I fail to see how systems that I use precisely because they are stimulating and curiosity-satisfying are going to dull my mind.

I've been quietly rooting for Jaanix for a while, ever since the creator first posted a link to it on Reddit. You guys have been constantly tweaking and tuning the site, and listening to suggestions, and it's looking great now.

That said, the infinite scroll thing drives me a little nutty. Since I'm usually stealing time away from something to screw around on a news site somewhere online, I try to say to myself, "I'll just read 2 pages", or "I'll just scan the first page, I only have a couple of minutes". But, I can't do that on Jaanix. On the other hand, I think it's a cool feature, and I get why you want to use it.

Is there an on/off switch for it in user settings maybe? (I'm not currently a registered Jaanix user.)

I heard the guy who patented those sliders (to narrow search results) made about 60 million dollars for about two days work. One of my friends went to interview at some company he was associated with.

Ick

I love it... the recommender actually works (in extreme contrast to Reddit).

I still hit reddit / digg / slashdot / other sources, but that's to find things to post here. More articles on JaaNix is a good thing.

Great concept, but you're a little late. The userbase seems small, and the user submitted content is definitely lacking so much so that I can't find anything on the front page (after adjusting sliders) that interests me. Had this site launched pre-Digg/Reddit, I definitely would have jumped on board.

Called network effect - true for network-based systems with similar functionality.

Jaanix will have much more, soon, this is just to bootstrap.

Start posting, and people like you will stay :)

have you tried searching? what was that you were looking for?

One quick note: I'm using admuncher, and Jaanix somehow displays a lot of javascript from admuncher that it shouldn't. I don't know how many people are using this ad blocker, but it could be an issue for mass addoption of Jaanix if admuncher is popular!

Maybe I'm stupid, but I can't figure out how to post. I see the toolbar, but I'm not about to install a toolbar. Sorry.

Also, I really dislike the "infinite scroll" feature. Otherwise the site seems attractive.

You do not have to install anything, just bookmark a link that lets you post. The best way is to put it in the links toolbar of your browser, but it doesn't have to be there.

"Bookmark a link" in my browser? (???) A link that lets me post? (What does that mean?) I'm more confused than before. I want a button that says "post", and presents a textfield that I can put a URL in.

Is this site yours? If so you should say so.

No. It is absolutely not. I just found it on reddit the other day and thought it was interesting. I think it is an intriguing idea but I don't think it will work because tagging cannot capture enough information about a particular web page. Personally I didn't find it to be very useful, but I was wondering what other people's opinions are.

It is not just tags, it is using a netflix like recommendation system inside.

I like it because it lets me vote even if I do not have an account. +1 for making email optional.

I like it. I've kicked around this idea for a couple of years now.

Now automate the sliders for me.

the sliders are updated based on your feedback already, you do not have to touch them, they will work as indicators of your interest just fine.

Jaanix is a segway into a broader platform. It's great but needs work.

What?

he wants it to be google :)

I'm sure you wouldn't mind if it ended up as google :)

What's the segue into becoming a segway?

I like this. It's not a direct competitor of reddit IMHO -- it's an interesting corollary site. I like everything I've seen so far, especially the sliders. I'll try and stay on the site over the next few days to support the launch.

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