Show HN: The best way to discover web comics

6 points by hkuo 14y ago ↗ HN

I came up with the idea for this site a couple weeks ago and spent a few days hacking together an MVP. The basic premise is that there are two opposing issues surrounding web comics: sharing & copyright infringement. Sites like Pinterest make it easy to share comics, but people share the comics in full with no requirement to link to the original source. Other sites like Reddit are sensitive to copyright, thus only showing text links, but it's a very non-visual way of browsing highly visual content.

So I had the idea that showing only the first frame of each comic serves the needs/wants of both creator and audience. The audience gets a fun visual way of browsing all of the latest web comics. But only getting the first frame, they must click through to the original source if they want to enjoy it in full. Thus, the creators receive 100% of the deserved traffic, which comes with their own ad impressions and anything else they are promoting on their websites.

To me, that's kind of a win-win. I'd love to hear any thoughts!

Link: http://www.justthefirstframe.com

3 comments

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hkuo 14y ago ↗

Clickable link: http://www.justthefirstframe.com

mcrider 14y ago ↗

Great idea! I'd suggest as a next step a user account system to store your favorite comics.

Are you manually entering the number of frames or do you automate that? Its sortof a neat gimmick but I'm not sure it really adds much useful information to the UE to be worth lots of extra work.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes I'm manually entering the frames. With the variety of comic styles and the way the frames are bordered, I'm not sure there would be any easy way to write an algorithm that automates this task. But I'm pretty darn fast at Photoshop and it takes me about 15 seconds in all to copy the url, note the number of frames, and crop out/export the first frame.

Regarding a user account system, that's definitely on my feature list. This site is just the result of a weekend of coding, so I just wanted to see if it would garner interest first before investing more time to add more robust functionality.