Show HN: Interestin
interestin.co
interestin.co
If you don't focus that and make sure the content is great, then there's not much of a difference between this platform and, say, Tumblr. Sure, following interests adds a nice layer, but there are plenty of other platforms that allow for that as well.
You're right to focus on content. Part of the reason HN is so successful is because the rules and regulations on content are adhered to, strictly. Adopt some of that, and I think you could gain a good user base.
On the other hand, you want creators to be able to share seamlessly, and making them categorize their content isn't a good way to do it. Looking at the popular social services out there, making people choose a category is too much work, and is too limiting. And when you try to create a service that supports all of these needs, you end up with a really complicated tool that people don't use how you envisioned (see G+ - it has "pages" to support personas, it has private sharing via circles, it has communities, but you can't just throw all of this stuff at users all at once and expect a community to show up out of nowhere... you have to build your community)
Delete an essay? Well, um, OK.
Gravatar integration might be nice.
You can also outsource your authentication by a billion other services openid and all that.
So you're bravely marching into the battle of trying to expunge spam and ads yet allowing anonymous commenting. Well, good luck with that.
Appearance is clean and fast and no obvious bugs other than my picky sorting issue. Well done.
From a UI perspective having a list of zillions of empty interests is a problem. So you think heavy metal is great, well cool so maybe this will be a heavy metal related people and topics kind of website. Or would people who knit clothing fit in too, presumably in different interest areas. And hows that all going to fit on one enormous page of interests? Is this the main university library or the small specialized school of music satellite library focusing solely on music?
(edited to add, and do essays and interests age out, so if no one ever posts to woodworking, after a month thats the end of that. Or...)
You seem to 1:many map a post into an interest. Its probably more of a many:many tag like structure. So for the sheer heck of it I posted link to a wooden clock I'm building in woodworking. Now that you'd "tag" as clock-nuts or fine-woodworking or noob or whatever. Or are you going for something like "IRC on the web" where theres "a" room with "a" name and its not twitter tag time, which is a perfectly valid plan.
Is this your idea of a minimum viable product and if so, where to go from here? Or rephrased, what do you plan to do with it?
I've always wanted to see a discussion site that uses LCC (think, like Dewey Decimal, but free). Preloaded with the whole LCC catalog of human interests. Maybe the names in the LCC are not terribly intuitive but I'd like to subscribe to QC and QD.
There are of course many other knowledge classification systems.
full disclosure: I am one of the co-founders :)
You're capitalizing last names, whereas names can start with lowercase letters (as does mine). The content shouldn't be pushed to the right, it's harder to read, consider moving the topic list to the right side instead. The line length isn't too bad, but reading is made much worse when it's pushed to the right because of the topic list.
Update: deleted the names capitalizing. Thanks for letting me know!
Also can you add pictures etc to posts?
There's not a FAQ really but that's a good idea. I'll write one in the next few hours. Essentially you can post anything you'd like as long as you don't just take others' work (not directly pointed at you of course). You can post blog posts, questions, your opinions, etc... Actually, anything that you think might be relevant. Thanks!
Your UI is supposed to make me want to stay. It's very bland, right down to the logo. Where are the colours? If I stay more than 10 seconds clicking around and I don't love it, I'm gone, sorry but there's millions of sites out there I could browse.
I don't understand how it works. I click the links on the left (why are they randomly generated?) and it just generates more random links, and for some reason has peoples avatars on top? Why? What happens if you get 100,000 users, what function will the top avatars serve? Why not have a members directory?
Why did you link me a link that says /essay/? Is that a users self post? Shouldn't this explanation be summarized for easy consumption by the user upon first visit to the root domain?
Really think about the flow of your site and the UI/UX. Right now, I am very uninterested in using this website. No offense but if you want this to go somewhere, the benefit has to be painfully obvious.
Sorry for being harsh but I was just typing the thoughts as they came right to my head as I viewed the page, this is how I think and I'd imagine how a lot more users think.
Right now this seems like a cute side project, put in the time to make it a real product.