Show HN: Yak, my weekends project - invite code "hackernews"
yak.to
yak.to
- A bit jarring that entering in the invite code simply took me into the site as a user. I was a bit confused at first as to what just happened. I quickly figured it out, and admit it is quite cool how you do it, but I'm not sure my father or other un-techy people would ever be able to understand it. Maybe an overlay or something explaining what is going on would be good. Or perhaps this is a beta only thing.
- The site let me change my name even though I didn't pay for any credits. I suppose I'm in credit debt now. Not sure if that was supposed to happen, so I didn't proceed to try anything else that required credits (creating a channel).
- It seems like you allow people to host pictures and files directly on the site, which helps prevent link rot as articles age, but you do NOT seem to store videos. You can only link to them on two sites. Oversight perhaps?
- I'm a little unsure about the "flirt" option. I get how it jives with the geolocation and people near you thing, but for a site that states "All 100% anonymous and proudly Facebook unconnected." it feels out of place. It's also just feels a little weird to have that pop up in "What's Hot" on the world channel next to other stuff. Maybe I'm just an old fuddyduddy though.
- When viewing a channel, it seems like the three tab navigation model comes up a little short. Say you get a busy channel, how would you find something that isn't a "best of" or "hot", but is old enough to have fallen off the "live stream". It seems like all I could do would be to keep whacking "More". Perhaps a "Today" tab and/or a "Week's Best" tab or something?
- I click on "cowboy" and the sidebar said I could anonymously post something by emailing the address. I did that and after 5-10 minutes, nothing appeared. Not sure how that is supposed to work? That said, it seems kind of strange that anyone can post anything on my "wall". I feel like it might be possible to get into trouble - socially or otherwise - with that. In the least, lots of clean-up controls would be good to have in place.
- I feel like I can't highlight or locate things from people I want to follow. What I think I want is a tab that I can add people to and just track anything they post. This way I'm not checking a million channels, a million individual walls, or trying to get everyone to use a single private channel.
- I feel like you could get into a position where "good" channel names can get taken up and left for dead by their owners. Say someone makes one called "Apple", is the only moderator, and then just gives up. Now the best named channel for Apple news is a desolate wasteland. It just seems like there is potential for a bad user experience because the most likely place to look for information is a wasteland. Perhaps there should be something in place to reclaim names after periods of inactivity? Then again, I'm not sure how that jives with people paying for them either.
Anyway, this is getting long, so I'll stop here. But all in all I think it is really cool. And, as someone NOT on Facebook, its refreshing to see a new site that isn't completely tangled up in it.
* There was no welcome page explaining what this thing and how to use it.
* I didn't quite see the need for the eye icon ("quickview"), since clicking on the image for the item seems to do the same thing.
* For images, clicking on the image should show the original image, instead you have the link on the bottom.
* When you click on an item's small picture, it's not obvious how to minimize the item again (click on the small icon), it would be nice to have a +/- icon on the right.
* Understandably, there are a lot of junk posts, i.e. currently the first one on the Android channel. Since first impressions are the key, you should try to create some meat asap.
* When you click on the small icon to the left of the channel name, it to the main channel, this is a little unexpected. Why not put the Yak icon for this channel there instead?
All, in all, nicely done. Will be hard to attract people to yet another sharing site, though. My suggestion would be to jumpstart it around an idea/event, i.e. Google I/O, Oscars (too late for that), etc. and advertise heavily on Twitter for that event's hashtag(s).
Good luck!
I will say, I'm not quite sure about the whole "not giving beta folks any credits to start with" -- especially since it costs credits to create channels, and you NEED people right now to start creating channels and submitting content. Maybe give beta users 150 credits to start or something? (Enough to change your profile name and create a channel or two).
Also, I was able to create a custom profile name even though I had no credits (my account now has -30 credits). I guess that would be another way to do it (letting beta folks go into debt), although I think spreading some credits around to start is a better idea.
Finally, is there not a way to "filter" my home page? Right now it's not really an issue since there's not much activity on the site, but eventually if for example the Android channel starts blowing up and I don't care about Android -- how do I get activity from that channel not to show up on my home page?
The location-based touch could be pretty neat if people adopted it. I think your challenge is going to be convincing people to share content on your site, as well as reddit. We all know nobody is going to "leave" reddit for another site, so I think your mission is to figure out how to make people want to also check your site.
The channels are cool, but you need a more intuitive interface for them. It's kind of difficult to browse them, I feel like. Maybe even some type of full-text search for locating new channels.
Yak will have the classic chicken-and-egg problem of being kinda lame prior to having a critical mass of users. Any ideas of how to jump-start growth are welcomed.
As a way of saying thanks, I'll give the top-rated commenter here (after 24 hours) 1,000 Yak Credits, and every other commenter with positive points 100 credits.
But seriously, thanks for the feedback. We're probably not going to go after the HN crowd with Yak... my hunch is college students aren't as impressed with minimalism as techies.