Re:Show HN: News site solely based on what people share
by grey-area on Friday June 06, 2014 @05:53PM
(#7860468)
Nicely done - I like the simple styling for pulling in a multitude of news stories and presenting them in a format proven to work for news sites (The Daily Mail uses this for example to pull readers in to other stories). Unfortunately the content doesn't really live up to the website, because it is popular content, not quality content.
I'd love exactly the opposite of this - something celebrating slow news and thoughtful reactions to the world around us. Unfortunately it seems all the pressures in our society militate towards instant and ephemeral bite-sized nuggets of information, and we enjoy novelty and excitement above all. I wonder if there is a place somewhere for quality, even if it is not popular, it might be worthwhile.
Re:Show HN: News site solely based on what people share
by declan on Saturday June 07, 2014 @01:33AM
(#7861399)
Interesting. I like the idea of currently/today's/yesterday's news.
The scores, though, are rather buggy. On the home page right now a Forbes article about Apple's headphone jack is listed twice in the top right with two different scores (8,046 and 7,908).
On the CNBC subpage, Marc Andreessen's interview in which he called Snowden a traitor is listed three times, with three different scores. All are probably very low -- the article was well-discussed online, has 300+ comments, and the discussion topped the HN home page yesterday for a while:
http://newsscale.com/site/cnbc.com
I'd probably narrow categories considerably. Two of the top three articles in "entertainment" deal with random human interest stories (a sick 4-year old and a puppy video). That's what I'd call "cute" or something, but not what most people would think of in an entertainment category.
Similarly, in business the top articles include student debt (should be in personal finance), landlords and dogs (should be in real estate or pets), an Obama story (should be in politics), a musician obituary (should be in music or entertainment), and guns (politics or law enforcement).
The problem is that solving those problems and taking Newscale to the next level requires rather more work than merely crawling RSS feeds and making some calls to Facebook's graph API to get sharing counts. :) I've looked into similar problems while working on creating a recommendation engine and iOS/Android app for personalized news (I quit CBS to found http://recent.io this year) and it gets a bit more difficult from here. Happy to chat offline if you like. I think my email address is in my profile.
Re:Show HN: News site solely based on what people share
by bryanhun on Friday June 06, 2014 @05:45PM
(#7860437)
I found it difficult to scour the web to find the most shared links when building trendn.com. You will find that the top news sites get the most shares, and the little guys never get to the top (unless your scoring takes that into account).
I'd love exactly the opposite of this - something celebrating slow news and thoughtful reactions to the world around us. Unfortunately it seems all the pressures in our society militate towards instant and ephemeral bite-sized nuggets of information, and we enjoy novelty and excitement above all. I wonder if there is a place somewhere for quality, even if it is not popular, it might be worthwhile.
Of course, not all of these viral schlockers are happy about the world they've wrought... http://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5742148/facebook-product-direct...
The scores, though, are rather buggy. On the home page right now a Forbes article about Apple's headphone jack is listed twice in the top right with two different scores (8,046 and 7,908).
On the CNBC subpage, Marc Andreessen's interview in which he called Snowden a traitor is listed three times, with three different scores. All are probably very low -- the article was well-discussed online, has 300+ comments, and the discussion topped the HN home page yesterday for a while: http://newsscale.com/site/cnbc.com
I'd probably narrow categories considerably. Two of the top three articles in "entertainment" deal with random human interest stories (a sick 4-year old and a puppy video). That's what I'd call "cute" or something, but not what most people would think of in an entertainment category.
Similarly, in business the top articles include student debt (should be in personal finance), landlords and dogs (should be in real estate or pets), an Obama story (should be in politics), a musician obituary (should be in music or entertainment), and guns (politics or law enforcement).
The problem is that solving those problems and taking Newscale to the next level requires rather more work than merely crawling RSS feeds and making some calls to Facebook's graph API to get sharing counts. :) I've looked into similar problems while working on creating a recommendation engine and iOS/Android app for personalized news (I quit CBS to found http://recent.io this year) and it gets a bit more difficult from here. Happy to chat offline if you like. I think my email address is in my profile.
I would change "Currently on the Web" to "Currently Trending" or something like that.
Currently on the Web sounds strange as all the articles are on the web.
...although I blame that on what people share rather than the creator of this. The layout and implementation are great.