7 ms·

Hey folks creator here. I often find on sites like HN/Reddit that I tend to mostly just read the headlines/comments and not necessarily the articles themselves.

Hey folks creator here. I often find on sites like HN/Reddit that I tend to mostly just read the headlines/comments and not necessarily the articles themselves. I wanted to build a site that is more aligned with that use case. I was partially inspired by Wikinews but wanted to lower the barrier to entry for participation. On Hoxly News, each story is a collection of facts which link to a source URL. Facts can be independently up/down voted and in aggregate form a TLDR style summary. Stories also support a threaded comments section similar to HN. Instead of ads to fund the site I decided to build a "credit" system where users purchase credits to perform various activities around the site. You can read more about that here: https://news.hoxly.com/credits https://news.hoxly.com/credits. Feedback is appreciated.

pbasista 7y ago
> Feedback is appreciated. Ok. In my opinion: 1. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark. 2. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real content, which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further. 3. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content. Thanks to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the number's length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned. 4. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is not transparent at all. It is also unclear to me why the credits system has been introduced in the first place. The linked page mentions that it is supposed to "limit spam and reward quality contributors". It seems to me that the same goal can be achieved by using upvoting-based reputation system with carefully configured entry barriers that is already in use at many Stack Exchange sites. In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs is to ask for donations. But it needs to be done in a very transparent way. For instance, show a chart of real Google Cloud / Amazon AWS bills offset by donations. People need to be 100% sure that when they donate money to "running costs", it would not end up being used for something else like your new iPhone or a vacation in Mexico. Edit: add line breaks
- misterdoubt 7y ago
  There's a reason that essentially zero websites default to a dark theme. I may be in the extreme end, but in the rare occasion that I find a dark website, if I can't run it through a browser extension to make it light and readable: I leave and never return.
  - pbasista 7y ago
    > There's a reason that essentially zero websites default to a dark theme. Yes, it seems like there is. I am wondering what that reason may be. My preference for dark themes is based on my current typical viewing conditions, which are rooms with low to medium light levels where the brightness of my screen is also low. In such a situation, I do not wish to look at white-themed content because it is uncomfortably bright. In a place with a lot of light, I would not mind the light theme, but it still would not be my preference because of the established habit. With the sun shining directly into the screen, it may even be impossible to use the dark theme, but that is an edge case which, in my opinion, should not affect how a website looks by default. I assume that many theme-related preferences are habit-based. In my opinion, a reasonable UI design should at least allow simple switching between dark and light themes.
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  The credit thing is my only real concern here. As far as I'm concern, upvoting/downvoting isn't fun, it's an act of public service. I'd be incredibly concerned that corporate entities will have huge incentive to buy fact-upvotes and since there is no limit how many they can use, it would take 5,000 good samaritans to undo the damage of 1-shill with $5. Basically a deal-breaker to me that the site is that out-of-touch with the problem of internet news. Frankly, I'd like a news site that does the opposite - 1 vote per proven US citizen (no bots, no foreign influencers, no corporations).
  - thekyle 7y ago
    It seems like the bulk of your concern is about the voting specifically. I'm curious if the voting aspect of the credit system were removed and voting worked more like it does on Reddit/HN (one vote per user), but the other aspects of it were left intact would that alleviate most of your concerns? Specifically, it would still cost credits to leave comments, submit stories and facts, but not to vote.
StreamBright 7y ago
I think I just found a newsfeed that I actually like. Thanks for creating it!
wruza 7y ago
I’ll second misalignment of titles due to numbers in boxes. And I would prefer “10 days” instead of “1 week 3 days ago”. Beyond that, the site seems good for its purpose, and I like how multilink+summaries puts the event above particular sources. Its like someone googled a headline for you and presented you a good results page, instead of providing just one domain and its point of view.
- thekyle 7y ago
  Right now I'm using the Django humanize module for the timestamps. I'll see if there is a way to make it more concise.
canthonytucci 7y ago
Is there an RSS feed?
- thekyle 7y ago
  Yes, I haven't had time to add one for the trending page yet, but the search page has them for every query. For a global RSS use: https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.* https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.* But you can replace the query string with whatever you want.
tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
Oh wow, this is very similar to an idea I've had on the back burner for a while. My idea was to crowdsource small units of information as news - atomic statements that correlate to one "fact". i.e. "There was an accident on highway 70". Users could then upvote or downvote based on a set of criteria (grammar, truth, atomicity, etc). Your site needs some CSS love, but otherwise very cool!
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  I had been playing with something similar, but I’ve come to the conclusion that any anonymous aggregator / community at any scale runs into the same problem: eventually the incentives of the bad actors to behave badly start to outweigh the incentives of good actors to participate productively. Once that happens, it inevitably runs off the good actors behaving somewhat altruistically and leaves you with an increasingly toxic user base that ideologically slants to one extreme or the other. Sure, you can try to play both sides; but then you just end up with 2 toxic user bases at war with each other (which I’m not sure is any better, and certainly more expensive for the platform owner). See also YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Instagram is pretty far down this path as well. Unless you have an editorial process that involves real humans with the ability to censor bad actors, this whole situation seems inevitable (remember private editorial censorship is not government censorship)
NoInputSignal 7y ago
Bug: clicked on "About Hoxly" in the footer menu, from that page (link https://www.hoxly.com https://www.hoxly.com) I was unable to open the top menu (device: Android, browser: Brave)
- thekyle 7y ago
  Alright, thanks for letting me know. I'll look into it. EDIT: Fix rolling out. The page was missing jQuery dependency.

pbasista 7y ago

> Feedback is appreciated. Ok. In my opinion: 1. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark. 2. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real content, which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further. 3. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content. Thanks to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the number's length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned. 4. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is not transparent at all. It is also unclear to me why the credits system has been introduced in the first place. The linked page mentions that it is supposed to "limit spam and reward quality contributors". It seems to me that the same goal can be achieved by using upvoting-based reputation system with carefully configured entry barriers that is already in use at many Stack Exchange sites. In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs is to ask for donations. But it needs to be done in a very transparent way. For instance, show a chart of real Google Cloud / Amazon AWS bills offset by donations. People need to be 100% sure that when they donate money to "running costs", it would not end up being used for something else like your new iPhone or a vacation in Mexico. Edit: add line breaks

misterdoubt 7y ago
There's a reason that essentially zero websites default to a dark theme. I may be in the extreme end, but in the rare occasion that I find a dark website, if I can't run it through a browser extension to make it light and readable: I leave and never return.
- pbasista 7y ago
  > There's a reason that essentially zero websites default to a dark theme. Yes, it seems like there is. I am wondering what that reason may be. My preference for dark themes is based on my current typical viewing conditions, which are rooms with low to medium light levels where the brightness of my screen is also low. In such a situation, I do not wish to look at white-themed content because it is uncomfortably bright. In a place with a lot of light, I would not mind the light theme, but it still would not be my preference because of the established habit. With the sun shining directly into the screen, it may even be impossible to use the dark theme, but that is an edge case which, in my opinion, should not affect how a website looks by default. I assume that many theme-related preferences are habit-based. In my opinion, a reasonable UI design should at least allow simple switching between dark and light themes.
alexandercrohde 7y ago
The credit thing is my only real concern here. As far as I'm concern, upvoting/downvoting isn't fun, it's an act of public service. I'd be incredibly concerned that corporate entities will have huge incentive to buy fact-upvotes and since there is no limit how many they can use, it would take 5,000 good samaritans to undo the damage of 1-shill with $5. Basically a deal-breaker to me that the site is that out-of-touch with the problem of internet news. Frankly, I'd like a news site that does the opposite - 1 vote per proven US citizen (no bots, no foreign influencers, no corporations).
- thekyle 7y ago
  It seems like the bulk of your concern is about the voting specifically. I'm curious if the voting aspect of the credit system were removed and voting worked more like it does on Reddit/HN (one vote per user), but the other aspects of it were left intact would that alleviate most of your concerns? Specifically, it would still cost credits to leave comments, submit stories and facts, but not to vote.

StreamBright 7y ago

I think I just found a newsfeed that I actually like. Thanks for creating it!

wruza 7y ago

I’ll second misalignment of titles due to numbers in boxes. And I would prefer “10 days” instead of “1 week 3 days ago”. Beyond that, the site seems good for its purpose, and I like how multilink+summaries puts the event above particular sources. Its like someone googled a headline for you and presented you a good results page, instead of providing just one domain and its point of view.

thekyle 7y ago
Right now I'm using the Django humanize module for the timestamps. I'll see if there is a way to make it more concise.

canthonytucci 7y ago

Is there an RSS feed?

thekyle 7y ago
Yes, I haven't had time to add one for the trending page yet, but the search page has them for every query. For a global RSS use: https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.* https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.* But you can replace the query string with whatever you want.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago

Oh wow, this is very similar to an idea I've had on the back burner for a while. My idea was to crowdsource small units of information as news - atomic statements that correlate to one "fact". i.e. "There was an accident on highway 70". Users could then upvote or downvote based on a set of criteria (grammar, truth, atomicity, etc). Your site needs some CSS love, but otherwise very cool!

wayoutthere 7y ago
I had been playing with something similar, but I’ve come to the conclusion that any anonymous aggregator / community at any scale runs into the same problem: eventually the incentives of the bad actors to behave badly start to outweigh the incentives of good actors to participate productively. Once that happens, it inevitably runs off the good actors behaving somewhat altruistically and leaves you with an increasingly toxic user base that ideologically slants to one extreme or the other. Sure, you can try to play both sides; but then you just end up with 2 toxic user bases at war with each other (which I’m not sure is any better, and certainly more expensive for the platform owner). See also YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Instagram is pretty far down this path as well. Unless you have an editorial process that involves real humans with the ability to censor bad actors, this whole situation seems inevitable (remember private editorial censorship is not government censorship)

NoInputSignal 7y ago

Bug: clicked on "About Hoxly" in the footer menu, from that page (link https://www.hoxly.com https://www.hoxly.com) I was unable to open the top menu (device: Android, browser: Brave)

thekyle 7y ago
Alright, thanks for letting me know. I'll look into it. EDIT: Fix rolling out. The page was missing jQuery dependency.