Show HN: News from Reddit
fastnews.me
fastnews.me
Technically, it's well-designed. It's a fine-looking product that is easy and compelling to use. The key-point summary is a good feature. That's all granted.
However, I think this is a bad product to build. The past weeks and months have shown us that we probably need more long-form content and less short-form content, where the loss of details robs us of important nuances. Just reading the headlines -- and that is what this product allows you to do very efficiently -- does not necessarily make the user better-informed, but it dangerously gives the user the probably-false impression that they are now actually informed.
I would encourage you to think not just about the problems you would like your product to solve, but also the problems that your product might contribute to.
The first point is that the site is not posting super new content, but stuff that is already popular and has a fair bit of discussion around it.
Another thing is that I ran https://www.reddit.com/user/samacharbot2 for quite some time and what would happen was many people never actually read the article but just made assumptions from the headline. The summary actually helped a lot and even became a starting point of discussion.
I agree that half baked information can be sometimes harmful than no information at all. Ideally how I'd like the website to be used is that people who find a summary interesting go and click the actual article.
Hope you understand my perspective.
that's not news.
Fixing that equation probably requires a deep restructuring of how companies get attention, growth, and revenue.
Reddit in particular likes to upvote things I wouldn't consider news. At one point, 50% of the articles were of the format "mildly important person says something reddit agrees with."
Why do engineers have so poor understanding of social sciences? Is there anything in math-driven jobs that inhibits approaching topics without trying to mathematize them?
A hangover from logical positivism - in a nutshell, the dogma that any statement that is not falsifiable through observation is actually without meaning.
It's not an easy decision.
This developer uses Python though, which seems like it does the correct thing in raising an error instead of just returning a -1. I'd have to look through the Python code to be sure through:
I like the idea of some customization.
(While on the subject of customization: Am I crazy or does the theme choice not "stick"?)
How accurate is the summary points?
I personally don't use Reddit very much after their warrant canary issue .. and the CEO that edited comments. Kinda lame since the only similar alternative is kinda a cespool for racism coughcoughGoatscough.
Thanks for opening up the source too. I can see a lot of potential uses for this. You might want to add vim swap and .log to your .gitignore though. :-P
Side comment, I am wondering why you've bothered with putting your email as: salmaanpehlari[at]gmail[dot]com considering you've got the raw email address in the source code of that anchor.
Really glad you liked the first impressions!
- Work a bit more on the design, specially on mobile. On my iPhone 6s Plus, when I open the page I can only see 1 article, what I like about HN or Reddit is that you can quickly scan with your eyes what you are interested on, as a list. If that is your target audience then you should probably give a similar experience.
- Not a bit fan of the whole "popup" to see the bullet points, I would hide and show them under the title
- I would add an icon to click directly to the reddit comments next to the button
- I think this is a great site to be turn into an mobile app
Keep up the good work!
One suggestion: Have you considered adding the Reddit thumbnail to each article? May help break up the page a bit.
News! isn't a drop-in replacement (I liked the 'curated' aspects of BN), but News! is going on my short list of replacements.
The next and previous buttons should not drift so far apart, they should be next to each other, close to where the next button is at the start.
It would also be nice if when you went to fastnews.me/subject it would search for the subject. You could also add a recently searched items to the right of the search for the last 3 or 5 items.
Using the website would flow better if you were to have the bullet points display on hovering over the descriptive text.
The summary algorithm seems to work pretty well, so you might want to add the functionality to use it on individual subreddits, in which you could utilize the fastnews.me/r/ to access. Although this would generate some problems since most of these would probably have to be generated by a user request I think it would be really useful.
search with /subject sounds like a good idea, i will certainly do that.
Right now I'll add more subreddits and put /r/subreddit for later as that will require bit more resources.
I'll keep tweaking the UI and keep your points in mind. Thanks again!
At the moment I can't see how old are the items – I really miss dates.
Also, pagination with Next/Prev buttons is ambiguous. Replacing the labels with Older/Newer would make it clear, in which direction in the timeline I'm moving.
I very much like the summaries. It would be great if they had unique URLs. This way I could share the URL of the story summary.
I will add dates soon, and change the button labels.
Also - an RSS feed of each category would be the icing on the cake!
RSS is next. :)
That gets lost here.
Does the animation lag, or is it annoying?
1) Full rows per article, so you can put in a longer title and the design looks the same regardless of if you are on a phone or desktop.
or...
2) Keep this layout, but use flexbox to ensure that the read more button is in the same location at all times. Truncate title length with ellipses, but let us click the ellipses to see the whole thing.
As for the animation... it's problematic on larger screens because the content has a lot of white space on the left side, and everything is centrally placed. This makes the animation appear to take different times depending on your screen size (I know, it likely technically is the same time, but that's not how our eyes see it). Inconsistent user experience is generally bad, unless it is intentionally done.
It might be better to have a side from the top, which would be consistent across all screen sizes....
I'm not sure how it works on mobile. Can we swipe left / right to see more articles? From the animation, it'd appear like we should be able to.
with that said, there's a bug with the next button. /r/world is selected, i search turkey, i go down and press next, it brings back the home of /r/world. same happens without a search keyword as well. (or maybe there's just no data)
https://github.com/SalmaanP/news_backend/blob/master/altsumm...
What's the point of drinking from a straw instead of directly from the cup?