Hacker News Reader

Comment by Isomorpheus | Hacker News Reader

I've also had the idea of creating a site which restricts users to having read the article. So, I'm excited about your project.

Couple questions

1) You mention a paywall, but your video says that users who sign-up before paywall stay in forever. You honoring that (the video was posted 5 days ago)? I see that the median comment count on your site is about 3 so I should hope so

2) How exactly are you paying these authors? We can post articles from anyone and then trust you're able to get in contact with them and hand them their money?

View on HN

Glad to hear you're excited about the idea!

1. Yes, we are honoring that! It's a reward for being an early adopter and it's important to keep the community "starter culture" intact as we move to a paid membership model.

2. We don't want you to have to trust us. That information will be transparent. Check out our current writers leaderboard [1] as a prototype of how that will look. Minutes reading to completion is our basis for payments to writers so you can imagine a pie chart on your account page that shows who your $5 went to for that month in addition to a community-wide distribution that would look similar to the current leaderboards.

As you can imagine there will be cases where we can't get in touch with writers or they're not interested or something like that. We'll probably have to have some sort of time-out period where the uncollected funds might be reallocated to writers who have verified with us or something of that sort. The important thing is that we're committed to making these rules and decisions transparent.

[1] https://readup.com/leaderboards

Ok, cool.

Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? Skimming through the frontpage I either have no idea what an article is about or it appears to be some lowest-common-denominator politics article. With reddit I can go read my niche subreddits with topics I actually care about (yeah, I know you don't have enough users to replace this quite yet, but still). With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.

Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least? Even better would be an abstract for every article (not sure how you would accomplish this)

> Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)?

The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! In fact right now I'm working on a new "Discover" screen that will allow filtering by publisher and topic. We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.

> With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.

It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it so the real garbage usually doesn't float up since people chose to abandon those articles. Again, not perfect by any means but it is something to consider if an article is more than a few minutes long and has a lot of reads on it.

> Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least?

Yes! When the AOTD email goes out (midnight PST every night) it includes the "description" metadata provided by the publisher if present (seems to be available about 90% of the time). We should definitely show that in the UI on the web app too for the AOTD at least (and maybe have some expandable toggle to show it for other articles).

> The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet!

I see you're using React on the frontend. And, you only have an iOS app but not (yet) an Android app. Are you not using React Native? In that case it's fairly easy to target both platforms. I know RN is a bit of a shitshow but not supporting the biggest mobile platform in the world is arguably worse

> We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.

If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness. Anyway, it's better than nothing I guess

> It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it

This is something, but still high-quality articles with clickbait titles will outcompete high-quality articles without clickbait titles. Incentive still being: write clickbait titles. Anyway, if someone is 0.25x as likely to finish a bad article having clicked it, but 10x more likely to click a clickbait article, you still have a major problem beyond "not perfect", imo

I know it's a big ask for you to solve every single problem with online reading/discussion but this one is so tangled with the rest it's kinda hard to ignore.

Today's AOTD: "If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich?"

From the past few weeks, some selections:

- "Meet the social media echo chamber that is radicalizing you & your friends. - Alexa Rohn" - "Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not." - "A White Woman, Racism and a Poodle" - "The American Press Is Destroying Itself" - "Dear Fuck Up: How Do I Figure Out What I Want in Life When Every Day Feels the Same?" - "You Should Be Feeling Miserable" - "Tom Cotton: Send In the Military" - "The Sickness in Our Food Supply"

I'm sure some of these are great, but be honest: did the title have anything to do with people clicking through?

You weren't kidding about being dialed in on this space!

> Are you not using React Native?

Not even! Our iOS app just uses WKWebViews for the main UI so yes it would be pretty trivial to do the same thing on Android. Only excuse is that it's in our backlog with 100 other things that we also really want to build.

> If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness.

Haha yes, it's an absolute clusterfuck that I'm currently trying to clean up enough to make useful. The descriptions are usually actually pretty solid, but there is so much noise in the tags/topics.

> This is something, but still high-quality articles with clickbait titles will outcompete high-quality articles without clickbait titles.

Yes, yes, yes! I think providing more context in the way of the description could help to cut down on this, but you're very right that there is no easy or complete fix (at least not that I can imagine!). Something else to think about would be looking at the ratio of clicks to completions instead of just the sum of completions alone. That way in your example the 10x likelihood of a click could be cancelled out by the low 0.25x completion rate.

> Something else to think about would be looking at the ratio of clicks to completions instead of just the sum of completions alone.

Good idea. In addition to better metadata for boring titles, penalizing articles which have a low completion rate would probably help

Good luck! I'll keep an eye on the progress

Reply on news.ycombinator.com