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Ask YC: Review my project: meta.li News for Startup Hackers

2 points by zzzmarcus ↗ HN
The link: http://meta.li

The description: I like the Drudge Report. In a glance I get what's happening in politics and major news. Chances are, if I spend 10 minutes reading Drudge I'll up on any major news related topic that comes up in conversation. It also has a sort of scandalous feel to it, which is fun.

I created meta.li as a Drudge-like site for startup news. It pulls from a few sources and ranks them by authority (notably HN, the highest ranked source) and sorts articles based on a number of parameters. I've used it as my primary source of news for a couple months and I'm pretty pleased with it. Feedback is welcome.

4 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] thread
pedalpete
I don't think you need to put 'feedback is welcome' on a entry where you are asking for a review.

I think you may have a bit too much of a crush on "drudge resport' as well. Just like Drudge, your site is almost unusable. Forget the 3 column layout. It might work for them, it doesn't work for you. Your text is too small for headlines. You want to grab the users attention, and make them click, right now, i'm barely reading what you've got.

That top section with the centered text and yellow border, i thought it was an ad and ignored it at first. Now I see it is a headlines section.

In general..not good.

zzzmarcus
Ha. Okay fair enough. 'feedback is welcome' is redundant. You're right.

RE: Drudge. Yes, it is entirely possible that I am just used to seeing it after looking at it daily for about 8 years. I can see how it'd be sensory overload if you're not accustomed to that style of news.

minalecs
initial impression is overload. I tried to scan quickly, and it was just too much. You should do a layout similar to this site, hacker news. Easier to scan for content im interested in.
topynate
Two issues, one with design, the other with your algorithm.

Design-wise, I'm no expert but you need to make better use of space. The grey boxes are spaced too closely together, and the text in each box is too close to the border. The uneven vertical dimensions of each group of boxes is subtly disturbing and stops me taking in the content. Your colour palette is a bit odd too.

Algorithmically, you're relying too much on your "authority" rankings. The result is that the top of your site is over-stuffed with HN links. My solution would be to assign an "exhaustion" parameter to each source. Each time your algorithm picks the next article to show, it increments the exhaustion parameter for that source. Then you can just subtract the exhaustion parameter from the authority score in order to give other sources a chance for the remaining space on the page. Tweak the weighting of the parameter to taste.