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Note: I had to put the description here because it didn't show below the title. So, this is my second attempt at building something people want. How am I doing
by waleedka 19y ago
Note: I had to put the description here because it didn't show below the title.
So, this is my second attempt at building something people want. How am I doing? ZoooV is a social news site for niche subjects. Here is why I built it:
With the big social news sites: Digg, reddit, and recently after the name change, news.yc, the discussions tend to become more general as the communities grow because we, the readers, have different interests. And because of that, only what's common to everyone goes to the top. Smaller communities have more focus, but it's hard for them to survive because there is less to read, and therefore, we tend to visit them less often and eventually forget about them.
I'm trying to solve this by keeping the communities smaller and focused, but allow the individual reader to choose the communities they like and I create a custom page for them where they only see what they're interested in. This way, even though the individual communities might have low volume of stories, the reader will always find something interesting to read in one of his communities or the other. It's like how an RSS reader allows us to keep track of low volume blogs because we don't have to remember to visit each one of them.
- darragjm 19y agoi like the idea of customized social news gathering, but i'm not sure if a community structure is the right way to do it. i don't think most people want to limit themselves to a particular community of stories. most of us have pretty broad interests and, while we may want to read more about a particular field over other fields, that doesn't necessarily mean we want to read ONLY about that field. i envision a system where you sign up for an account and you subscribe to your own personal RSS feed with content similar to Digg/Reddit and over time the site learns your interests based on the stories that you click on from your RSS reader. each feed would have user-generated tags associated with it and will begin showing more (but perhaps less popular) feeds that share tags with feeds that you've previously viewed. over time, your personalized RSS would contain only feeds that it knows you're interested in, and the random feeds it included at the beginning in order to learn your interests would gradually be phased out. the layout of the site is great though. i'm just not into the community/forum idea too much.
- waleedka 19y agoI guess there might be a misunderstanding here. The idea behind Zooov is that you can join multiple communities at once, not just one. Then, your home page will show the communities you joined all in one page (but in separate sections, like Google News). Your idea addresses the same problem from a different angle, and it's a good idea, actually. Though it's much harder to implement.
- apgwoz 19y agoI don't really see how this is much different from my.reddit.com, but I could be missing something... EDIT: sorry, I jumped the gun before I started reading more of the discussion. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.
- omouse 19y agoi like the idea of customized social news gathering, but i'm not sure if a community structure is the right way to do it. i don't think most people want to limit themselves to a particular community of stories. I think The WELL was structured similarly to this site.