Show HN: A place for stories | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A place for stories

storylike.com

12 pointsstorylike13 comments

I think you need a mission statement/elevator-pitch style intro to the raison d'etre of the site. At the moment I'm having to invest time reading multiple snippets and inferring the overall goal of your project from them, which is difficult.

I agree that it might not be obvious what the site does when you see it the first time, I will put a up faq but i don't want to take room on the front page to explain the site, it doesn't seem right.

Agree with @user24. Are these snippets essentially quotes of interesting articles?

Yes, they are quotes from blogs and personal stories, some are short and the have whole story in the quote but most are longer and you have to go to the source to read it all.

The share seems a bit odd, since I have to leave the site to read the story, and probably will share it from there (the original site).

Probably it should be visible below the quote, and not only sharing the title and link, but the quote itself (less for twitter 140 chars) because that's what I want to share from your site.

Two thoughts:

You probably want to do some A/B testing on your choice of quote. I think that's legitimate.

I personally think the domain name of your site is a little simple. Just my opinion though and I know the domain name market is a nightmare.

What determines that a story would get aggregated by the site? And what determines the passage selected? (Am curious if it's crowdsourced, curated, algo-driven, machine-learned, etc.)

Right now i select the quote myself. I read the post and try to find the best quote to serve as a introduction to the story.

I have rating system in place on a scale of 1-10 but i didn't give all the stories a rating yet. I want to crowdsource the ratings in the future, it's on the list of things to add.

Grats on the simplicity of the site and repository of good stories. I think as a portfolio piece it's very serviceable.

As for growing the site itself, I think you'd need to somehow provide some unique-ish value prop to differentiate yourself from yet-another-social-discovery/bookmarking-service, in more than a "StumbleUpon for HN articles" kinda way.

Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback, yes it's not easy to grow the site but i hope it will at least help me find a job if I add it to my cv.

Do you have to explicitly be submitted a story or your system is uber smart to crawl the interesting ones and generate the best? A system for the latter would be quite cool.

They have to be submitted, I think it's possible to make a crawler to find links but the quote still has to be hand picked.

You should explore automated solutions - there are quite a few around.

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