Show HN: Grok, a modern wiki for useful, concise, trustworthy content | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Grok, a modern wiki for useful, concise, trustworthy content

grok.how

29 pointstashmahalic29 comments

The email-code-to-login is pretty slow - I've been waiting about five minutes for mine, and am tempted to give up fixing one of the articles.

Thanks for letting me know. I'm relying on Mailgun presently. Did you check your spam folder?

Yup. Lots of generous offers to purchase sunglasses of dubious origin, but no code.

I'd like to get this working for you. Please retry the login, and contact me directly via the contact link at the bottom of https://grok.how/.

Is the code email in your spam folder? Mine was.

Your constructive suggestions about Grok are very welcome.

Homepage currently returns a 404.

Is it still 404 for you now?

Thanks

Looks very interesting. Maybe link to examples of threads? I didn't see any in action, but looks like a good idea.

I'd also suggest smaller default font. Sites like this benefit from high informational density (look at craigslist, reddit (old design) and wikipedia as examples). That's my vote anyway.

I do think it's a good idea to have a starter thread and starter comment for each topic. Stay tuned for that.

You may be right about the font size. For now, Grok's larger font size is deliberately lower density. It's meant to encourage conciseness, be comfortable to read, and avoid overwhelm.

One guideline I'm trying to respect is what UX people claim is the ideal text line width: 50-75 chars. Wikipedia, on other hand, is ~279 chars on my present screen (it scales with screen width), which feels awkward to me.

I’m using Safari on an iPhone X running the latest OS:

    * The main page search bar is really choppy.
      I typed in “lisp” and, when holding down backspace, the cursor skipped around.
    * The website is unwelcoming.
      If this is supposed to be a wiki, then maybe the landing would be better off if it just contained a logo, short description, search bar, and a random-article button.

The idea of a “modern wiki” caught my attention, and I’d be interested to see how this fleshes out.

Thanks for the feedback. Will fix.

What about "modern wiki" is interesting to you?

Would you please share more about what makes the site feel unwelcoming to you?

Chrome 66.0.3359.158, android 8.1.0 There should be an answer in the negative if your search produces no results. This problem is exacerbated by the beta status and lack of articles - it took me almost a minute to figure out if my queries (like "computer" and "a") were producing no hits or if the site was broken.

Good idea. I'll add something like "No results" in that case.

IMO a platform like this has a lot of potential, especially for education. Wikipedia is often far too dense to really learn from if you're not already a subject matter expert.

One thing that concerns me slightly is the presentation of opinion as fact, which to some extent is inevitable in a public wiki that has no citation requirement. There also seem to be articles with a wide variety of intents - there are informative articles like the keto diet instructions and the hierarchy of evidence, but also laundry lists like "no brainers" and "scientific study requests". I don't know if there is an intended purpose for the contents of the site, but having this mix creates some ambiguity in my eyes.

Overall, I'm keen to see where this goes - especially if it can help me to learn new useful ideas and practices (as opposed to edutainment-style wikipedia browsing).

Thanks for your feedback.

Citations are currently encouraged, but not required. They might be required in the future.

If you were to pick a domain of knowledge to focus the site content on (rather than "everything"), what would you pick?

What new ideas and practices are you interested in?

Encouraging but not enforcing citations sounds good - requiring citations may end up drying up the content wikipedia-style.

The content I'm interested in is twofold - practical/actionable info, and high-level summaries. The former is somewhat covered by WikiHow but their content is notoriously vapid. There's nowhere currently that I'm aware of that I can quickly learn the general mental model for a new topic. If I was new to keto, for example, the article on your wiki would provide me with all the high-level knowledge I need to get started, and to roughly understand what's going on. There are numerous concepts that I want to learn about but often that requires buying 2-3 books or reading a lot of articles before I can start to understand the mental model. Self-help and business books for example are well known for stretching an easy-to-understand concept out into hundreds of pages.

Windows 10, Firefox 60.0.2

Search doesn't do anything when I type a term and hit enter.

Gif: https://gfycat.com/ShortNeedyEmeraldtreeskink

Thanks. Will fix.

Is there a Benevolent Dictator? Is there an editorial policy? Is there a plan in place from this being overrun with flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers and holocaust-deniers? (Or, from some arbitrary point of view: with SJWs, libtards and infidels?)

Grok is meant to be, above all things, accurate. Here are the content guidelines --

https://grok.how/topic-guidelines

The most impact will come from the community of contributors who are committed to these principles. I'll be supporting them.

It's a big challenge to maximize accuracy while allowing open contribution. We'll need to experiment and iterate on this to improve.

What are your suggestions?

I think you need a Benevolent Dictator, or a council thereof, who can delegate as well. Inevitably, you'll have edit-wars, differences of opinion, etc. You need someone to step in and authoritatively declare, "this is what Grok considers to be truth".

Articles might need a warning before editing to warn users that certain edits or information will be reverted/removed.

I think that most disagreements will be resolvable via discussion in topic threads. The Topic Guidelines (https://grok.how/11) provide the criteria to judge.

For topics where the truth is a matter of opinion, the topic should probably just describe the different points of view, and qualify their use-cases and pros and cons, rather than arbitrarily picking one.

For the remainder, the side with the strongest references should win. I'll probably need to stratify the community a bit as Grok grows. Those with more influence should judge based on the site principles, similar to the US Supreme Court interpreting the law. I'm cautious to avoid fiefdoms, ulterior motives, and conflicts of interest.

Using Google Mail, the signup code email went to my spam folder.

I marked it as not spam.

That's helpful to know, thank you. Looks like there's room to improve on email deliverability.

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