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Ask HN: How can we improve our website?

3 points by weston ↗ HN
Hi HackerNews,

My name is Weston and we launched http://SwarmSports a few months ago. We provide sports fans with a quick overview of the top news articles daily.

Our website is sort-of a hybrid between the new Digg and TweetMeme. That means, some of our content is hand curated and some is automated.

What we're looking for is any feedback in how we can improve the website and if it's good. We're still Beta.

Also, any advice on getting the word out to users?

Thanks!

6 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] thread
agentsaran
How do you calculate the viral rank? How about letting users visiting your site, upvote/downvote articles? More importantly, for a sports website, I think the style/theme of your site is too simple. Check this for example: http://bleacherreport.com/. what I really like about your site is that's its ad free.
weston
Hi AgentSaran, thanks for commenting!

• Without giving away our 'secret sauce,' the ViralRank is calculated based on a users actions on the original article. As an example: If you click on a link from SwarmSports and then Like the article on Facebook, we take the action into our calculations.

• That's a good idea about the upvoting/downvoting! For right now, we're simply trying to make sure the content is relevant and the ViralRank is calculating correctly. Eventually we'll add more stuff like upvoting/downvoting directly on our site. Thanks for the idea!

• We're trying to stay super simple right now since we're still MVP/Beta. Eventually we'll add more stuff. BleacherReport is a very good site and we give them kudos for their huge exit to Turner.

• We actually come from an ad-tech background. We're avoided ads so far since we're still MVP. Once we get enough traffic, we'll probably ad advertising... or go the Wikipedia route and survive off of donations.

Thanks again for the awesome feedback! :-)

wikwocket
Try submitting the site to criticue.com. You can pose a question for reviewers to answer. I have gotten some good, actionable feedback for my sites this way.
weston
Awesome, thanks for the tip!