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An HN Alternative for Long-form Content
- ArekDymalski 13y agoIf the site is aimed at high quality content I'd suggest that the submit page should not be the first thing that the user sees after creating the account. I understand that right now you need users&submissions but in the future it might be beneficial if users will be required to learn a bit about the community (read X posts, take part in Y discussions etc.) before submitting stuff.
- thoughtcriminal 13y agoI'd submit this again. This is too cool.
- colbyaley 13y agoThanks!
- feniv 13y agoIt looks pretty nice! I would suggest that you get rid of the list numbering. It adds little value to the front page (knowing the exact rank of a post isn't very useful) and makes the points a little more confusing.
- dkuntz2 13y agoBut... HN has those...
- jckt 13y agoWow, all this time I've been on HN, I have never, ever noticed those numbers. I must be blind or something.
- feniv 13y agoThe layout makes all of the difference. The numbers aren't right next to each other on hackernews, so there's enough visual difference between the two.
- dkuntz2 13y agoThe numbers weren't right next to them on the list before (they're now gone). The difference is that the point total is under the news item on HN, where the list put it next to it. There was more space between the numbers on the list than on HN. HN is only separated by the up arrow.
- eksith 13y agoI'm curious as to what software they're using. Might be interesting to look at the code for that.
- _mhr_ 13y agoIt says on the site that they're using Ruby and Rails on the about page.
- eksith 13y agoYes, but the Github repo seems to return 404 : https://github.com/jacksonGariety/The-List https://github.com/jacksonGariety/The-List
- iancarroll 13y agoYep, there's a new GitHub repo. Let me pull it up for you. https://github.com/Little-Big-Co/The-List https://github.com/Little-Big-Co/The-List I'll setup a pull request to change the URL.
- eksith 13y agoThanks! I like this approach to karma as well, but I wish the number were hidden altogether and instead had an "excellent", "good", "neutral" or "bad" model for community standing. This can prevent heard mentality for up/down voting.
- gozar 13y agoIs there a license for the code available?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- iancarroll 13y agoIf anyone wants an invite, I'd be happy to give one out if you actually deserve it. You can submit an application on the page, but if you want to send details I'm at ian{dot}carroll{at}snapstudiodesign{dot}com
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- 1123581321 13y agoWhat is your criteria?
- photorized 13y agoI would make the list numbers more subtle (gray), or would remove them altogether. Currently, the two numbers so close together (same size/font) look weird: http://i.imgur.com/nvr6cCC.png http://i.imgur.com/nvr6cCC.png
- mtowle 13y agoYou may want to reconsider the "top 15" thing, and even the pages of content thing, if you're trying to fill the longform niche. I don't know what direction you'd necessarily want to go in, but I do know that the form factor you're using right now is the same one that gave rise to the problem you're trying to solve.
- JacksonGariety 13y agoI'm co-creator of the site. What form factor would you recommend?
- mtowle 13y agoLike I said, I don't necessarily know. I'll tell you what, I'm going to go think about it for an hour and come back. For now, stating the problem correctly will have to suffice: What form factor rewards Depth over Sensationalism? The latter should be understood both in the journalistic sense and in the "wow, that's a cool animated gif" sense. NB: if there's a universal law of content aggregators, it's that the less time it takes to absorb content, the higher its upvote ceiling and the more that category dominates. E.g., on Reddit, imgur > gifs > youtube > political headlines > short articles > your niche. Call me crazy, but you may seriously want to consider doing away with votes, headlines, even the "next" button. I really don't know. Brb in an hour or so.
- JacksonGariety 13y agoThanks for your feedback. All saved in the company notes.
- rubinelli 13y agoHow about working with discrete batches? Update the first page only twice a day. I think this would be enough to drastically changed the dynamics.
- mtowle 13y agoAlright, here's what I've got so far. Constraints: 1. The web as it exists today is largely slanted toward clickthrough. Yes, this means that the Reddit Comment Model dominates, but it also means that the content users link to is sensationalist and, frankly, poor quality, because the publisher doesn't much care how long the user stays, only how many clicks they generate. 2. Content vs. comments. In my web forum experience, which is more extensive than I'd like to admit, form factors tend to favor one or the other, either in terms of quantity or quality. There is no such thing as a high-quantity, high-quality forum; if there were, you wouldn't be trying to make one. 3. Growth vs. loss of cohesion, aka the Eternal September problem. I've seen this solved only twice in countless tries, but each under very unique circumstances. (One of them is r/SRS, which I think is a bunch of silly people, but they've both grown a lot and kept being exactly what they want to be, which is something virtually no online forum can say they've accomplished.) Potential exploits: 1. Your name, The List. You're not a bunch of submissions that happens to appear in ranked order, you're The List. How many items are on The List each day? If the answer is infinite, not much thought went into making the list, which means you aren't a site that rewards depth. One alternative model: Take link/topic "requests" and let users vote on which will appear the next day. This avoids the ever-present problem of reposts, which is what drives away longtime users fastest. Whatever, say, 7 topics win, those 7 items are linked and up for discussion the next day. Losers are cast into the abyss and nothing from that domain can be resubmitted for another week. (Or you could just hand-pick from among the requests. Whatever.) 2. Lack of time-sensitivity. You're trying to be the opposite of the 24-hour news cycle. If somebody has a thought-provoking piece from 2001 about 9/11 (like Hunter S. Thompson's take on the event), then awesome! People would love to see that. But it'll never match up against Fox, CNN, et al., who put food on the table by shortening your memory. So don't let them compete. No news. Fuck news. Why I think the above can defeat Eternal September: First, to characterize the problem: it is not people. People are never the problem. People are largely whatever situation you put them in. Eternal September was Usenet's fault, not the fault of incoming college freshmen, as former Usenet folk like to claim. Take it out of the internet context. What's something else people get sick of? And then are super surprised to find out later that other people are into? I.e., the same way people get into Reddit, enjoy it, decide it's declining, leave altogether, then vomit when they hear it's getting 5B pageviews a month? Music. Top 40. Whatever you're listening to when you're in your teens/20s, you're going to be listening to the rest of your life. But it's not like the Backstreet Boys were so much better than Justin Bieber. (Let me tell you, the people hating on Justin Bieber now freaking loved NSYNC, and I've got the photos to prove it.) It's just that after listening to X amount of music, your tastes are established, and everything new after that sounds the same because it all sounds sufficiently different from what you're used to. How do you defeat that? Change the form factor. No more radio. 5 songs a day. They better be fucking good.
- quasque 13y agoNice, though I seem to have a font-rendering issue on the site, as they appear rather aliased: http://i.imgur.com/173YQ1Z.png http://i.imgur.com/173YQ1Z.png (Windows 7, Chrome 27)
- vxNsr 13y agoSame only Windows 8, Chrome 26
- AlexDanger 13y agoI'm getting weird font rendering on this site: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1325900/Capture1.PNG https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1325900/Capture1.PNG Windows 8 x64, Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m.
- JacksonGariety 13y agoCan you clear cache and try now? Thanks.
- AlexDanger 13y agoStill no good. Are you doing some kind of scaling? It looks much better when I scale to 110% (Chrome and IE), but at the default 100% I get the artifacts. Tried a few different zoom settings, some are ok, some are not. On the HN site I can zoom to any size and the font renders correctly .
- JacksonGariety 13y agoI wish I had a Windows computer to test with. I'd play around with font size in the inspector until I got it rendering correctly. If you can give me a font size that renders correctly I'll change it.
- allannienhuis 13y agohttps://github.com/xdissent/ievms https://github.com/xdissent/ievms super easy way to get windows vms installed on virtual box. Installs as many versions of IE as you want/need, preconfigured on clean vms. The vms are provided by microsoft: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
- AlexDanger 13y agoI'm not a web guy but you might need to check out the root cause, from looking at the inspector I presume you're using google webfonts? this might be related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10953037/google-webfonts-render-choppy-in-chrome-on-windows http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10953037/google-webfonts-... Regarding a windows machine, you can get a free micro windows instance on Amazon AWS.
- ArekDymalski 13y agoI like the karma-tax on posting. Does it also apply to comments?
- colbyaley 13y agoIt does not, actually. We encourage discussion.
- hkmurakami 13y agoAs a faithful reader of longform.org's business section, I am drooling all over this!! Looking forward to being a reader and submitter! :)
- sidcool 13y agoA pretty cool concept. I won't call it an HN alternative though. It's more of HN augmentation.
- ruswick 13y agoAm I the only one who despises the gamification and absurd elitism present in this product? I've neven been fond of exclusivity, and am of the opinion that good content ecosystems are resilient and will surface superior content regardless of the number of people present. The "tragedy of the commons" argument is a total straw man, and if anything is erroneous. HN thrives because of the volume of people and diversity of content. Good content is good content, irrespective of who discovered it or how much notoriety they have. It's not the prerogative of the site to make arbitrary decisions about who ought to be able engage in the discussion or who ought to be able to submit content. Such draconian, "karma"-based restriction will likely preclude the submission of a lot of great stuff and will make it more difficult for newcomers to engage with the site. HN is pretty damn good at surfacing interesting content. Restricting submissions and users in an arbitrary manner is not the way to improve news aggregation.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoTrue. There's nothing to worry about. If it's a bad idea, no one will use it, and it will go away on its own.
- namelesstrash02 13y agoYou are implying that there is not absurd elitism present on HN (which, in my opinion, there very much is) as well as an exclusive environment. For example, while my comment is both an opinion and said in a non-confrontational way, the fact that it's going to be unpopular among the HN elitist crowd will likely mean some sort of negative repercussions (downvote or hellban). For crying out loud, the thread about 'the evolution of HN' on the top of the front page is disallowing comments from "new" users! Holy smokes if that isn't a slap in the face of egalitarian content contribution. And let me be very frank here when I say that if your goal is to attract "hackers" -- and keep them around -- to contribute to items of interest to other "hackers" then it's in your interests to tone down any kind of totalitarian control over the conversation, or you will probably soon run out of "hackers". Your comment that HN thrives because of the volume of people and diversity of content is exactly what paul graham is arguing against in his quotes on the recent TechCrunch article. He is saying that there's a direct correlation between scale and undesirable interaction and content. If that isn't exclusive and elitist, I don't know what is. Again, I hope a fair amount of people get to read this comment before it (and this account) disappears, because it's a glaring problem with this system.
- colbyaley 13y agoSo it appears as if the HN gods have pushed us down to the bottom. Sadface
- thekingshorses 13y agoIf you remove underline, and increase font-size to 21 px for titles, it will look lot better on windows. http://i.imgur.com/7ZKA7gh.png http://i.imgur.com/7ZKA7gh.png