Hey! We created Newsbrane because we were frustrated with the skew between the popular stuff and the quality stuff on social news sites like this one and Reddit. Easy-to-upvote stuff gets to the top quickly, which is not always what you want.
Newsbrane learns your personal tastes, so it avoids this problem. Now whatever's at the top of your recommendations is completely up to you, and if you don't like it, you can change it with a few downvotes. It learns instantly, so just refresh the page after making a few votes either way.
We wrote a more detailed article about this "lowest common denominator problem" and how Newsbrane solves it: http://blog.newsbrane.com/?p=4
Anyway, if you'd try Newsbrane, I'd be appreciative. If you send us feedback -- UI suggestions, security flaws, whatever -- I'll be VERY appreciative. Emailing feedback@newsbrane.com is the easiest way for me, but feel free to post here if it adds to the discussion! I intend to respond to every piece of feedback.
The main question I want to answer is whether it can replace Hacker News for you. If not, why not?
When you first sign up, you'll have to spend a little time training Newsbrane before it's useful. A good way to train it, if you know what you usually want to read, is to click 'Add Subscription' and add the Hacker News feed (or whatever other feeds you like), and vote on the recent articles there.
I'd like to offer a small observation about how you are pitching your idea to this group:
I know you are thinking about how to unseat the competition, but asking people to try out your tool with an eye toward abandoning something that we like is not the best approach, in my opinion.
I don't want to "replace" Hacker News. I assume that I am not alone -- many people are very loyal to HN, and like the community and the information found here. We're not looking to dump it in favor of something else, although if it's a compelling product I might use it in addition to HN.
Hmm. I can see what you're saying. (I'm actually kind of loyal to HN too, but I visit mainly for the comments.) Thanks for the idea -- it's much appreciated!
Yes - suggesting that your product might "replace" HN creates preconceptions in my mind before I get there. I see the link, I imagine startup relevant topics, I see dinosaur comics. WTF? Fail.
Whoops, sorry to give you the wrong preconceptions. If you train it by voting a bunch, you can make it give you whatever topics you like, startup news definitely included. If you don't have the patience to train it, I've heard that feedback before, and that's an axis along which we don't have a good answer yet -- though hopefully we will soon!
You might try making some profile templates that I can start with. The landing page could say, if you like Hacker News, click here, if you like XKCD, click here, etc. Clicking would copy the profile of a user that you have pre-trained with items that are like that site.
I assume the tabs on a story are to represent duplicates? You might want to make them more subtle or not make them at the top. When a tabbed link is shown first on the page, it looks like the entire page is tabbed, and it also makes the site confusing (e.g. is the entire site about Dinosaur comics?).
The tabs show you the same story from different sources. Dinosaur Comics appearing twice with the same content is a bug, oops. :) I agree they can be confusing, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to represent this information without being as confusing.
UI wise I like being able to scan titles quickly, so I can skip content I'm not really interested in. Your site feels like it's just another blog, not a news site.
No, it won't replace HN. It would need good content and less fluff to start. Additionally, it would need a way to quickly scan through the article headlines without having to deal with article content so that you can more easily skip the filler articles. In short, this might be a nice alternative to digg.
What I'm understanding from your post is that the front page needs work. Is this accurate -- you didn't see anything you liked on the front?
(Edit: I also understood that you want to be able to scan the headlines, and that's something that I'm interested in too.)
There's lots of high-quality content in the site (we pull from several hundred RSS feeds), but you are going to have to train it for a while before Newsbrane will learn what you think constitutes quality.
Well, I changed the title of the post in response to feedback that we were setting the wrong expectations.
The old title was "Rate/review -- can it replace HN for you?"
I'm still interested in answering that question, but it's not because I hate HN -- I love it, especially the community -- it's because I feel like there's a niche for personalized news.
I agree that there's a lot of stuff we can do without requiring users to give us specific feedback. And we're doing some of it, and we probably will do a lot more in the future.
But when I'm looking at a news site, I often find myself thinking "this is good" or "I am not interested in this", and Newsbrane allows me to express that preference. It's not the only way we get data into the recommendation engine, but it's an important way.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadNewsbrane learns your personal tastes, so it avoids this problem. Now whatever's at the top of your recommendations is completely up to you, and if you don't like it, you can change it with a few downvotes. It learns instantly, so just refresh the page after making a few votes either way.
We wrote a more detailed article about this "lowest common denominator problem" and how Newsbrane solves it: http://blog.newsbrane.com/?p=4
Anyway, if you'd try Newsbrane, I'd be appreciative. If you send us feedback -- UI suggestions, security flaws, whatever -- I'll be VERY appreciative. Emailing feedback@newsbrane.com is the easiest way for me, but feel free to post here if it adds to the discussion! I intend to respond to every piece of feedback.
The main question I want to answer is whether it can replace Hacker News for you. If not, why not?
When you first sign up, you'll have to spend a little time training Newsbrane before it's useful. A good way to train it, if you know what you usually want to read, is to click 'Add Subscription' and add the Hacker News feed (or whatever other feeds you like), and vote on the recent articles there.
Good luck!
I know you are thinking about how to unseat the competition, but asking people to try out your tool with an eye toward abandoning something that we like is not the best approach, in my opinion.
I don't want to "replace" Hacker News. I assume that I am not alone -- many people are very loyal to HN, and like the community and the information found here. We're not looking to dump it in favor of something else, although if it's a compelling product I might use it in addition to HN.
You might try making some profile templates that I can start with. The landing page could say, if you like Hacker News, click here, if you like XKCD, click here, etc. Clicking would copy the profile of a user that you have pre-trained with items that are like that site.
I assume the tabs on a story are to represent duplicates? You might want to make them more subtle or not make them at the top. When a tabbed link is shown first on the page, it looks like the entire page is tabbed, and it also makes the site confusing (e.g. is the entire site about Dinosaur comics?).
The tabs show you the same story from different sources. Dinosaur Comics appearing twice with the same content is a bug, oops. :) I agree they can be confusing, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to represent this information without being as confusing.
If you want to quickly skip stuff, the shortcut keys (J and K to go up and down) might be good for you. :)
Other than that, we've considered making a condensed view before -- it seems like that might be valuable.
Thanks for being honest!
What I'm understanding from your post is that the front page needs work. Is this accurate -- you didn't see anything you liked on the front?
(Edit: I also understood that you want to be able to scan the headlines, and that's something that I'm interested in too.)
There's lots of high-quality content in the site (we pull from several hundred RSS feeds), but you are going to have to train it for a while before Newsbrane will learn what you think constitutes quality.
The old title was "Rate/review -- can it replace HN for you?"
I'm still interested in answering that question, but it's not because I hate HN -- I love it, especially the community -- it's because I feel like there's a niche for personalized news.
I agree that there's a lot of stuff we can do without requiring users to give us specific feedback. And we're doing some of it, and we probably will do a lot more in the future.
But when I'm looking at a news site, I often find myself thinking "this is good" or "I am not interested in this", and Newsbrane allows me to express that preference. It's not the only way we get data into the recommendation engine, but it's an important way.
Why do you say it is a bad idea?