Ask HN: Please evaluate my reddit-clone

1 points by kaizenfury7 16y ago ↗ HN

I've been thinking about putting a spin on social news and I decided to put up a prototype to test my idea.

The idea/twist is simply this: Use full sentences as a subreddit name.

So instead of subscribing to subreddits:

- worldnews

- technology

You would 'subscribe' to:

- I am interested in world news.

- I am interested in technology news.

You can subscribe to other 'full sentence' subreddits like:

- I love Star Trek.

- I need a student loan.

- I enjoy rock climbing.

- I am worried about the global economy.

Thus, submitting a link would look like:

- Title: Greek tremors continue to rock markets - CNN.com

- URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/05/05/...

- Target this link to people with this profile:

    -- I am interested in world news.

    -- I am interested in technology news.

    -- I am worried about the global economy.

The difference may look minor, but I think it provides an interesting twist on submitting links.

For example, here's another possible submission:

- Title: Star Trek club is more than ‘stereotypical nerds’

- URL: http://www.cw.ua.edu/2010/04/22/star-trek-club-is-more...

- Target this link to people with this profile:

    -- I love Star Trek.

    -- I enjoy rock climbing.

If you want to play around with submitting a link, you can use any of these demo accounts:

hn_demo1

hn_demo2

hn_demo3

hn_demo4

The password for all of them is: hacker

3 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 16.1 ms ] thread

kaizenfury7 16y ago ↗

Clickable link: http://socialnews.targetmyinfo.com/improve_recommendations

pedalpete 16y ago ↗

I'm not sure that that is a large enough differentiator.

If I understand correctly, you're changing 'topics' into sentences. Is that correct?

the nice thing about not having a sentence to assign as a subject is that it is faster for the person adding the link, and doesn't take up as much real estate when navigating.

I was having some serious usability issues with your site. The colors made it VERY difficult to focus on what I was supposed to be looking at. As well, the layout didn't really direct me as to where I should be looking.

Most important, I kept looking at the Social News section, expecting to see the submitted links. Then I thought that maybe i needed to answer the questions before getting the links.

It took a bit before I realized that the links where in the 'recommendations for you' section.

Overall, you've put a huge number of roadblocks between the user and the content, which is a big no-no.

Yes, that's pretty much what I'm doing. I'm experimenting with adding more meaning to a 'topic' or 'tag'. It does make it a more complicated to add a link, but it allows someone to be more expressive in what they want to see in their news. This should in turn allow a submitter to really target their link to the right audience.