Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated
listry.com
listry.com
I registered so I could vote on something, decided to see what creating an article was like, and it was so smooth it made me want to start more, and then eventually realize I have been looking for something like this.
I started a list of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA" because I remembered that I had been looking for just such a list the other day. I figured it's mostly HN users on there now, probably, and a fair amount of us are from here. I'm not positive what types of lists you're wanting, though, so I won't be hurt if you delete it!
Feature request: I would love to add some simple custom attribute to each list. For instance, with the coffee shops, it'd be nice if I could define an attribute for that list of "Free wifi?" and then each item could select either yes/no as it's created. An article on vim color themes could define an attribute of "Background?" with options "light, dark, both".
At some point in the future, then, you could filter and look at just the items in the list that match an attribute. E.g., I can look at the coffee shops and filter to look at only the ones that give free wifi.
Great work!
Your other article, "Best Text Editors for Programming", is a perfect article for Listry I think. The Cambridge coffee shops one would be good if there were a lot of Listry users that lived in Cambridge and could vote on it, I'm not sure there are enough though.
Your feature request is a good idea, I'll keep it in mind for down the road.
Given that each item shows a positive or negative number as its rating, it is unclear to me what the effect of a 5-, 3-, or 1- star ratings is against the net score for that item. I'm reasonably certain what the net effect will be, but it isn't totally obvious. The fact that it isn't so obvious is a friction point that makes me somewhat less likely to interact.
Using the familiar pattern of the binary up/down as arturadib has suggested (and taking a page from StackOverflow, Reddit, etc.) would make the interface much more familiar to me.
Though a binary up/down system would make this point irrelevant, I'll add it to the conversation anyway: It seems to me that over a long enough period of time, the rating for many items (using a 5 star system) will average near 3.
Congratulations on getting Listry out in the wild. Looking forward to witnessing future developments!
So you really won't be losing much information with a two value (eg, upvote/downvote) system.
There may be value in the determination of consumer-side article rank by a (weighted) average that encompasses both the net rank of items posted to the article + the rank of the article itself.
I'm sure you've already thought about the item/article interaction in terms of effect on overall article ranking. UI/X-side, the effect (of ranking an item within an article) is unclear now, and I am fine with that as an early user.
Moving forward, developing a ranking formula that weighs article rank against net rank of all of the article's items will be a usage-informed improvement that provides great value to users.
That ranking formula, as well as making the result of a "ranking" interaction obvious to the user, will help the understanding of how such interactions work.
With a social answering/ranking/voting application, creation of, and/or tweaks to, the formula that determines the effect of interactions will have a huge influence in shaping the culture of the individuals that interact with the application.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fr...
Some people may express their honest preference, but a major motivation for people to interact with something like this is to change the average, and voting at the extremes maximizes their power.
Any suggestions?
Just thinking out loud, your time could also be spend editorially adding more and more subjects and quality lists. The whole problem with such a site is that you need to maintain some level of quality, which is best maintained by attracting people that care about that quality. If you have a lot of quality lists with quality subjects, the next thing you need to ensure is that Google (and other search engines) pick up on that.
If I search for "emacs color themes", for example, you want listry to be the #1 match in Google with a list of links to color themes.
That, and just balls: try to get some popular bloggers to cover your site. If they like the concept, they won't mind vouching for you.
Congrats, cool site :
It has languished since and never took off, but the pieces were all there: user generated listed, votes, wiki style edits, comments etc.
I've had some time to think on why mine never took off and wanted to share a few ideas in case it helps.
- critical mass is hard, StackOverflow (my inspiration for it) was able to launch with two massive blog posts from influencers
- how to counteract this? either empower your users to create their own "sub-listries" and try to attract influencers
- or do the bowling pin strategy http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/
- or do the tripadvisor approach (read Founders At Work for this story) and spend massively to seed content for several years to reach critical mass on your own
Few other thoughts:
- I think your design is better
- Is "Articles" the right word here? Esp given your domain would "lists" work better?
Hope it helps!
I was debating between calling them "lists" or "articles", and decided on "articles" because my hope is that over time they will become full-fledged articles (true that my domain name makes that a bit confusing). Paul Graham's article on "the 18 mistakes that kill startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) is the type of article I am shooting for with Listry. Where each item of the article has 1 or more in-depth paragraphs of explanation or details.
I was a bit annoyed that getting things you want from your own country(minimizes shipping and taxes) is still so hard in the era of google. So I wanted to share it with the world hoping that others would populate the list further and I could benefit from this. But it was voted -2. Now I have no complaints against that... Maybe such a list is unsuitable for this type of site. But I think it may be a smarter idea for you to make it more obvious as to what constitutes a bad list. Why "Coffee shops in Campridge" is kosher and why "Shops interesting for hackers in India" is not.
I voted you down because I thought it was spam, sorry. I've undone my vote now so you are back to 0. When I voted there was just one item with a link, and it looked like someone just wanted to advertise their online store.
Your article seems fine for the site. An optimum article would be more than just a list of links though.
Ideally, I want articles to become full-fledged, comprehensive articles. Like the article for "Reasons to Quit Smoking". In time, I hope that article can become a comprehensive resource of all the best reasons to quit smoking. Then someone who is trying to quit smoking can use that article as motivation to quit.
I'll be working on a commenting system so that in the future it'll be easier to discuss this type of thing on the actual article page.
Thanks for trying out the site and providing feedback! And sorry again for thinking it was spam.
Cheers and best of luck.
If you change #mainbuttons height to 59px and bump the margins a little bit more to 29 or 30px you get a nicer look I personally think. A little bit more white space separates the buttons from the top header and to me is easier on the eyes.
I really like the site thought. There's lots of these but yours is different, the content stands out more than the site, and to me that's what matters.
After entering my abridged version of stackexchange's public web site checklist (http://www.listry.com/list/96005/live-app-checklist), I can see 2 features that I like to see:
- Allow entering just the "details" part of an article Item. Current workflow restricts articles to be more of a sub-level categorization. For simple lists that the article title already describes the article, there's no reason to require an item title.
- Allow option to auto insert list bullets/numbers into text that separated by empty lines.
Feature request: For each list allow users to link to lists in the wild. For Eg there could be a 10 reasons to quit smoking on some magazine. The user may not want to recreate the list, but just provide a bookmark. You could even provide a "listify" bookmarklet. For Eg Paul Graham's list of reasons why startups fail and a lot of startup failure story post mortems could be Supplimentary materials for a list of the same name.
The list which begins life as a list of useful bookmarks to external lists about the same topic could over time be deduplicated by the community to create a Master list that would be much more useful than the external lists themselves.
If it is simply sorted by votes with no time-component then your going to have the same "self-fulfilling prophecy" problem that Stack Overflow had when they first launched.
Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items.
Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and "popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".
I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are updated with javascript.
So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you different links if you are logged in.
I noticed one small detail that is jarring and it should be a simple style fix. The location of content contained in a div or span shifts when you change categories on the "New Articles" tab. You should be able to see what I mean by selecting "New Articles" then watching the Listry icon in the upper left move to the right (or left) after selecting another category from the list.
I agree with stingraycharles that it's a nice and unique hybrid b/w Reddit and StackOverflow.
Best of luck!
Notice that you're using Google App Engine to send your welcome emails, and I'd love to offer you PostageApp (http://postageapp.com) while you're in beta. We'd be happy to help you out with that. :)
Let me know, cheers!
I've seen that site before. Mine's more about creating comprehensive articles rather than just a list. Something where each item of the article has paragraph(s) of detail.
Something like Paul Graham's article, "18 Mistakes that Kill Startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) would be an ideal Listry article.
It's developed with the dynamic language Groovy, on Google App Engine. Here's a comment with some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803
One design tweak I would do... Have the descriptions of the lists collapsable so the reader can skim the list and only get the full scroll effect if they need.
1. Add those social login buttons (facebook, twitter)
2. Make "e-mail address" the only input field, then mail me a password.
3. Delay asking me for a display-name until I try an operation that needs it.
Either way, this is a nicely designed interface and great idea.
For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough. Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that don't fit the format.
For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though.
If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify malicious edits.
Pretty!
I've manually merged their entries with the main vim entry.
For example, if you wanted to convince someone that they should develop for iOS instead of android, you could start an article on Listry titled "Reasons to develop for iOS". Then add a few reasons of your own to the article, and then other Listry users could add their reasons, everyone would vote on the best reasons, and then in the end you would have a good resource of all the best reasons to develop for iOS.
A reputation system would definitely be a good thing to have too. I was thinking about creating one, but decided to launch early, and then improve the site over time.
Do you have any plans to write a technical overview of your implementation?
emacs 30
vim 20
vi 15
It uses my own mini-framework for Google App Engine. This comment has more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803