Hacker News Reader

Comment by kindlez | Hacker News Reader

You should check out our platform at http://www.snapzu.com ... It's like a more mature reddit with great news/articles and minus most of the memes and other junk. Cheers.

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> It's like a more mature reddit

This piqued my interest, but then on the front page I found "Britney Spears' music used by British navy to scare off Somali pirates". Then I check out the 'architecture' tribe and the top post is "21 Houses to Avoid on Halloween".

Perhaps I am not the target market for this, but what I would like to see is a social news site that actively rejects junk content and promotes content that helps you become a better, smarter person.

I think there's an implicit conflict of interest between the features and focus of a "social" site, and quality of content. Appealing to the lowest common demoninator will drive up your status (views, karma, XP, whatever) faster than content which invites debate and possibly criticism. I noticed the urls for the stories on this site branch out from user accounts too -- to me that's a bit of a red flag that whatever passes for karma-whoring over there will be an issue, since there's a direct association between story, user and user status.

I don't know how you would engineer actively rejects junk content, if you even could - it seems to me having a site where users post content means a community has to be reactive about curating it. Maybe focusing on content groups rather than user groups or having it be invite-only. But still, what you want lies mostly in the eye of the beholder.

We have (and try to keep improving) an intelligent system that prevents "brigading" by limiting the amount of power from individual sources (such as someones followers) that would otherwise give a huge and unfair advantage. We aim to have the social features as a secondary companion to naturally shared content (only used as tiebreakers, etc). This means that a user with 5000 followers will have little advantage to a user with 5 followers. The same goes for the prevention of too many image/video/gif snaps beating out quality written articles on our front page, which may take a considerably longer time to consume and longer to vote on.

There will always be obstacles and problems when trying to pave a new direction, but that's the best part. It's what keeps us going ;)

I cannot find a way to reply to the first portion of your comment because I cannot speak for our current users and what their individual interests are. Everyone is provided the same tools to use and they use them as they best seem fit.

I do understand your point though. One of the highest of our priorities is to continue developing ways to discourage crappy/lazy/junk content from being posted and voted on. And that's why were trying our best and actively listening to feedback like the one you just provided.

It's really annoying that 25% of the page is taken up by the "Join Now" "Learn More" banner at the top and that there's no way of hiding it. Why ruin the user experience for people just because they don't want to sign up for your site? As someone else mentioned below: having to click through twice to get to the article is obnoxious as well. Other than that nice job.

I like the first impression - nice and dense - and I get what you're trying to do, but beyond the first impression I find that the multiple tile sizes make it hard to skim the page. Additionally, on the tiles where text is overlaid onto the images, I find it hard to visually parse the text. The tiles where text is above and below the pictures are a lot easier to read.

My suggestion would be to stick with the tiles, but use only those that place text separate from the image, then group tiles in rows of similar dimension. For example, a row of 2x2, a row of 2x1, a row of 1x2, a gutter of 1x1 on the right-hand side, etc. I feel like this type of grouping would help the eyes scan the page, and feel a little less random and hodge-podge to the user.

Just a couple suggestions. Keep up the great work!

Thanks for the feedback! We've already played around a LOT with those and there's not much we can do about that. The point of the tiles it to show popularity (more popular = bigger).

If you don't like the grid view, you can always switch to the list view (which actually has more sifting functionality) by clicking on the tab near the top.

I did find the list view, but I switched back to grid view pretty quickly. If you're set on keeping the different tile sizes intermixed, perhaps you could come up with a layout that creates rivers of similar size tiles on the page for the eye to follow naturally. In typography, rivers are avoided at all costs, but I feel like the concept would be valuable here.

Just a suggestion, as always.

Thanks, it's much appreciated.

I find it a major deterrent to adopting your service that I have to click twice to read the story. It's very disruptive to the "mindlessly clicking through things" mindset I'm in when I read these sorts of aggregator sites.

Thanks for feedback!

Tip: Just click on the favicon or the URL (green link) to go directly.

We are trying to create a "hub" experience where you can build on top of just a simple link (add text, video, list, gallery etc) and others can contribute comments, related links, votes, etc.

Looks nice, but seems a bit to aggressively 'social' for my tastes.

Can you elaborate a little? Me and the rest of the team would love the feedback. Thanks in advance.

Too many meters and ranks and percentages - it feels too gamified to me, and focused on competition between users and not on the content itself. That's just one person's opinion though - I like a bit more minimalism.

Ah, that's just for fun, and we wanted something different that's not really out there. But it's also there to combat spam, trolling, etc.

Its difficult to scan the titles on the homepage - this kills my ability to quickly scan the list of links to see if I want to read them - it'd definitely be easier if it was less photo-centric

Our list view is a more traditional style of viewing content that is available just a click away (next tab over). Hope that helps.

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