Ask HN: Please stress-test the arc server for my latest prototype | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please stress-test the arc server for my latest prototype

readwarp.com

35 pointsakkartik26 comments

I'm trying to build an online reader that:

a) Lets you read interesting content from all your usual sites in a single place.

b) Is accessible to Normals without needing to grok rss, feedreaders or subscribing.

c) Scales up to large number of sites even for power google-reader users without seeming like a chore. (I was subscribed to 1000 sites on google reader when I moved them to readwarp)

d) Smartly prioritizes the sites I care most about.

e) Doesn't allow individual sites to swamp my reading just by pushing out a firehose of articles. (http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc)

f) Intelligently unsubscribes me from feeds I no longer care about.

g) Isn't completely swamped by the (ipad) popular story du jour.

I've been using this for a few weeks and it's pretty damned awesome. My only complaints right now are that I think it should be easier to add feeds (abstracted away or not, it gets its articles from somewhere), and that I always say "no" to "do you want to unsubscribe this thing you've been downvoting repeatedly?" because it feels too destructive, like there's no way I could get it back if they ever put out an article that I care about

Thanks David! Yes I've got your email feedback stuck on my wall :) The next rev will lose the prompts and will largely be about prioritizing without relying on a blacklist.

One big UI thing.

The opposite of a thumbs down is a thumbs up. I was confused by the star. Is that a "favourite" button?

Yeah, I go back and forth on that. Currently the star is like an upvote+bookmark. I'm interested to see how it gets used.

I'll either add a thumbs up or change the thumbs down icon to something else (maybe an x?)

I'm torn between wanting to minimize the number of buttons, and 'not making people think'. Thanks for the feedback.

You already have circular buttons, how about a smiley face on top (upvote + bookmark), a frowny face on the bottom (dislike), and a "meh" face in the middle (skip)? It's a lot more intuitive than what you've currently got, I think. Your current ordering doesn't map to what I think it means (the current order seems to be "meh" on top, "like" in the middle, and "boo" at the bottom). The "like" action should be at the top.

Also, I'm not in love with the "next" rollover text. I assume it means "skip", but a user could interpret that as the only way to go to the next item, and upvoting or downvoting before ey're ready (for example, if ey read the first paragraph and like it). It's not horrible, since ey can hit the back button of eir browser, though.

Also, I can never decide whether to separate the "upvote" action from the "save" action. Reddit currently has separate functionality for those; HN has them in one. It's a simpler design to combine them, but there are times I want to save things on HN on a smaller list than my upvoted stories list. Ah, for now stick with them being the same; if it becomes a problem, add it later. I'm sure there are much more important things you could be doing on this site. :)

:) It's not the absolute top priority yes, but it's amazing how much building the next stumbleUpon is about product and positioning, not recommendations. Thanks for enumerating all those tradeoffs.

You might want to rethink the color choice for the 'next' button as well. In this setting I associate "green" with _like_ and "red" with _dislike_.

Maybe a more neutral color choice can avoid possible misunderstandings.

You could try thumb superimposed on a star to give thumbs-up + bookmark.

Um, I think I DOSed you. Sorry. I ran ab to stress-test your server, and I guess it didn't handle it all that well. I wonder how HN handles excessive traffic?

Lol, I'd upvote you twice if I could. Can you send me your commandline args to ab?

To answer how HN handles it: the arc webserver has code to detect abusive crawlers. I should look into why that failed to kick in.

I'm glad readwarp didn't run into you until it had peaked on the front page :)

I don't have the exact parameters, but I think it was something like

    ab -c 100 -n 10000 http://readwarp.com/<somethinghere>

I don't remember what <somethinghere> was, it was one of the JS fetch links I think. I was trying to flood your site with a bunch of traffic and I did think it might slow down for a bit, but I wasn't expecting to knock it offline. I, too, am glad that everyone else was able to see how your site was supposed to look before I took it down.

Yeah, -c 100 is nothing I haven't tried before. My server knows to disable abuse detection for localhost, but it should have throttled your requests fairly quickly.

I have a nanny to restart the server if it dies, but on this occasion it just got wedged. That happens sometimes because PLT scheme uses atomic operations to enforce consistency. Like I said, thanks for uncovering this.

You are asking for user comments, I take it, so my comment will be about a first impression from visiting your site. You are gathering information about user preferences, but I didn't see a convenient link to your site's privacy policy. While I can certainly trust anyone who posts on HN not to do anything nefarious with my personal information (can't I?), it is industry-standard practice for consumer-facing websites that gather personal information of any kind to have a posted privacy policy. That may or may not have any legal effect, but it can have a user-reassurance effect that will encourage more people to use your site, if that is what you desire.

Thanks for the reminder, I'll add a policy.

And yes you can trust me :)

I like the simple UI. Here are a few ideas that came to mind while trying it:

- Ask me to choose a few categories before I start so you can do better news targeting and get me more engaged right from the beginning.

- Going through stories need to be faster. Either pre-load the next few stories or show me a list of headlines on the side so I can skim through and click the ones that catch my attention.

- I need a back button. A tiny link would suffice as I won't be using it often, but when I need it it's very useful.

Fully agree. I gave up after four stories that I all disliked. Two were totally out of my area of interest (celebrities and horse racing, huh?), and two were tech stories that didn't cross the "marginal curiosity" threshold.

Could work, but you'd have to get me hooked more quickly.

Agreed. My recommendation algorithms do well but need lots of data about you. This is an experiment to see if I can bootstrap with no user data by playing 20 questions at the start. How long are people willing to grant me?

A lot of the articles I got looked odd and messed up because of the content being chopped into your site. Webcomics especially suffered (Hark a Vagrant didn't even display until I opened it in a new window).

Perhaps an iframe or something similar so we can see the site itself, with your site becoming a top or sidebar?

Even with an iframe how would I deal with wide pages? I want to avoid nested scrollbars.

You're right that it may just be worth sidestepping this issue somehow. Rendering issues have been persistent on readwarp[1]. It's kinda useful to see articles with standardized typography like the readability plugin provides, but it may be too much effort to make perfect.

[1] Though my handful of users haven't complained about this in a while (I've been fixing bugs as they come up). Time to go find the stories you ran into - thanks for the feedback.

It reminds me a lot of Google Reader Play (http://www.google.com/reader/play/)

I agree with the comment saying that the star icon should be replaced with a thumbs up.

It's not beautiful ;

Yeah, Play and the underlying fast flip technology (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com) are interesting and not a little scary. They seem focused on lowest-common-denominator content (images and video) that looks good, and it's not clear that they're actually trying to guess my tastes. (I'm signed in but still don't see stuff from my feeds.) Pure-text articles look hideous in play, and if there's a way to find permalinks I can't see it.

It's not clear how much of this is just transient implementation issues, and how much is their bet that most people want to look and not read. It keeps me up at night.

How will this be different from StumbleUpon?

The value-prop isn't different. Stumbleupon has verified a market, but IMO they've failed to grow it to its full potential (along with google reader and netnewswire). They've stagnated. They're failing to provide the most personalized experience possible.

The readwarp solution is different from stumbleUpon. More textual analysis, more tight UI research, more integration with current recommendation sources like twitter and facebook. Less reliance on following random users based on a few links.

I'm going after stumbleUpon. But this prototype isn't there yet.

>But this prototype isn't there yet.

Ah, of course. I just wanted to see what you'd say in response. (-:

Looks like it's down.

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