8 ms·

Hey HN, I'm looking for some feedback on NDN, it's a little MVP that will eventually give you only the not-depressing news from all over the web - it's seeing

Hey HN, I'm looking for some feedback on NDN, it's a little MVP that will eventually give you only the not-depressing news from all over the web - it's seeing quite a bit of retention, and I'd like to know what you think! I'd like to turn it into a product, but it's pretty hard to see where to go.

corysama 8y ago
Just a tiny bit of typography on the links would go a long way to making the site look more professional.
- armatav 8y ago
  I'd be happy to add that, if you can suggest what kind of typography I should use or take a look at
  - rococode 8y ago
    A basic start: bigger font size, drop the underscore (text-decoration: none), change the font color to black or dark gray. You can do a lighter color on hover to make it clear it's a link. Not perfect, but I think it's better than what's live right now. You can browse for a nicer font, too. Plenty of free choices at Google Fonts. End result would be something like this: https://i.imgur.com/c7YJCN9.png https://i.imgur.com/c7YJCN9.png Maybe align the text with the image as well, although vertical aligns are always a big pain to implement haha.
    - dceddia 8y ago
      Flexbox makes vertical alignment a snap. It's even pretty well supported these days: https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox In this case, all you need to do is add "display: flex; align-items: center" to your a tags. After that I'd probably get rid of the margin-bottom on them too. Finally, to visually center everything vertically, remove the margin-top on the img inside the a. A bonus of using display:flex is that it'll fix the wrapping problem where long links wrap underneath the image. With flex, the text will stay on the right, in its own "column".
      - armatav 8y ago
        You are a genius. I was super panicked and couldn't get the working memory going to actually fix the spacing. Thanks!
thrmsforbfast 8y ago
A lot of your news is not just "not-depressing". It's actively uplifting. In fact, most of the stories on the front page are "feel good" stories. It'd be cool/useful if you could provide news on the important issues of the day that's simply "not-depressing". I.e., factual and detached and doesn't elicit emotion, but not explicitly feed-good. (e: forgot to say: nice work!)
- armatav 8y ago
  Thanks! Yeah I'm thinking of adding a sentiment slider after I get a large amount of news sources going, as well as a "which sources I want to see" selection.
seltzered_ 8y ago
Do you have a main audience (i.e. age range, field of work) you're shooting for? What do you care about seeing in the news? How do you discern between truly good news and 'puff pieces'? One thing I've actually liked is the approach of organizing news of the sad with the good. Deregulation nation ( https://deregulationnation.substack.com/welcome https://deregulationnation.substack.com/welcome ) is an example where the newletters are organized by bad/better/good/great - it's focused around a core topic (environment/Trump) and written by hand.
- armatav 8y ago
  I don't have a main audience that I'm shooting for, but I think this will attract younger folk - I care about seeing anything other than sensationalism. That's kind of cool, I'll take a look at their site!
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Promote it on Twitter. There are periodically requests there for some kind of relief from negativity. No clue how to monetize it though.
- armatav 8y ago
  Like just post it on Twitter with a billion related hashtags? Didn't know Twitter people needed relief from negativity, I should do more research.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    There's a lot of politics on Twitter. Sometimes people get overwhelmed and then say stuff like "Send me all your puppy pic feeds." I don't really know how to self promote on Twitter. You will need to figure that part out yourself.
    - armatav 8y ago
      Alright - thanks for the tip man!
ahje 8y ago
The idea seems nice, but: > You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.
- vntok 8y ago
  Here you go: https://www.enable-javascript.com/ https://www.enable-javascript.com/
jonathanstrange 8y ago
It doesn't display any news, just two empty round boxes, on my browser (Firefox), probably due to the privacy extensions I'm using. Disabling uBlock Origin and noScript for the site doesn't change this situation.
tumetab1 8y ago
Doesn't work on Firefox (updated) : "Warning: Invalid DOM property `class`. Did you mean `className`?" and some CORS errors.
Theodores 8y ago
Recently some people rescued a kangaroo from drowning and gave the marsupial some mouth to mouth resuscitation. I shared this story with animal loving members of the family and we were all moved by it, reassured that humanity was out there in this cruel world. However, was it news? This was news in the broader sense of the word but really it was just a human interest story (and maybe a kangaroo interest story). If we look at the divers rescuing boys from a cave story that Elon Musk got so badly wrong then the same criteria can be applied. Yet their rescue certainly was news. But we didn't give as much scrutiny to the thousands of people rescued in Japan from floodwaters at or around the same time. My Japanese neighbours could have done with less of Elon Musk that week and more of Japan. For them the good news of the rescue in Thailand was at a cost of hearing good (and bad) news from Japan. Invariably there is a political aspect to the news beyond human interest stories. For instance, if Donald Trump choked on a pretzel (heaven forbid) and had to leave office due to the calamity then some people would be absolutely delighted, for them this would be 'good news'. Same goes with news regarding the economy. If house prices go up then this is good news to the rent-seeking class but it is not good news for those that are not on the housing ladder and have to pay more money to the rent-seeking class. Even sport has the same problem, if Burkina Faso beat Brazil in the World Cup then a lot of people would be absolutely gutted, it would not be received as 'good news'. Given that you are not in control of the content and are stuck with what you have got in that aspect (copying from Reddit) you might want to do what others in this comment section have suggested - remove the 'not' and the 'depressing' from the title. There is a double negative going on there. My suggestion is to go for something where you don't have to limit yourself to mere human interest stories, take a side but leave the politics aside. If you went with something like 'underdog news' then you would be able to take the side of 'Burkina Faso against Brazil' without a problem, plus you could do a nifty logo. You could also engage with your audience on this basis, get them to mod up/down stories based on whether there was some epic struggle going on with a clear underdog. Small child beating grand master at chess? Clearly epic for the underdog. You can sidestep the Trumps/Brexits of the world with this type of a spin and not decide what is and what isn't 'non depressing'.
sailfast 8y ago
Do you have to curate this, or is it dependent on other curated websites to generate the news? Some sort of ML-backed reading of each story to determine not-depressing vs. depressing? I could see aggregating different curated sites as a potential liability. Was fun to read all the items on your page. Great work!
- armatav 8y ago
  This MVP is dependent on Reddit, I'm going to start working on a scraper that runs a sentiment analysis on articles (or something) to provide the same effect from every news source available.

corysama 8y ago

Just a tiny bit of typography on the links would go a long way to making the site look more professional.

armatav 8y ago
I'd be happy to add that, if you can suggest what kind of typography I should use or take a look at
- rococode 8y ago
  A basic start: bigger font size, drop the underscore (text-decoration: none), change the font color to black or dark gray. You can do a lighter color on hover to make it clear it's a link. Not perfect, but I think it's better than what's live right now. You can browse for a nicer font, too. Plenty of free choices at Google Fonts. End result would be something like this: https://i.imgur.com/c7YJCN9.png https://i.imgur.com/c7YJCN9.png Maybe align the text with the image as well, although vertical aligns are always a big pain to implement haha.
  - dceddia 8y ago
    Flexbox makes vertical alignment a snap. It's even pretty well supported these days: https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox In this case, all you need to do is add "display: flex; align-items: center" to your a tags. After that I'd probably get rid of the margin-bottom on them too. Finally, to visually center everything vertically, remove the margin-top on the img inside the a. A bonus of using display:flex is that it'll fix the wrapping problem where long links wrap underneath the image. With flex, the text will stay on the right, in its own "column".
    - armatav 8y ago
      You are a genius. I was super panicked and couldn't get the working memory going to actually fix the spacing. Thanks!

thrmsforbfast 8y ago

A lot of your news is not just "not-depressing". It's actively uplifting. In fact, most of the stories on the front page are "feel good" stories. It'd be cool/useful if you could provide news on the important issues of the day that's simply "not-depressing". I.e., factual and detached and doesn't elicit emotion, but not explicitly feed-good. (e: forgot to say: nice work!)

armatav 8y ago
Thanks! Yeah I'm thinking of adding a sentiment slider after I get a large amount of news sources going, as well as a "which sources I want to see" selection.

seltzered_ 8y ago

Do you have a main audience (i.e. age range, field of work) you're shooting for? What do you care about seeing in the news? How do you discern between truly good news and 'puff pieces'? One thing I've actually liked is the approach of organizing news of the sad with the good. Deregulation nation ( https://deregulationnation.substack.com/welcome https://deregulationnation.substack.com/welcome ) is an example where the newletters are organized by bad/better/good/great - it's focused around a core topic (environment/Trump) and written by hand.

armatav 8y ago
I don't have a main audience that I'm shooting for, but I think this will attract younger folk - I care about seeing anything other than sensationalism. That's kind of cool, I'll take a look at their site!

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Promote it on Twitter. There are periodically requests there for some kind of relief from negativity. No clue how to monetize it though.

armatav 8y ago
Like just post it on Twitter with a billion related hashtags? Didn't know Twitter people needed relief from negativity, I should do more research.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  There's a lot of politics on Twitter. Sometimes people get overwhelmed and then say stuff like "Send me all your puppy pic feeds." I don't really know how to self promote on Twitter. You will need to figure that part out yourself.
  - armatav 8y ago
    Alright - thanks for the tip man!

ahje 8y ago

The idea seems nice, but: > You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

vntok 8y ago
Here you go: https://www.enable-javascript.com/ https://www.enable-javascript.com/

jonathanstrange 8y ago

It doesn't display any news, just two empty round boxes, on my browser (Firefox), probably due to the privacy extensions I'm using. Disabling uBlock Origin and noScript for the site doesn't change this situation.

tumetab1 8y ago

Doesn't work on Firefox (updated) : "Warning: Invalid DOM property `class`. Did you mean `className`?" and some CORS errors.

Theodores 8y ago

Recently some people rescued a kangaroo from drowning and gave the marsupial some mouth to mouth resuscitation. I shared this story with animal loving members of the family and we were all moved by it, reassured that humanity was out there in this cruel world. However, was it news? This was news in the broader sense of the word but really it was just a human interest story (and maybe a kangaroo interest story). If we look at the divers rescuing boys from a cave story that Elon Musk got so badly wrong then the same criteria can be applied. Yet their rescue certainly was news. But we didn't give as much scrutiny to the thousands of people rescued in Japan from floodwaters at or around the same time. My Japanese neighbours could have done with less of Elon Musk that week and more of Japan. For them the good news of the rescue in Thailand was at a cost of hearing good (and bad) news from Japan. Invariably there is a political aspect to the news beyond human interest stories. For instance, if Donald Trump choked on a pretzel (heaven forbid) and had to leave office due to the calamity then some people would be absolutely delighted, for them this would be 'good news'. Same goes with news regarding the economy. If house prices go up then this is good news to the rent-seeking class but it is not good news for those that are not on the housing ladder and have to pay more money to the rent-seeking class. Even sport has the same problem, if Burkina Faso beat Brazil in the World Cup then a lot of people would be absolutely gutted, it would not be received as 'good news'. Given that you are not in control of the content and are stuck with what you have got in that aspect (copying from Reddit) you might want to do what others in this comment section have suggested - remove the 'not' and the 'depressing' from the title. There is a double negative going on there. My suggestion is to go for something where you don't have to limit yourself to mere human interest stories, take a side but leave the politics aside. If you went with something like 'underdog news' then you would be able to take the side of 'Burkina Faso against Brazil' without a problem, plus you could do a nifty logo. You could also engage with your audience on this basis, get them to mod up/down stories based on whether there was some epic struggle going on with a clear underdog. Small child beating grand master at chess? Clearly epic for the underdog. You can sidestep the Trumps/Brexits of the world with this type of a spin and not decide what is and what isn't 'non depressing'.

sailfast 8y ago

Do you have to curate this, or is it dependent on other curated websites to generate the news? Some sort of ML-backed reading of each story to determine not-depressing vs. depressing? I could see aggregating different curated sites as a potential liability. Was fun to read all the items on your page. Great work!

armatav 8y ago
This MVP is dependent on Reddit, I'm going to start working on a scraper that runs a sentiment analysis on articles (or something) to provide the same effect from every news source available.