Hacker News Reader

Comment by SarahWasTaken | Hacker News Reader

I like it. I like it mostly because I love Google reader, but all the RSS feeds can be hard to manage when I want to go back and find something I read (usually a recipe I tagged). This is sort of like a reader for links? Seems easier to organize, which is cool.

My only question is, what is the incentive for people to organize information? If I have already read it, or seen it, why do I care if its neatly filed away? I think you need to give people more incentive to curate their links- so they are inspired to pick cool ones, organize them, annotate them, and then share them. If they just use the shared web to collect links, it could quickly become the mess (similar to my reader) and then it loses utility.

I think if you can answer the question about "why do I organize?" this will be awesome, The more effort you can get people to put into the "curate" part- the cooler your platform becomes.

View on HN

Hey Sarah,

Thanks so much for your feedback. The way we think about it - there's two reasons to organize the thing's you've seen. Self-reference for later, and also, just so your friends have a place to browse it if they want to. I could tell a friend, yah go check out all the advice I've read on pitching - there's lots of good stuff there in my 'pitching' channel :). For those people, they now have a place to browse what you've seen, and they can thank you for posting it, and respond.

The nice thing, is that we're working on ways to make the categorization as automatic as possible (e.g. via crowdsourcing etc) - so that for you its easy to say you saw it, and then it goes into the appropriate topic.

We're also thinking about the ways to differentiate between the links that stand out, and the ones that don't in the long term. For example, based on your friends' reaction to it, your own indication of its importance, and other metrics. That way, this becomes a more useful showcase and memory of your web experience.

I think social sharing is a good first start- people like the stuff their friends like. For example, I might read your facebook feed (if I didn't hate facebook) because I know you, but I'm not going to go read some randos facebook feed. That would just be boring. and weird.

My point is, social only gets you so far. You share with your friends, your friends share with you- but then it actually does break down. If you look at preceieved sense of authority, trust drops almost 2 fold when its a "friend of a friend- instead of a friend. You run the risk of having all of these "cells of authority" that don't interact.

But the good news is, traditional forms of authority can solve this problem. People seek out and read content all of the time that isn't recommended by their friends. They read it because they think its a good source of information. And because they think the person who is writing it is an authority (or at least entertaining).

I think you want to make sure that your platform encourages this kind of authrity as well. You want people to have shared web channels that people read like they read tech crunch or the wall street journal. This is important because 90% of all content consumers (and in my opinion, its really more like 99%) are passive. All they do is read. They don't create. They don't share.

But the do click your ads. So its smart to think about how this product is for them.

Also, we'll look into annotation - curious if you can tell us more about how and why you'd use it :).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com