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Show HN: Rank a random subject every day (rankaday.com)

40 points by pattle ↗ HN
Hi my name is Chris, I'm the creator of Rank a Day.

I don't know if it's just me but I love ranking things and discussing them like "Who's the best sports person?" or "What's the best Matt Damon film?", so I decided to create a simple web app that gives you a random topic to rank every day.

Once you've selected your top 3 answers you can submit them, see how they compare against other peoples answers and share them on social media.

I have a few Whatsapp groups I'm in and every morning we share our answers, it's just a really good conversation starter.

I'd appreciate any thoughts and feedback.

Thanks!

49 comments

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jiffygist
I'm interested what are the logistics of adding new topics for such "random thing every day" sites. I would guess that you maybe have a queue with topics for the next few days that you add to whenever you have fresh ideas. What would happen if you forgot to add new topics?
derbOac
This is fun.

A couple of things:

It's a bit confusing because I wasn't ranking anything, I was voting for things. I thought I was going to rank the three things I selected, for instance. Some explanation of this might be helpful.

Maybe it's just because there's so many fruits I like, but I would have liked to pick more than 3. I was left feeling like the 3 didn't reflect much meaningful about my preferences, and was mostly about attention at that moment. Choosing up to 10 seems better to me. Or better yet, why not have it be unlimited? Unlimited with ranking? Unranked are set equal and last (except for unranked)?

thaumasiotes
I like the current system; it makes different users' choices comparable to each other, so the overall ranking shown afterwards is conceptually coherent. "Unlimited choices ranked by ordinal numbers" would make everyone incomparable with everyone else.
badcppdev
I personally hate this concept because it treats the world as a homogenous group where the largest number of people with a common opinion is noteworthy. It's as bad as the "Top ten songs from the 70s" or "New and Trending" anything. It's a process that literally destroys the diversity of human thought.

Rant over. Sorry Chris, but for me the Tayberry which is the bottom of your results page at the moment is a trillion times more interesting than Apple, Banana, and Mango at the top.

danem
In what way does it “destroy” diversity? Do you think anyone is persuaded by these rankings to change their beliefs?

It’s just a fun game and maybe an interesting insight into the minds of English speaking reddit/hacker news users.

pattle
I don't think it destroy diversity, people can still choose what they want. It's just a fun way to see how your choices would compare to the masses.

Also for what it's worth my top 3 were Mango, Gooseberry and Tayberry

batch12
Today, I learned that there's a thing called tayberry. So maybe destructive to the diversity of human thought is a bit of an exaggeration.
Chris2048
The problem is it assumes perfect knowledge of all the options. People should be able to remove the influence of their ranking for fruits they are not familiar with.
thaumasiotes
It might be fun if you allowed people to submit reasons or categories that make their choice the best. Today is "best fruit". What if I could submit the subcategory "best as a basketball substitute" and other people started populating that?

I'm imagining something like this:

1. I pick the three best fruits.

2. You show me the table of which fruits are the best fruits.

3. To the side, there's a list of subcategories, ways to be the best. Choose which ones display by some combination of recency and how many votes they have.

4. If I click on one of those, I vote for three fruits from the master list, and see another table for that category.

0. Somewhere there's a way for me to submit a category.

indigoabstract
Bananas, apples and watermelons. I have pretty mainstream (or predictable) tastes it seems. Nice!
martyvis
I noticed that Apple and Banana rank in the top two. While clearly they are very familiar fruit to your audience, they are also near the beginning of the alphabet. I wonder if alphabetical order creates a bias.
pattle
I changed it so they are ordered randomly now. Let see if that makes a difference. Having them in alphabetical does make it easier to find what you want but there is a search.

For some questions I'm going to have to display the answers in some kind of fixed order, for example chronological order for films

mysterydip
I was just coming here to ask if it could be alphabetical because the list is so long I can't find anything :) Maybe do Z-A instead?

There's also so many fruits I've never heard of that I feel like my opinion of which is best would be inaccurate (maybe that's the point?)

sebstefan
A to Z but reversed 50% of the time is the way to go to avoid bias while still being sorted one way or another
sys13
There's a lot of possible choices presented to the user, some of them totally out there like 'Ximenia'. Maybe there should be fewer choices, or can group them by what the author might guess are the common choices (where I can focus my attention), then a group with the less common choices. More elaborate things are possible like dynamic grouping and using web/LLM searches to come up with the initial choices.
pattle
The problem I have with this, is if I reduce the choices to the more popular ones I always get people complaining like "How come dragon fruit isn't on there?!"

But I agree that for questions like this where there are a lot of potential answers, then it can be overwhelming.

hooby
Funny.

The question asks "what is the best fruit?" - but the answers only show you what the most widely available fruits are.

Anything that's lesser known or more expensive to mass produce or harder to ship fresh - is a complete non-starter to begin with, regardless of how good it is.

throwaway0665
It's also unlikely that an unpopular fruit would win a popularity contest.
hooby
My grandmother once told me, that she had never known strawberries in her childhood. She had known those tiny wild ones - but not the large garden strawberry we today know as THE strawberry.

Her favorite childhood berry was the mulberry - a berry completely unknown to me. Out of curiosity, I tried getting mulberries - but since those grow on trees which only start bearing fruit after 10 years of growth (!!!) - those can't be produced at a commercially viable price point.

It wasn't until years later, that I found a mulberry tree in an old cloister garden, of a cloister that specialized in preserving old strands of plants that were no longer being commercially grown.

They are really tasty! If they were actually available, I could easily see them become just as popular as other berries.

thaumasiotes
> Out of curiosity, I tried getting mulberries - but since those grow on trees which only start bearing fruit after 10 years of growth (!!!) - those can't be produced at a commercially viable price point.

That doesn't seem to follow. If nothing else, there are a lot of existing mulberry trees.

hooby
Here where I live they've definitely been completely displaced by berries that grow on just shrubs or even less.
thih9
This list of fruits includes avocados, but not olives - both are arguably fruits. There are more: https://www.treehugger.com/vegetables-are-actually-fruits-48...
pattle
Sorry I did exclude those fruits which people typically mistake as vegetables like tomatoes. Otherwise the list would have been too long.
umanwizard
It is not a “mistake”, it’s just two separate meanings of the word fruit. I find it annoying that some technical field assigned a meaning to a term that had already in wide use for hundreds of years and then people started claiming that people using it in the original way are “wrong”.
NeoTar
It’s surprisingly common.

A more extreme version is what I call the Stonehenge cycle:

- humanity names something, e.g. Stonehenge,

- humanity finds other, somewhat similar things, and names them similarly, e.g. Woodhenge, Seahenge,

- people studying the field realise that the term has become so broad as to lose any meaning, and attempt to create a tighter definition of what a thing is - e.g. a ‘henge’ is ‘ a roughly circular or oval-shaped bank with an internal ditch surrounding a central flat area’

- the original thing no longer qualifies under the new definition, e.g. Stonehenge is not a ‘henge’.

thaumasiotes
It's weird for olives to be excluded though. They've never been considered "vegetables" as opposed to "fruits".
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skribanto
Aren’t fruits only plants which contain seeds? Like a celery would not be a fruit
dlazaro
Mostly. There are some “seedless” fruits (bananas, grapes, etc) which have been bred to be defective, or have become defective because of some natural mutation. [1]

There’s also fruits like coconuts, which don’t have seeds like we normally think of them. The coconut we eat after removing outer layers (exocarp, mesocarp) is a seed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenocarpy

dlazaro
Spinach, onions, celery, broccoli, bok choy, carrots… These are certainly not fruits. Vegetable is a culinary term, but so is fruit.

Outside the context of a botany classroom, you’re going to have a hard time finding people who respond to the question “Is cucumber a vegetable or a fruit?” with the answer “fruit, of course!”

Chris2048
Isn't "which is best" a culinary distinction?

Comparing sweets fruit to savoury might not make sense in this context, though this is one instance were we can compare apples to oranges..

stabbles
Would probably be better to show X and Y and let people select which is better (or skip), and compute an ELO score. A list with hundreds of items isn't great
thatwasunusual
I was about to say the same thing. A trillion options is just unmanageable.

One (other) solution is to create a tiny algorithm that lets the user choose the best one compared to another, and do this maybe three times. Could be done on the same page, of course.

So you have to choose between:

* Blueberry or strawberry?

* Raspberry or apple?

* Banana or raisin?

pattle
That would be good but I wanted to make an app where you just do a simple, fun task every day. With an ELO rating system you can just keep going and going whereas with this it only takes a minute or so
sebstefan
Doing it your way it will just end up being a ranking of things that are kind of okay, but comes up first in your mind.

ie: apples

(Still upset blackberries are only 20th)

floodle
> simple, fun task every day

Honestly, comparing two options is much more fun than scrolling through a massive list and trying to figure out what your favourite item is

smusamashah
With current approach, i will only look at first few items and pick my ratings from there.
jiwidi
Try to shuffle the order of options to avoid bias (you can see apple and banana at top, both also in the beginning of the alphabet)
BenoitP
Apple is #1, but a lot of other fruits are way less known. This is the equivalent of every not-well-thought map visualization being a population density map.
umanwizard
I have never heard of “kiwifruit” in my life. In the U.S. I and everyone else (AFAIK) just call them “kiwis”. Is “kiwifruit” really the full name?
dalore
Because in Australia and New Zealand, a Kiwi is someone from New Zealand.
jpsouth
I had absolutely no idea the Monstera Deliciosa produced fruit!

Nice idea, thanks for sharing.

streamfunk191
I really like the general idea. I’m constantly doing this solo or with friends so good to see what others think. The long lists are a difficult UX, not sure how you completely get around that. Glad to see mango second (at the time of posting)