Hacker News Reader

Comment by trizoza | Hacker News Reader

Hi all,

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

View on HN

The pressure to make money out of it will turn your forum into what could be another subreddit. To repeat HN you'd need to remove pictures (they invoke emotions and attract unsophisticated audience) and all the marketing fluff, hire a team of people who deal with autos on day to day basis (mechanics, salesmen, dealship owners, pro racers, stars like the ex Top Gear team) and advertise everywhere that here's the no bs forum about autos. Wait for 10 years and you'll get a critical mass of audience. You'd still have to pay expensive mods. On top of that you'll have to figure a non-ads business model to support the forum.

All the top stories seem very consumer oriented, not for professionals in the industry.

From a cursory glance it seems more like a "car enthusiast" news site rather than a place for industry discussion.

I've spent much of my career in the auto industry (Tier 1 supplier), and I couldn't agree more. I'm even a "car guy," but I could care less about exotic cars, which most of what appears on autonews.io.

Aside:

What are good car sites?

So true. I'm with a Tier 1 for many years, and exotic cars are meh.

I would prefer to see items like advancement in tyre technology, or improvements in passenger safety, or reduction in energy consumption.

It seems like a neat idea, I hope it works!

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.

Hi, thx! The great aspect of HN, as you say and for me is also the community curation of relevant content. I've automated the inputs of the most popular automotive portals to get in some initial content. However the community - by clicking, sharing, commenting then decides which articles make it to the top. And of course they can submit their own articles - if it gets enough traction - I will consider switching of the popular.

Congratulations on shipping a thing! I have to say though, creating a place to submit links and invite or comment doesn’t mean it’s “a Hacker News for X” - what makes HN what it is is the community. Do you have any thoughts on how you could build a community around this project?

Hi and thanks a lot. I 100% agree with you on the community factor - that was the main motivation behind my project - however to get your hobby project up and running I needed to bring some content in first - therefore the automation. I've reached out to all my peers (i'm ex-automotive engineer) and they've started using it - some of them on daily basis. However once I've reached my network limits - I've started launching to relevant communities - PistonHeads, reddit/r/AutomotiveEngineering, product hunt and now HN. I am hoping to that there will be a cross-section of users that love cars and will stick and start posting content themselves.

If some of them are aggregated, while others are submitted, it is not clear to me to tell them apart, nor where an aggregated story came from. One just says "Submitted by Carol", but I cannot click on the name to learn anything more.

I also notice you hotlink all the images, you might want to contemplate re-hosting the images yourself, or abandon the images altogether.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. In the long term, you will be able to click and see the user behind the submission. However it's still in TODO column atm. But will def add it as this feedback is so valid. Good shout about splitting the automated/submitted content.

I think I like the autosubmissions, sometimes it's silly that a story HN will definitely discuss has to be found and submitted by someone. There are certain sites one could arguably auto-submit to HN, though HN is popular enough to just not need it.

Do make it clear which are auto-submitted though.

Will do.

Lots of people here are saying the UI and images detract from the site. I think it is possible that people who are into cars are different than people who are into hackery, and that perhaps this criticism should be discarded.

Hey Peter, mind if I embed the feed in my automobile marketplace site? :)

We could definitely work towards that!

A couple of former TTAC editors are active users here on HN. Will be interesting to see their feedback.

That would be absolutely amazing.

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