I made this project to help myself stay up to date with automotive industry because I love cars and anything related to them. It gathers the latest automotive news from more than 20 auto portals. Allows users to submit articles, comment, and upvote. I got quite literally inspired by HN and was mindblown why such a thing does not exist for automotive industry.
Also users can subscribe to a newsletter that delivers top 10 articles of the week every Monday morning.
Thank you in advance for any feedback! And happy to reply to any questions.
Congratulations on shipping a thing! I have to say though, creating a place to submit links and invite or comment doesn’t mean it’s “a Hacker News for X” - what makes HN what it is is the community. Do you have any thoughts on how you could build a community around this project?
Hi and thanks a lot. I 100% agree with you on the community factor - that was the main motivation behind my project - however to get your hobby project up and running I needed to bring some content in first - therefore the automation. I've reached out to all my peers (i'm ex-automotive engineer) and they've started using it - some of them on daily basis. However once I've reached my network limits - I've started launching to relevant communities - PistonHeads, reddit/r/AutomotiveEngineering, product hunt and now HN. I am hoping to that there will be a cross-section of users that love cars and will stick and start posting content themselves.
I'm not sure I'd say it's "HN for ..." though. The automated(?) news aggregation and newsletter features seem pretty different from HN's Spartan style and entirely user-submitted content.
Hi, thx! The great aspect of HN, as you say and for me is also the community curation of relevant content. I've automated the inputs of the most popular automotive portals to get in some initial content. However the community - by clicking, sharing, commenting then decides which articles make it to the top. And of course they can submit their own articles - if it gets enough traction - I will consider switching of the popular.
If some of them are aggregated, while others are submitted, it is not clear to me to tell them apart, nor where an aggregated story came from. One just says "Submitted by Carol", but I cannot click on the name to learn anything more.
I also notice you hotlink all the images, you might want to contemplate re-hosting the images yourself, or abandon the images altogether.
Hi, thanks for the feedback. In the long term, you will be able to click and see the user behind the submission. However it's still in TODO column atm. But will def add it as this feedback is so valid. Good shout about splitting the automated/submitted content.
I think I like the autosubmissions, sometimes it's silly that a story HN will definitely discuss has to be found and submitted by someone. There are certain sites one could arguably auto-submit to HN, though HN is popular enough to just not need it.
I've spent much of my career in the auto industry (Tier 1 supplier), and I couldn't agree more. I'm even a "car guy," but I could care less about exotic cars, which most of what appears on autonews.io.
The pressure to make money out of it will turn your forum into what could be another subreddit. To repeat HN you'd need to remove pictures (they invoke emotions and attract unsophisticated audience) and all the marketing fluff, hire a team of people who deal with autos on day to day basis (mechanics, salesmen, dealship owners, pro racers, stars like the ex Top Gear team) and advertise everywhere that here's the no bs forum about autos. Wait for 10 years and you'll get a critical mass of audience. You'd still have to pay expensive mods. On top of that you'll have to figure a non-ads business model to support the forum.
Lots of people here are saying the UI and images detract from the site. I think it is possible that people who are into cars are different than people who are into hackery, and that perhaps this criticism should be discarded.
Thanks for the feedback. The main reason why I went for the combination of pictures and text was that many car enthusiast like the visual aspect of cars and therefore I kept the images as well.
For what's its worth - Circular images are a fad created for avatars (pictures of people with their heads fitting inside the circle). You're showing images embedded in the article and IMO should be rectangular.
I think the thumbnails add too much white space between headlines and doesn't actually show enough to be useful. Like if there's a press release of a new model or spy photos, I want to see all the pictures from all angles and not a zoomed in crop of a singular headlight. As of right now I'm only see 3 thumbnails of the top 10 with a picture of a vehicle.
Also (old.)reddit already does the small thumbnail and headline thing. I like the hackernews layout for its information density.
> Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is.
>
> There's good waste, and bad waste. I'm interested in good waste-- the kind where, by spending more, we can get simpler designs. How will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware?
This might seem facetious, but the cookie warning really threw me off. It doesn't really matter, I canbjust click past it, but instantly in my head:
"This isn't HN for anything. Some marketing something or other I guess..."
I think, for a dedicated/techy crowd, little things like a cookie warning mean a lot. To me it screams crap. I can't think of a single website I use enjoy using regularly that included a cookie warning. I think Reddit added a cookie warning when their UI went to shit.
Hi, I honestly hate the cookie banner myself - that's why I made it as much invisible as possible. But I'm using Google's Firebase for user authentication and therefore it uses cookies. I also store your choice of theme dark/light into a cookie so it's there for you next time. I believe that's why I have to have the banner there. Or am I wrong?
You probably shouldn't backend on a Google service if you value your users' privacy.
The theme cookie is easier to solve: Use CSS media preferences instead and use people's browser settings to choose it. That being said, cookie warnings may not be necessary if you aren't storing anything personally identifiable.
Per my understanding of GDPR you only need the cookie warning for cookies unrelated to your site's fundamental operation. Admittedly, I'm not a lawyer and I've not really liked too closely at it, but I don't think you need a warning just because you use a cookie.
I always thought that for purely functional cookies (like storing theme preferences) the banner is uncalled for. Is there a place I can read more about? I guess this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction? This (cookie compliance) is a mess...
Not a big fan of the use of space compared to hn. On hn on mobile I can clearly see the headlines for 13 stories, on the automotive one, I get 6, meaning i have to scroll a whole page just to see as many stories as I can at a glance on hn. With one quick scroll, i can see an entire hn page, to get to the bottom of autonews I had to scroll 5 times and scroll past an annoying subscribe bar placed in the middle.
I don't really feel like it captures hn's ease of use and simplicity.
Thanks, I was actually exactly thinking the same when I was comparing autonews.io vs HN. But I would have to compromise the images if I wanted to make it more concise, and I've decided not to.
I don't think the images are a problem. Like the other commenter said i think it's the use of whitespace. The story feed seems quite narrow compared to hn. There's lots of deadspace to either side. I think you could increase the usage of space while not compromising on the images.
Please too, put the subscribe thing at the bottom of the page, not the middle. That just reminded me of a midpage banner add. It disrupted the reading flow very obviously.
We need to own this and say HN design is far superior vast majority of web design out there. It has nothing to do with us getting old and it only gives excuses to people to not be inspired by it.
Because then it's not proper "Hacker News for X", of course! /jk
(Although it has to be said that HN's rejection of complexity -- the exact opposite of your approach of embracing it with all those javascripty thingies -- does have something going for it.)
Great website, you seemed to have worked hard on it.
Some feedback if you don't mind it.
1. How about moving the domain of the article posted beside the post title (like HN)? This maintains the flow of reading. I read the post title and then I can see the source of the article on it's right.
2. You seem to have a separate URL for each post ( EG: https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3...) but I couldn't find any way of accessing an individual post's URL from the front page. Had to dig into the HTML. Maybe clicking on the timestamp copies the post link or takes you to the individual post's URL?
3. Dark mode toggle is very confusing (https://i.imgur.com/V0MrNlA.png). Don't switch the icon after each toggle. Put an icon (indicating dark or light mode) outside the toggle and then let users change based on that (https://i.imgur.com/1wyE6si.png) .
4. Don't automatically open links in a new tab. HN doesn't do that. Let users ctrl+click if they want to open it in new tab if they want to.
There definitely is an overlap, big one. I built it for this reason: I am a automotive engineer. I come to work in the morning, make myself a coffee and open autonews.io, click on 2-3 articles that interest me, read them, done with my coffee, ready to work, I'm up to date with latest news in industry - so maybe the combination of news feed plus community submitted articles is different. Hope it is!
Not op, but seems like he's (potentially) creating a focused, niche community, maybe with better moderation. Or maybe he's going for the exact same thing. There's no reason to differentiate from what one subreddit does. Many of us don't like reddit.
/r/cars focuses primarily on performance ICE vehicles, specifically sports cars and some offroading. It seems like most subjects on OP's site cater towards EV's, hybrids and general non-enthusiast subjects. As a huge performance car enthusiast, there were only a couple links within the past few days that were of interest to me.
Makes me wonder about hacker news having tags/categories. You can ignore them (they're just metadata) but also filter by them if you choose. (show me "automotive" posts)
For the same reasons being a coder isn't necessary to criticize code. Anybody can do it, but chances are your opinions are a lot less informed than you realize.
It depends. If you don't know how to code and you're commenting on language or framework choice (e.g. "it's electron therefore bad") or something like that, then your opinion is probably invalid. On the other hand, if you're comment is something like "This app doesn't work like I want" then it really doesn't matter if you have the slightest idea how to implement what you want.
Likewise, a non-designer offering opinions on design philosophy or alternate styles is probably pretty useless. A non-designer saying the thing is awkward/ugly/confusing/whatever is informative though.
This isn't a great comparison. The only people that need to read (and know how to read) code are coders. A non-coder can't criticize code.
This is not the same for UX (or restaurants, films or cars from my other example) as these are things that everyone interacts with and understands to some extent despite not doing so in a professional capacity.
That is the problem though. As a consumer you’ll never get to know the intricacies of how things are made and why. The biggest problem at least here on HN is that hardly anyone knows how to articulate their (however valid) critiques, and therefore fallback to cliches and easy-to-quote “laws” that are quite irrelevant among design practitioners.
You don't need to know how something was built in order to critique the experience of using it.
A non designer is not going to be good at identifying solutions to problems because that does require knowledge about how the sausage is made, but they should certainly be listened to when identifying problems. Not doing so would be madness.
(Not to mention a lot of the commenters on here that you're decrying as "non designers" probably do have experience with design, considering the userbase of HN)
The whole point of UI/UX is to provide a good experience for users. Users know when they are having a good experience and part of the role of a UI/UX practitioner is to collect and synthesise this feedback.
A practitioner who ignores feedback and says "who's the UX professional here?" is not a very good one.
I may indeed not know the intricacies of web design. But I do know when the "modern" UIs are unable to scroll smoothly. It's full of not moving, then a giant lurch to somewhere else. Worse, random new content will suddenly appear causing my view to randomly move to some other part of the page.
This disease infects an awful lot of "modern" web sites.
I work at an automotive-related tech firm so in principle this looks great and useful. I do think the design could be simpler, more like old reddit or HN, to maximize the amount of information presented to the user. There also appears to be a moderation problem, especially on the current top post, so I can't really share it with colleagues yet ;)
For those viewing this in the future after this has (hopefully) been fixed, it's one user spamming comments with exactly the slur you'd expect a dozen times.
I like it and, to tell the truth, I may end up reading it rather than subscribing to Motor Trend, the way I no longer feel a need to get science magazines because of r/Science!
great idea, remove the thumbnails, they serve no purpose. If you want a thumbnail, make it topic related. So like a politics/legislation thumbnail, new product thumbnail, etc that way it is easy to determine what the story relates too. I guess it'd be equivalent to flair on reddit
The reason I use HN is because it is simple. Nothing fancy. Just text. Copy that please. And please add more indepth tech links. Not just company press release links
This site (cool intent, good luck) highlights what HN does really well, because this site doesn't go deep on a refined textual experience. HN has a very simple user experience, deep content, and yet remarkably little abuse or junk content. There must be a great deal going on behind the scenes for this clean look and feel, free of abuse. How are bots suppressed? How are abusive users and content avoided? Insight into what that looks like would be most appreciated!
That's what I'm trying to figure out at the moment. Want to bring commenting back asap, but need to come up with clever way to block trolls...maybe a time window between registration and allowance of commenting + some sort of minimum karma - like you'd have to click on certain number of articles before you can comment. First thoughts. Will read up a bit on it.
210 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadI made this project to help myself stay up to date with automotive industry because I love cars and anything related to them. It gathers the latest automotive news from more than 20 auto portals. Allows users to submit articles, comment, and upvote. I got quite literally inspired by HN and was mindblown why such a thing does not exist for automotive industry.
Also users can subscribe to a newsletter that delivers top 10 articles of the week every Monday morning.
Thank you in advance for any feedback! And happy to reply to any questions.
Peter
I'm not sure I'd say it's "HN for ..." though. The automated(?) news aggregation and newsletter features seem pretty different from HN's Spartan style and entirely user-submitted content.
I also notice you hotlink all the images, you might want to contemplate re-hosting the images yourself, or abandon the images altogether.
Do make it clear which are auto-submitted though.
From a cursory glance it seems more like a "car enthusiast" news site rather than a place for industry discussion.
What are good car sites?
I would prefer to see items like advancement in tyre technology, or improvements in passenger safety, or reduction in energy consumption.
Also (old.)reddit already does the small thumbnail and headline thing. I like the hackernews layout for its information density.
Paul Graham wrote about automobile design in an essay.
http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html
Or this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/design.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
> Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is. > > There's good waste, and bad waste. I'm interested in good waste-- the kind where, by spending more, we can get simpler designs. How will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware?
"This isn't HN for anything. Some marketing something or other I guess..."
I think, for a dedicated/techy crowd, little things like a cookie warning mean a lot. To me it screams crap. I can't think of a single website I use enjoy using regularly that included a cookie warning. I think Reddit added a cookie warning when their UI went to shit.
The theme cookie is easier to solve: Use CSS media preferences instead and use people's browser settings to choose it. That being said, cookie warnings may not be necessary if you aren't storing anything personally identifiable.
I don't really feel like it captures hn's ease of use and simplicity.
Please too, put the subscribe thing at the bottom of the page, not the middle. That just reminded me of a midpage banner add. It disrupted the reading flow very obviously.
It's a terrible spot for it.
I wonder if part of the appeal of HN is it has no images?
But I like seeing it tailored a little more towards the target audience.
Yoink, I’ll definitely be borrowing that. Thanks!
(Although it has to be said that HN's rejection of complexity -- the exact opposite of your approach of embracing it with all those javascripty thingies -- does have something going for it.)
Some feedback if you don't mind it.
1. How about moving the domain of the article posted beside the post title (like HN)? This maintains the flow of reading. I read the post title and then I can see the source of the article on it's right.
2. You seem to have a separate URL for each post ( EG: https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3...) but I couldn't find any way of accessing an individual post's URL from the front page. Had to dig into the HTML. Maybe clicking on the timestamp copies the post link or takes you to the individual post's URL?
3. Dark mode toggle is very confusing (https://i.imgur.com/V0MrNlA.png). Don't switch the icon after each toggle. Put an icon (indicating dark or light mode) outside the toggle and then let users change based on that (https://i.imgur.com/1wyE6si.png) .
4. Don't automatically open links in a new tab. HN doesn't do that. Let users ctrl+click if they want to open it in new tab if they want to.
1. Unauthenticated: try to add comment.
2. Error that you need an account to comment.
3. Create account
4. Attempt to submit the comment typed in one.
Expected: Comment submitted successfully.
Actual: Something went wrong.
I personally use Hacker News without JavaScript, and was expecting/hoping the same would work for autonews. But, alas. It gets stuck at "Loading..."
Still, wish you all the best with autonews, and hope you can build a tailored community of automotive enthusiasts.
Cheers, Robin
https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3...
Edit: They fixed it! Nice.
You don't only read restaurant reviews from restaurant owners, or movie reviews from filmmakers, or car reviews from automotive engineers do you?
Likewise, a non-designer offering opinions on design philosophy or alternate styles is probably pretty useless. A non-designer saying the thing is awkward/ugly/confusing/whatever is informative though.
This is not the same for UX (or restaurants, films or cars from my other example) as these are things that everyone interacts with and understands to some extent despite not doing so in a professional capacity.
A non designer is not going to be good at identifying solutions to problems because that does require knowledge about how the sausage is made, but they should certainly be listened to when identifying problems. Not doing so would be madness.
(Not to mention a lot of the commenters on here that you're decrying as "non designers" probably do have experience with design, considering the userbase of HN)
A practitioner who ignores feedback and says "who's the UX professional here?" is not a very good one.
This disease infects an awful lot of "modern" web sites.