Show HN: An ad-free news website with crowdsourced summaries
news.hoxly.com
news.hoxly.com
I wanted to build a site that is more aligned with that use case. I was partially inspired by Wikinews but wanted to lower the barrier to entry for participation. On Hoxly News, each story is a collection of facts which link to a source URL. Facts can be independently up/down voted and in aggregate form a TLDR style summary.
Stories also support a threaded comments section similar to HN.
Instead of ads to fund the site I decided to build a "credit" system where users purchase credits to perform various activities around the site. You can read more about that here: https://news.hoxly.com/credits.
Feedback is appreciated.
Ok. In my opinion:
1. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark.
2. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real content, which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further.
3. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content. Thanks to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the number's length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned.
4. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is not transparent at all.
It is also unclear to me why the credits system has been introduced in the first place. The linked page mentions that it is supposed to "limit spam and reward quality contributors". It seems to me that the same goal can be achieved by using upvoting-based reputation system with carefully configured entry barriers that is already in use at many Stack Exchange sites.
In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs is to ask for donations. But it needs to be done in a very transparent way. For instance, show a chart of real Google Cloud / Amazon AWS bills offset by donations. People need to be 100% sure that when they donate money to "running costs", it would not end up being used for something else like your new iPhone or a vacation in Mexico.
Edit: add line breaks
As far as I'm concern, upvoting/downvoting isn't fun, it's an act of public service. I'd be incredibly concerned that corporate entities will have huge incentive to buy fact-upvotes and since there is no limit how many they can use, it would take 5,000 good samaritans to undo the damage of 1-shill with $5.
Basically a deal-breaker to me that the site is that out-of-touch with the problem of internet news. Frankly, I'd like a news site that does the opposite - 1 vote per proven US citizen (no bots, no foreign influencers, no corporations).
Specifically, it would still cost credits to leave comments, submit stories and facts, but not to vote.
Maybe I'm an odd-breed but I see HN as a charitable place for those in the know to contribute to the pool of public knowledge.
I think the best version of HN (or equivalent) is full of people with that objective (e.g. wikipedia). The worst version is full of people grinding emotional axes (4chan) or self-promoting.
I think you'll find the people who are self-promoting (e.g. trying to start a new cryptocurrency, or a PR firm) will have much more resources to submit articles than good-samaritans.
The thing I do like is breaking an article into a list of cited facts. I like the brevity, and I like sources.
So what if it does? Yes, if you explicitly say that all donations will be used for site maintenance, then maybe. But even that could include labor?
In any case, the point is moot. Very, very, very few open source projects take in enough donations from the general public to pay for a new iPhone. Most are very lucky to get $100-$200 in a year.
I would not. Now we're cancelled out.
I may be in the extreme end, but in the rare occasion that I find a dark website, if I can't run it through a browser extension to make it light and readable: I leave and never return.
Yes, it seems like there is. I am wondering what that reason may be.
My preference for dark themes is based on my current typical viewing conditions, which are rooms with low to medium light levels where the brightness of my screen is also low. In such a situation, I do not wish to look at white-themed content because it is uncomfortably bright. In a place with a lot of light, I would not mind the light theme, but it still would not be my preference because of the established habit. With the sun shining directly into the screen, it may even be impossible to use the dark theme, but that is an edge case which, in my opinion, should not affect how a website looks by default.
I assume that many theme-related preferences are habit-based. In my opinion, a reasonable UI design should at least allow simple switching between dark and light themes.
One thing I wish: I don't want to go to a separate page to see the few facts, especially for the top stories.
I made a stylesheet to fix a few of the glaring UI problems, as well as a sheet for dark mode: https://github.com/rovyko/hoxly-gui-patch-stylesheets
* Horizontally align news item titles
* New Items take up full margined-page width
* Search input at the top of the page
* All facts button has a pointer cursor
* Increase button text size> 1. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark.
I'll see if I can add an optional dark mode.
> 2. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real content, which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further.
I'm not really sure what changes could be made that would encourage users to explore. Could you elaborate?
> 3. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content. Thanks to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the number's length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned.
Yeah, this is a problem. I think maybe it can be partially solved by abbreviating 3,000 as 3k, etc.
> 4. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is not transparent at all.
Okay, this is something I hadn't even considered. Originally the entire credits pack actually required authentication to view but I changed that last minute. I'll see what I can do to make the pricing more transparent.
> In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs is to ask for donations.
I have run websites in the past on the donation model. In my experience it hits a wall once you have more general web surfers on your site than power users. Reddit tried the donation model with a transparent meter that showed the sites costs each day but it eventually had to pivot to ads.
Microcontent, context.
News sites (though not HN) typically categorise stories topinally: local, regional, world (often forthrr by region), events, disasters, crime, politics, business, labour, science, technology, sport, culture, entertainment, health, real estate, transport, style (with varying overlap).
Jacob Nielsen on microcontent. I'd prefer a brief lede 'graf, say, 10-20 words (about a tweet), well chosen for framing item(s).
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/microcontent-how-to-write-h...
Change the colour or remove it entirely.
I really like this project and the credits system in place. If you're open to the idea I'd be down to collaborate on some of the frontend / design work. Feel free to message me.
Sure, I'd like to hear more if you had some ideas. It doesn't look like your profile has any contact info, but you can email me: contact@kylepiira.com
Any good site needs to get the visitors' attention from the first moments after they open it. I do not mean to steal the users' attention by showing forms to agree with or blinking elements. I mean showing the most useful content, carefully organized so that it is simple and natural to work with.
Currently, hoxly news site looks like n-th iteration of a typical corporation site with content blocks in the middle replaced with a modified HN-style list of links. There is the top bar, some account-related stuff in the top right corner, the about and policy links at the bottom. Nothing really new, no interesting design elements.
To most visitors, such a site appears like they have already seen it and they may wonder what makes this one stand out. The content, obviously, could be the answer. But with the current generic look, some people may think that it is yet another link aggregation site which aims to artificially boost its PageRank score and simply leave.
I do not have any exact ideas for improvement, but in my opinion, the site should have a more unique look and be more practical to use. The main areas I would focus on are:
1. Bad usage of space. At a normal zoom level, on a typical 16:9 screen, the actual news content is restricted to a column whose width is about ~30% of the available display width. The rest is blank. When I zoom in so that almost all of the display width is utilized, then I see only ~7 news items with overly large font. In other words, there is no way to properly resize the website so that all the space is used efficiently.
I would change that e.g. by moving the top bar to the side or making it hidden until the mouse is moved near its edge. Also, I would use at least two column layout on wide screens.
2. The offered features (timestamp, user, upvotes, comments, etc.) are difficult to recognize for a new visitor, because they do not stand out. It is not clear that those phrases under the news items have some interesting meaning and that some of them are clickable. I would say that many first time visitors would simply overlook them.
3. As was already mentioned, it would help to provide even more information about the particular news item on the main page, so that visitors could decide with more confidence about whether it would be interesting to them or not. A link to the article from which most of the facts are taken, for instance, could be useful.
You may be right, but I wonder how many of those people would be ok with their employer saying "we're willing to cover living costs, but your recent trip shows we're paying you too much. We value the work and service you provide us, but we'd prefer to only pay the bare minimum that it takes to maintain that service. By all means, buy food for yourself, and a bed is ok, maybe a modest television, but a trip is right out."
Beyond that, the site seems good for its purpose, and I like how multilink+summaries puts the event above particular sources. Its like someone googled a headline for you and presented you a good results page, instead of providing just one domain and its point of view.
For a global RSS use: https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.*
But you can replace the query string with whatever you want.
Your site needs some CSS love, but otherwise very cool!
See also YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Instagram is pretty far down this path as well. Unless you have an editorial process that involves real humans with the ability to censor bad actors, this whole situation seems inevitable (remember private editorial censorship is not government censorship)
EDIT: Fix rolling out. The page was missing jQuery dependency.
When you submit a story you can specify an initial seed source which will be summarized using the gensim summarization module and used to prepopulate the facts section. If gensim isn't able to generate a summary then we just use the headline of the linked article as the first fact.
After that, facts can be added manually by adding some text (max 160 chars) with an accompanied source URL.
Gensim: https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.htm...
Sometimes it doesn't quite work. In the case of Bloomberg I've noticed that they aggressively block AWS IPs which is why it says "Are you a robot?".
Newspaper: https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Gensim: https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.htm...
You can change the query string to whatever you want depending on what type of news you want.
Given this, I'd be inclined to believe that it's curated. However, I haven't studied it enough to verify if news links > x months are added as "related news" to current news articles.
[0] - https://nyhetsnotiser.se/ekonomi/merkels-eftertradare_-ecb-s...
Just the thing for my text browser.
Bookmarked!
Requested a password reset. Reset my password. Login page still sends me back to the login page every time I try to log in.
Ha! Figured it out! I cannot login with my email. Need to use my "username". That is an unusual choice.
Which tech stack did you build this with?
That should not be happening I'll have to look into it.
> Which tech stack did you build this with?
It's Django with registration powered by Django registration.
Django registration: https://django-registration.readthedocs.io/en/3.0.1/
I ask because one of the top news is "Facebook launches it's own currency" (instead of "its") which I find a bit grating/unprofessional.
This, in turn, would make me question the sources.
Edit: typo
To answer your questions, the titles are provided by whoever submits the story to the site. It's up to that person whether to use a title from an article they found or come up with their own. There are some guidelines for that here: https://news.hoxly.com/guidelines.
As for editing, there is no automatic way for anyone to edit a title once it has been submitted (I did have an idea for allowing people to submit alternative titles and vote on them but never got around to it). Obviously under special circumstances someone with access to the database can edit them.
Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/
Bootstrap MD: https://mdbootstrap.com/
good luck!
Would be cool if you supported left and right arrow keys to quick navigate to next / prev article
And because there's not that much content you could probably preload it
By the way, would HN allow bots to post summaries?
Right now, I'm thinking maybe it would be good to add tags to stories which would reduce some of the problems with filters.
I don't see a good argument for NOT making it open source. The value of sites like this is not the code so much as the community that builds up around a particular instance of it (witness all the open source HN clones that don't detract from the value of HN at all).
Even if other folks created their own instances they'd still need to build up their own communities, which is fine, because, for example, we don't really want cute kitten posts here on HN but totally on a clone dedicated to cute animals.