Show HN: A new way to share and collaborate on links | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A new way to share and collaborate on links

seelink.app

Hello HN,

I am a 14-year-old developer from Mumbai currently studying in grade 10.

After being frustrated with not being able to share and collaborate on links with friends and family, I created SeeLink, a platform to simplify sharing and collaborating on links with friends and family. After 3 months of work, I have created a complete platform that simplifies link sharing and collaboration, allowing you to seamlessly share, save, and collaborate on links. I built it with Python and Flask, used Bootstrap for the front-end, and am using Heroku for hosting the site. There were a lot of technical difficulties I faced and had to wade through a lot of uncharted territories, but I'm super excited to finally launch SeeLink and get it out to the world! Also, let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions. Feel free to ask me any questions about how I built the site, and I'd be happy to answer them.

Congrats on the launch! This looks like a great project and I'm sure you learnt a lot from building it.

Some first impressions:

1. You used Pinterest as an example link in the guide, and it wasn't immediately clear how this was differentiated from Pinterest. If you could think about why it'd be better to use SeeLink rather than an existing tool, I'd be more interested in it

2. I think the red block colour you're using is too much (#FF0004). I'd consider changing it to a lighter red, or even white background with black text (it'd be easier to read)

3. It wasn't clear to me what the bookmark icon does – haven't I already bookmarked the link by adding it to my board? Is this feature for further filtering?

Overall, great job! It looks quite polished and I didn't see any bugs.

Thanks a lot for the encouraging comments! I have addressed some of your points below.

1. It looks like it wasn't a good idea to use Pinterest as an example link, haha. I think Pinterest is mostly a social network for discovering interesting links from the web, this is more of a tool that people would use to share important links with each other, instead of messaging apps (which is how most people I know share links with each other).

2. Hmmm, I've got mixed feedback on that, but I think the best thing to do would be to change it to white with maybe black or red text in the foreground.

3. You're right, the bookmark icon is for further filtering, something you'd use if you're browsing someone else's board and like a particular link you'd want to read later.

If you don't mind answering a question of my own, do you think you'd actually find a use for this and actively use it?

Thanks a ton for all of your feedback!

Makes sense! I think I probably won't use it much yet, as the example you mentioned (messaging apps for link sharing) works pretty well, and often they also have a view where you can just look at all of the links sent. Some ideas of what would make it more likely for me to use:

* The ability to integrate with those messaging apps so I could use SeeLink, but then send out those links to friends via different messaging apps. I often send out the same links to multiple people on different platforms, it'd be neat to be able to track who I sent it to and catalogue them that way

* A feature like related links, or some form of automatic categorization of links based on tags.

I think Pinterest is great for discovery, so if this is more about link categorization and social sharing, you could take it in either of those directions

Noted! All of the points you mentioned also seem really interesting, I think this might make it more seamless for users.

Yup, I think Pinterest is great for discovering interesting links, I think the direction SeeLink should go in is the social sharing and work related sharing of links.

Thanks for all the comments!

Congrats on launching a very cool project!

Given that you're from Mumbai, I want you to know that I see what you did with name, and appreciate the pun!

Haha, the pun was a big part of the project's naming process. Glad you appreciate it!

Very cool. It looks well put together, and most importantly, it works!

I created a board with a couple links and then I noticed at the bottom of my homepage it says "Saved links" but that's empty. Is saving a link different from what I did by creating the links and putting them on the board?

Also, have you thought about something like "browse boards" page? People could optionally select a board they want to share publicly and others could view all public boards and maybe vote or rate them.

Edit: A couple more thoughts -

I have two kinds of link collecting. Social and personal.

Social:

1. Wife: hand her my phone. 2. Family: text messages 3. Friends: Discord server

I can't see myself changing from these solutions given...

1. Current solutions already work well. 2. I'd have to convince the other people to use this too, which seems hard, especially given 1. 3. More friction. Instead of "Go to url" it becomes "Go here to see the url to go to."

Personal:

I make YouTube videos sometimes and collect links for sources while I'm making them. Right now I put all the urls into a text file and at publish time I copy and paste the sources into the video description.

I could kind of see something like this fitting into the workflow IF I worked with someone else. Since I don't, the text file approach is easier and faster. If I did need to share collections of links, like with a collaborator or editor though...

Thanks for the encouraging comments!

The saved links section is probably not well-worded. It shows links you have bookmarked within the app for further filtering. You can bookmark a link by clicking on the black bookmark icon at the bottom of the link.

I've been thinking about a similar public boards feature, and I certainly think it would be useful to implement something like that.

Interesting to hear your viewpoint on this, it seems like most people are content with the tools they're using. Do you think something like a webclipper would help the project? This would allow you to add links directly as you are on the page, eliminating the process of actually copy-pasting it. I think this would make the process easier and actually make SeeLink more seamless to use.

I'm really confused by what it does after reading the homepage. I can share links with people collaboratively? Don't I just send them the link? It might be good to have an example of how this makes sharing links better because none of the features you showed seems like something I can't do already by pasting a link into an IM client.

The original reason behind why I created SeeLink was to share important links with friends and family. SeeLink makes your links shareable, searchable, and easily readable (as it displays each link in the form of a card with a title, description, and image). It also allows you to write text around the links using a tag, and has a ton of link specific features that make it easier to share links. These include creating specific boards through which you can add specific links to share with specific people. I think these are the main advantages that SeeLink has over something like IM clients. Let me know if you have any further questions!

I think you should clarify what you mean by "links" as it wasn't clear to me. I assume you mean random things people want to share?

Yup, just URLs or webpages from around the web.

I particularly like how the Get Started button jumps out from under your mouse. It's like playing punch the monkey.

Haha, I'm not sure it should be doing that though :)

Great app and good idea! Are you planning to make any money from it? If yes, what will be your revenue model?

Thanks a lot for the encouraging comments!

No plans to make money as of yet, but I think a freemium model might work in this case.

This is a good idea, and I might use it for work. It would be cool to allow commenting on links as well

Wahey! Glad you liked it! I've considered adding comments too, but I'm not sure how the process would work. Maybe a modal showing all the comments for each link? I might put it in soon :)

Nice! Very similar to https://tab.bz

Wow, I hadn't heard of tab.bz before. It looks somewhat similar to notion too.

I remember you from reddit! Awesome project.

Haha, thanks!

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