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Comment by gaika | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.).

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.

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.

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