Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I really like this idea, for quite some time I've been toying with the idea of creating a way to collect and organize all news (social/online newspapers/etc) into one stream by topic so things like "Aaron Swartz", "Ukraine Conflict", "BP Oil Spill", "Heartbleed", "Goto fail bug", etc and then arrange them on a timeline. The thought being to create an order of events and maybe even support connecting articles that link together so that you can see where (and when) a story broke and watch it unfold. Possibly even couple it with a summary engine so you can get quick bullet points about one subject across multiple sources. There would have to be a way to rank a sites credibility (Maybe through voting, maybe through an algorithm, maybe a little of both) but yeah. I really like what you have here so far as it seems to be in a similar vein.

View on HN

Thanks. That is the end goal - you could literally follow any topic (and we're adding more social networks).

The thing that we found performing the process manually is that some of the best content comes form people with a couple followers, so there's not enough data (retweets, interaction) to determine what content is quality. Our proposed solution to that now is just to show everybody everything that matches a certain keyword, similar to the hackernews or reddit /new feed.

Interestingly enough there are some people doing this already, just without a tool. So they'll watch the networks all day and gather links into google docs, fb pages, twitter, etc. It works really well, but it's a one-man team, and it's a very painstaking manual process. We want to let more people contribute to that same process, and eventually (hopefully) entirely crowdsource breaking news.

>> eventually (hopefully) entirely crowdsource breaking news

Yes, and almost equally important (at least IMHO) would be providing a record of what happened in the past. A way to find every piece of news surrounding an event. For example if I want to see a full outline of every Snowden related article I could pull them all up and then filter down to just news articles that were first to publish a particular story. While I am sure there are people creating pages/full websites to document this one issue I would love to have that for every event so that instead of endlessly googling for articles related to something you could just got to Grasswire (or other site). Sort of a Wikipedia for events but built from sources instead of written by people who then link to sources.

I'm actually working on a project quite similar to what you two are talking about: http://www.mosttalked.com/ The idea is to prioritise news be shares + display the most popular tweets of people that you possibly care about, along with a summary as well. It might inspire you hopefully. I believe merging news outlets with social media has so many points to improve.

I like your site. My only criticism is that there are not dates and times with anything. It would be nice to know how old a tweet is instead of assuming you are sorting from most recent to oldest.

Functionally I also cannot seem to scroll to the bottom of the tweets, and I would fix the loading on the main page. The news articles are loading on the left side of the screen and then shifting to the center.

Great feedback; you're absolutely right. We'll make timestamps clearer and implement an infinite scroll with the next iteration. Thank you!

Awesome idea, something I've been wanting to see for a while. Maybe add a splash/about page to give more information on what it is for people who happen upon the site from other sources than HN, where it has been described.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com