Show HN: Read summaries of Hacker News links without leaving the front page | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Read summaries of Hacker News links without leaving the front page

tldr.io

17 pointsczzarr8 comments

As the creator of hnsummaries.com and former founder of a news summaries business, seems like a nice middle-ground would be to give the user an automated summary and then let them edit it if they choose to do so. As we moved towards this model, we were able to be much more efficient (we were doing it internally though).

You have a chicken-egg problem with real contributors (my guess is that you're bootstrapping the content with editors?). Am excited to see where this goes!

Indeed, we have this chicken and egg problem. That's why we are focusing on the HN community for now: it is feasible to be quite up to date for the frontpage, even with just the three of us! But as you said, we are actively trying to find contributors.

For now we are not giving automated summaries because we obeserved that people tend not to edit summaries even if they are automatic and hence of lower quality. What is your experience on this?

Thanks for the feedback!

Well the thing is people are not prone to edit a summary that's already there. It's actually easier to start from a blank slate. Are you still working on hnsummaries.com? I would be interested in talking with you.

I don't like that I have to create an account to try it out. I realize you answered in the comments that the summaries in your demo are not real, but because of that it makes me want to try it out before I give you my email since I don't actually know how it WILL work. You should just make it installable without an account, then after it's installed encourage users to create an account for future updates (probably why you would want signups?) or more features maybe.

It would be useful to have summaries of actual articles instead of funny jabs at HN memes

this is just for demo purposes, if you install the extension you will have the summaries of the actual articles on the frontpage of HN

Really useful

slick lightweight interface.

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