Comment by iamdave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamdave | Hacker News Reader

I can easily see myself using this, going through twitter recently to prune and replace some of the accounts I follow.

One suggestion if I might? I noticed some of the imagery didn't seem to immediately 'grok' with their topics. For example "Sports" shows a photo of a bicycle propped against a wall in what looks like someone's flat, while "Arts" shows a photo of a basketball court, "Animation" showed a photography studio and the "Comedy" topic has a group shot of business suit types (albeit in a 'silly' pose).

It was a little odd, definitely nothing that breaks the platform but it may help 'discovery' to make images a bit less...ambiguous given the topic they're related to? I think sports and my mind goes to team sports and not necessarily riding a bike to work (the image looks like an average commuter bicycle versus a racing bike) so maybe that's on me to make the mental adjustment when assuming the connectedness of topics.

Otherwise, neat idea and service!

Happy you see it being useful.

That's a valid suggestion. I pulled the images from Unsplash (free to use), and needless to say, there's not really an endless assortment of pictures there, so I did with what I found, sadly. It is definitely something to improve upon, maybe I will get someone to do the photography for some of the topics, or alternatively go for a design. In reality I am not exactly fond of the execution of the categories - in the end they're sort of a filter, so I could have simply created a "super-page" where you could have those interests listed as filters, and could have found users sharing more than 1 category. On top of that, currently the platform has a fixed amount of categories, and it does not allow users to add themselves to any other interest, which is a bit limiting and unfortunate. Because of that, in the future I might redo this section entirely, which could help fix the issue you raised at the same time.

Thanks for the feedback!

Ahh thank you for that bit of insight, I was wondering if you had gone through the additional trouble of maybe pulling images from each respective topic via hashtag and applied some sort of ML to decide what picture is displayed with what category.

Definitely nothing wrong with the approach you've taken though (and if nothing else, consider the above an idea if you do decide to rewrite that functionality) if it helped ship the product more quickly, like I said-it doesn't break functionality, just a passive observation that may help the user experience later down the line.

Cheers :)

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