Show HN: I made a Hacker News for everyone. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a Hacker News for everyone.

whatsupedia.com

18 pointsjsmoov23 comments

What are you hoping to accomplish? Is this to showcase some new ideas, or do you hope to actually get some traction?

If it is the former, you ought to write some blog posts to explain how your conception is different than the current news.arc software, and what the benefits would be to this community.

If the latter, you've got the classic chicken-and-egg problem. There are known ways to deal with that, of course, but it's not an easy row to hoe.

I would say both. I would say it is substantially different, consider the following:

"This is a fundamental flaw in communities on the net in general, they don't gracefully combine different scopes." - Hacker News comment by jacquesm

You still didn't answer his question of what exactly makes your solution a "graceful combination of scopes". Follow the advice and write some kind of post that explains what makes this solution better

I'll work on a post - thanks for the feedback.

But to answer your question, by "graceful combination of scopes" I mean you can follow Hackers in New York (people who have saved Hackers + New York as a favorite) just as easily as you can share stuff with Hackers interested in Ruby on Rails (Hackers + Ruby on Rails) or even with Hackers interested in Ruby on Rails in New York (Hackers + Ruby on Rails + New York).

Isn't reddit kind of hacker news for all interests?

Ah. Let me rephrase again: it's " a Hacker News for specific interests"

Reddit has subreddits. Some of them even stick to a topic.

I think what's neat about this guy's approach is he's morphed subreddits into a fully complemented, distributed algebra by letting you take intersections and unions of different "subcategories" of discussion.

I suppose one could could argue "isn't any interface with tagging basically doing this?" To be fair, del.icio.us and the like usually let you combine tags in some way, but none of them get out of your way enough or have sufficiently simple voting mechanisms to be a really nice way to grok news. None of them implement a nice comment system, either.

This is like having your cake and eating it too! If only I didn't have to register an account to comment...

I'd rather have a nice clean interface where I can filter relevant articles than go near that cluttered rats nest of links called Reddit.

So far so good. Concentrate a bit more on the filtering/finding new topics a bit more. You could become whatsupedia.com to crowd-rated news sites as Quora is to Answers.com.

While I agree with the previous comments re: "why are you doing this?" - I wanted to provide some more usable feedback for the product itself.

I found the UI to be rather lacking from a new user perspective. The design is nice enough, but the layout and the usage is poor and could use some rethinking.

Not sure what you're wanting from all of us here - perhaps you could let us know. Are you wanting to know if we would use it? How we would change it? General recommendations?

jsmoov

Ignore the naysayers.

There is plenty of room for this.

99.99999% of the population does not use HN or Reddit or Digg.

It's beautiful and well structured so that's a good start.

Now I would work with a couple of things like how you have source and comments aligned on one page, that might be giving you trouble for longer headlines. and create a more unstructured look.

thanks! though it seems my post has been killed from the HN front page...

I like the use of tags to filter the story kinda like how reddit works in creating a front page based on the tags you want.

Unlikely to change from using HN but I might use your site as an aggregator if you could aggregate stories from top sites (like http://alltop.com/) ... but then that's probably not what you're trying to do?

Please don't make me create a new login account. I am the proverbial "on the edge of the back button" user right now, and this login button is a hurdle preventing me from making a comment about an interesting article. The energy potential just isn't low enough for me to jump right now.

Edit: Facebook OAuth/OpenID/Google accounts are a great way to get users to login FAST.

Every time i click to a new page that f'n chat window pops back up. I minimized it. Leave it minimized. It's terribly annoying.

jsmoov, I like what you are trying to do. Ignore the naysayers, there is definitely plenty of space for more HN-like communities..

Focus on building the community, not the site.

So, you scrape HN (except the comments, which is a good thing - I wrote them here)? What does this bring to the table?

No scraping, just seeding to show how it would work. You can filter Hacker posts and follow only specific community combinations you care about.

UI nit: In Chrome 10 on Windows 7, the "specific community" image is being cut off on the left.

Looks very nice so far. It might be difficult to get people to use it though.

I thought we had one.

Perhaps a better way to put it would be "a Hacker News for all interests"

Nice concept, but it doesn't seem big enough right now for me to login and come back everyday.

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