Show HN: I made a Hacker News for the automotive industry
autonews.io
autonews.io
That’s...not a Hacker News for X.
Of course it may have perceived flaws. Do you choose to beat the person for doing it that way, or do you want to offer gentle advice in order to help them? The motive behind the comment is hidden in its delivery.
You can say your truth, all of it - but you can say it in a nice way or in a shitty way. How you say it will define you.
This is exactly why there is blowback to the suggestion that GGP was not being nice enough. It comes across as a desire to obscure the motive of that comment.
It seems a lot of people think that if you have to confront someone or tell the truth, you can't be nice. That is pretty sad.
You can be nice, and you can tell people what you really think. It is 100% possible.
It is about how you word it. It is about putting in some effort to take care of others' feelings. I.e. being caring and empathetic.
We've seen mass exodus from Digg and Reddit. The inflection point is always design, 2008 when they messed up the Digg UX with promoted posts, the whole website went down in a dumpster fire. Reddit has been the same but inflection point was carried out through a couple of years as they went to a new design. Still, old.reddit.com is popular. Reddit has too much influx of new users, high churn rate to keep it from burning down.
Design is the reason for IBM. It is why Apple exists, Nike, Stripe, etc. Sure, a company can be successful without good design, but the ones that are built with design as a cornerstone of its foundation, are easy to spot - HN is one of those IMO.
I don't think so, even considering the paranthesis cases. People are addicted to its consistency. It stays the same, the way it worked, and stick to the principles of "don't fix if it aint broke". A forum is primary a forum, where people share ideas.
Trying to force in the industrial design principles of "best design" in to a forum is mixing up the true intention of "best design" thinking.
No such thing as "best design", there's just "different" design. Better design is the excuse producer give consumer to sell something similar yet different, implementing planned obsolecense through deisgn by making the consumer reaching for the "new" design. works for Apple, Nike, Stripe you name it because they constantly want to sell new products, that competes with their old product. To make a profit, the design becomes design for the sake of design. That principle goes against what a forum is supposed to be.
What this website looks like, how fast it loads, and how simple it is are not reasons to post here.
People post to contribute their thoughts to the community. There are people here who we want to discuss things with. There are topics we're interested in that we have opinions about. We each want to be seen to be curious or knowledgeable about tech things.
The design of HN is good because it lowers the barrier to posting. It's simple and obvious how to use it[1]. Those are good things but they're not enough to keep people here. That comes from the links and the comments.
Good design isn't enough to make people here stay on a website. Bad design is enough for people to leave.
[1] Apart from all the stuff new users don't understand like the black bar, the username colors, why comments turn grey, why you can or can't vote etc. Those bits are less good design.
Hmm... these things are hard to tell. I’ll give you my personal motivation to stay here and that’s unquestionably the design. I never got hooked on Slashdot because that site was an eye sore (sorry!).
Usually, good design fades in the background when it’s good. So we give the credit to other things.
I agree that the main appeal of HN is undoubtedly the community. There's no other place where you can be exposed to so many no-bullshit comments and submissions from so many people so deeply embedded in the industry.
However, I disagree that the design has nothing to do with it. I think the spartan design keeps the appeal of HN low for those who don't fully appreciate the value the community itself brings. Case in point, many people who post here are also probably on Twitter and/or Facebook. But Twitter and FB knowingly pursue such directions in their UI and UX and overall service design that having anything like HN on those platforms is all but impossible.
What this website looks like, how fast it loads, and how simple it is are not reasons to post here.
With the emphasis on 'here', I think they are very important factors.
Digg collapsed sure, but where does the Reddit exodus come from? Even IF they had people leave because of the design (which I doubt would be significant numbers) it would not be remotely comparable to Digg.
There isn't really somewhere "quite like reddit" enough for reddit users to march off to en-mass in the same way, though I, people I know, and I suspect a large number of others, visit reddit a lot less than we once did and hang around less once we are there. So rather than an exodus there is more an epidemic of "meh".
I certainly don't contribute to "communities" there these days - and I think many others with a similar attitude is why some significant subs have fallen to rabid fighting where at least some insightful discussion once prevailed: the more reasonable voices have shuffled away so the more rabid ones increasingly stand out (and boy do they love it), pushing more "more reasonable" voices into shuffling away leaving the polarised trolls on all sides to fight amongst themselves, and so the spiral descends.
Though I'm not an ad-clicker, gold buyer, or anything else such, so I very much doubt the powers that be over at reddit care that I am not engaged.
It's lazy that simple afforances to make it easy to use on mobile devices haven't been implemented.
There are a lot of people here that have slower bandwith than a pigeon, and they are very very happy that the HN staff tries to save every bit and byte.
The HN community is of course fundamental, but HN is very much defined by its UI.
(edited)
Your comment, on the other hand, brings up the person's post history to make a personal attack. It doesn't address the point being made in any way. This is not the sort of behaviour that's expected on HN.
You're conflating high karma with "goodness".
The former is as much a consequence of quantity as it is an indicator of quality. The latter is in the eye of the beholder.
Also, my browser already has a loading animation thank you very much. No need to load an animation to tell me that you're loading the page.
I don't really feel like it captures hn's ease of use and simplicity.
Please too, put the subscribe thing at the bottom of the page, not the middle. That just reminded me of a midpage banner add. It disrupted the reading flow very obviously.
It's a terrible spot for it.
I wonder if part of the appeal of HN is it has no images?
But I like seeing it tailored a little more towards the target audience.
Yoink, I’ll definitely be borrowing that. Thanks!
I made this project to help myself stay up to date with automotive industry because I love cars and anything related to them. It gathers the latest automotive news from more than 20 auto portals. Allows users to submit articles, comment, and upvote. I got quite literally inspired by HN and was mindblown why such a thing does not exist for automotive industry.
Also users can subscribe to a newsletter that delivers top 10 articles of the week every Monday morning.
Thank you in advance for any feedback! And happy to reply to any questions.
Peter
I'm not sure I'd say it's "HN for ..." though. The automated(?) news aggregation and newsletter features seem pretty different from HN's Spartan style and entirely user-submitted content.
I also notice you hotlink all the images, you might want to contemplate re-hosting the images yourself, or abandon the images altogether.
Do make it clear which are auto-submitted though.
From a cursory glance it seems more like a "car enthusiast" news site rather than a place for industry discussion.
What are good car sites?
I would prefer to see items like advancement in tyre technology, or improvements in passenger safety, or reduction in energy consumption.
Some feedback if you don't mind it.
1. How about moving the domain of the article posted beside the post title (like HN)? This maintains the flow of reading. I read the post title and then I can see the source of the article on it's right.
2. You seem to have a separate URL for each post ( EG: https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3...) but I couldn't find any way of accessing an individual post's URL from the front page. Had to dig into the HTML. Maybe clicking on the timestamp copies the post link or takes you to the individual post's URL?
3. Dark mode toggle is very confusing (https://i.imgur.com/V0MrNlA.png). Don't switch the icon after each toggle. Put an icon (indicating dark or light mode) outside the toggle and then let users change based on that (https://i.imgur.com/1wyE6si.png) .
4. Don't automatically open links in a new tab. HN doesn't do that. Let users ctrl+click if they want to open it in new tab if they want to.
The password reset and login form leaks account info in the network response. You should return the same network response regardless of whether the user exists in the DB, instead of relying on the UI to communicate that.
Logging into your site sends back the full account profile object, including the password 'hash', which appears to just be a Base64 encoded string. Fortunately the Firebase API redacts that field so the decoded string is just 'REDACTED', but that's not a good thing to rely on, and I hope the password is actually encrypted behind the scenes..
Both of these are unfortunately common mistakes you see even on more well known sites.
Goodluck with everything.
I guess a lot of the most current and interesting information about those topics stays locked within auto manufacturers.
The youtube channel Engineering Explained is probably as close to that as you'll get. It's mostly about technology already available though, not much content on future tech still in the R&D phase. https://www.youtube.com/user/EngineeringExplained/videos
"This isn't HN for anything. Some marketing something or other I guess..."
I think, for a dedicated/techy crowd, little things like a cookie warning mean a lot. To me it screams crap. I can't think of a single website I use enjoy using regularly that included a cookie warning. I think Reddit added a cookie warning when their UI went to shit.
The theme cookie is easier to solve: Use CSS media preferences instead and use people's browser settings to choose it. That being said, cookie warnings may not be necessary if you aren't storing anything personally identifiable.
I also find it hard to believe that submissions on this site are already accumulating >700 points, surpassing most HN submissions.
On top of that, there are few, if any, comments for every upvote. One submission has 728 points but no comments?
I think that some trolls have gotten to the site already.
I personally use Hacker News without JavaScript, and was expecting/hoping the same would work for autonews. But, alas. It gets stuck at "Loading..."
Still, wish you all the best with autonews, and hope you can build a tailored community of automotive enthusiasts.
Cheers, Robin
https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3...
Edit: They fixed it! Nice.
Also (old.)reddit already does the small thumbnail and headline thing. I like the hackernews layout for its information density.
Paul Graham wrote about automobile design in an essay.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
> Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is. > > There's good waste, and bad waste. I'm interested in good waste-- the kind where, by spending more, we can get simpler designs. How will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware?
I just ran our site through the Web Accessibility contrast checker at webaim.org to compare the headlines (what we think people want to scan and focus on) to the background. The contrast score is a very high and passing 14.5/1 ratio.
We make the micro text more subdued on purpose to make scanning the headlines easier.
Some text on your site is too light, and the contrast is meh. Otherwise, nice site, I'll be sure to check it out again in color tomorrow :)
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So, I was obviously interested, but this is not the content I expected.
I would not categorize it as auto industry news, more like auto consumer news.
I was hoping for content similar to the articles in moderndealership.com, or ‘Dealer News Magazine’.
More business-side, less enthusiast.
(Although it has to be said that HN's rejection of complexity -- the exact opposite of your approach of embracing it with all those javascripty thingies -- does have something going for it.)
People should be able to connect from their car I guess. I'm not sure it would work as is. HN would. It's just the beginning, post the update.
He's either tallying the count in a column (which is wrong after moderation), or caching the main page.
You don't only read restaurant reviews from restaurant owners, or movie reviews from filmmakers, or car reviews from automotive engineers do you?
Likewise, a non-designer offering opinions on design philosophy or alternate styles is probably pretty useless. A non-designer saying the thing is awkward/ugly/confusing/whatever is informative though.
This is not the same for UX (or restaurants, films or cars from my other example) as these are things that everyone interacts with and understands to some extent despite not doing so in a professional capacity.
A non designer is not going to be good at identifying solutions to problems because that does require knowledge about how the sausage is made, but they should certainly be listened to when identifying problems. Not doing so would be madness.
(Not to mention a lot of the commenters on here that you're decrying as "non designers" probably do have experience with design, considering the userbase of HN)
A practitioner who ignores feedback and says "who's the UX professional here?" is not a very good one.
This disease infects an awful lot of "modern" web sites.