5 ms·

Show HN: More feedback for Show HN stories

57 points by rchodava 9y ago

vineet 9y ago
I love the idea of getting more feedback to people building things. It will be awesome to not just provide feedback that is 'shallow', i.e. sentiment, but to make it easier to provide more constructive feedback. Perhaps dig into the past 100K comments on Show HN's, categories them, and make it easy to put a large set of them. Leaving comments for more detailed discussions. One challenge though is that development.kitchen is pulling content out of HN in this way. It might be handy if you had a browser extension that injected the content back into the site so that people could easily see existing feedback.
- rchodava 9y ago
  Thanks for the feedback vineet. Digging through past comments is a good idea and the quick reactions were in a way derived by doing that - we looked at Show HN comments and tried to distill them down to just a few. As you can imagine, its not easy to capture everything. We are looking at making the selection a bit more expansive but still quick to add. A browser extension is an interesting idea - this is something that was a bit of a struggle to figure out how to make it easier to see feedback from HN. We played around with importing comments from HN and had our own comments on the site along with HN comments, but merging the two was a bit confusing since you couldn't comment on HN from within DevKitchen. We're still trying to improve how this works.
internalfx 9y ago
Like it, wish I could re-submit some new libraries that got nothing. It's probably my fault for posting them late in the day. It was frustrating to see my library slide down the "new" page while a bunch of posts from news sites filled the top.
no_protocol 9y ago
I really enjoy commenting on Show HN posts here but I can hardly think of a time where I would have responded with something as simple as an up or down arrow with one of these short responses. Since this is mostly a UI improvement attempt, I guess you're basically just competing with https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show? My biggest issue with this approach is it seems like a "poll" of arrows isn't really going to give enough useful feedback to be meaningful. If I've taken the time to actually review a Show HN, I'm not going to skimp out on the feedback phase by using a 1-click option. I'll probably have 3-5 paragraphs to write out. Psychologically, it seems a bit rude to leave just a down arrow on someone's best effort project without explaining it. An up arrow alone seems fine. Of course, HN already has these built in. If you want quick-hit feedback, can you also include a textbox for typing a quick note in addition to the short reasons already there? A popup bar alerting about cookie usage is extremely off-putting to me and was almost enough to get me to just close out of the site before doing a review. If there is anything you can do to stop using so many cookies that you need to warn users of them.... The entire list isn't that long, can you get a deeper backlog? The /show page lists them chronologically which seems pretty nice to me since then a DevelopmentKitchen user can always pick up where they left off. You're currently sorting them some other way and it doesn't quite make sense? If I'm going to use JUST this site to monitor Show HNs, I'll want to know which ones I've seen and which I haven't. Good luck!
- rchodava 9y ago
  Thanks, I can understand the feeling about the depth of feedback here. And I agree when I have felt compelled enough to give feedback on an idea, usually it had a bit more depth than a reaction allows. As a creator, I also agree getting feedback as prose would be better. But this comes from having been on the other side and having posted a few things we've worked on to Show HN and to Product Hunt, and a few other sites and having gotten no feedback. I do understand that no reaction is a reaction in itself but you are left in a place of having no idea why it isn't working. So this is genuinely an experiment to see if making it easier to react will lead to at least some feedback, light in depth as it might be. And we'll continue to experiment to see if we can improve the depth while still making it easy. A quick-hit feedback text box is a good idea. We'll play around with that. The cookie usage notices is a requirement for companies based in the EU - doing analytics as we are does require tracking at some level, we can probably do better. We just reset the HN import from the API today for launch - it should grow longer over time. We'll look at going backwards though that isn't supported by the official API afaik. You're right we do need to improve how we sort them so it matches HN more closely - right now it sorts by day, and the top stories in that day.
NKCSS 9y ago
isn’t that what producthunt does as well?
- wuliwong 9y ago
  I think producthunt is for actual product releases. Show HN has a much wider range.
aithoughts-io 9y ago
This is helpful. Though I don't know if lack of feedback is due to too many Show HN posts or people skip through them. Isolating them is a great idea. The challenge for your project is how do you get folks to get to your site. Which is the same problem of Show HN posts :)
hack4supper 9y ago
Thanks for making this, like yourself, I have posted my projects on Show HNs about 8 times in the past and didn't receive any feedback. Edit: Talking about I am gonna post one now.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I hope HN had its top section carved out for some of the latest show HN entries. Kind of like how when you search on Google, the top entries are "sponsored links", but instead of sponsored links you would see latest show HN entries. Sure there is a "show" menu item but who really clicks on that? Which means most of us only find out about show HN projects ONLY IF they come up to the front page, or if we're constantly scanning the /newest page. I've seen a lot of interesting projects just get buried for no reason. You could say "just keep posting until it gets traction", but anyone who's built and posted something on HN knows this is really stressful and easier said than done, because most people--no matter how much they believe in their own project--don't want to spam the site they like.
- madamelic 9y ago
  >You could say "just keep posting until it gets traction", but anyone who's built and posted something on HN knows this is really stressful and easier said than done, because most people--no matter how much they believe in their own project--don't want to spam the site they like. Wait, you won't get in trouble for sending duplicates? I was always under the impressions that mods were pretty strict about one-and-done. Goes to show me I guess. Edit: Huh. Went back and read the rules, there seems to be nothing against it... It seems like what I thought was "one-and-done" was more "as a guideline, to be well-received, don't submit the same thing often"
  - soneca 9y ago
    I read before (but a mod could confirm) that the automatic rules to prevent duplicate posts are purposefully loosely set. There is some rule to not post the exact same link, but a small, meaningless variation at the URL is allowed as a trick to posting duplicates. It is a practical way to give second chances without giving too much room for spamming. The fact that you didn't even know it was allowed seems to prove that it works. What is not ok is to delete your own former posts to pretend you are posting for the first time. With this perception in mind, my own personal rule is if my first post does not get too much traction, I post a second time, 10~12 hours later (to get a different audience). Usually, I stop, sometimes when I am too optimistic I post a third time a couple of days later. And then I give up and stop posting. You can clearly see this pattern in my submission history.
UncleEntity 9y ago
Personally, I tend to check out the ones that go somewhere and not just link to their github repo. Sometimes comment, sometimes don't, depends...
bakli 9y ago
The problem that I see here is that development.kitchen needs quality traffic to provide that feedback, which sounds like the most difficult part of running this service.
udia 9y ago
Why are there some entries with what appears to be a poll with garbage answers? Seems like they're taking up a lot of space and I don't understand the point of them. https://imgur.com/a/FftPd https://imgur.com/a/FftPd
- rchodava 9y ago
  The questionaires were meant to be a mechanism to allow creators to get additional feedback. They can be posted by the original HN story author and we verify that they are the original author by asking that they post a link to the questionaire as a comment on the HN story. These were the ones posted by those posters - we have work to do here to allow editing and also flagging.
jcadam 9y ago
Yea, I posted something I've been working about a week ago and it got all of 2 points and no comments. I figure I'll wait a few more days and try again. I reckon that's a long enough wait to not constitute 'spam'. I think it's just blind luck, mostly.
- joantune 9y ago
  There's also the timing - beware of timezones, but yeah
  - jcadam 9y ago
    I keep forgetting - I'm on the east coast and have a tendency to post things before the west coast is out of bed. I've also wondered if posting on an otherwise slow day (Sunday?) would be a good idea (less competition) or a bad idea (fewer eyeballs).
    - BartBoch 9y ago
      You might be interested in this article that researches content on HackerNews to answer your question: https://medium.com/msing051/what-is-the-best-time-to-post-to-hacker-news-829fad3eac71 https://medium.com/msing051/what-is-the-best-time-to-post-to...
pmiri 9y ago
I think "hot take mode" is hilarious and needs to be more present in your UI. Neat idea

57 points by rchodava 9y ago

I love the idea of getting more feedback to people building things. It will be awesome to not just provide feedback that is 'shallow', i.e. sentiment, but to make it easier to provide more constructive feedback. Perhaps dig into the past 100K comments on Show HN's, categories them, and make it easy to put a large set of them. Leaving comments for more detailed discussions. One challenge though is that development.kitchen is pulling content out of HN in this way. It might be handy if you had a browser extension that injected the content back into the site so that people could easily see existing feedback.

rchodava 9y ago
Thanks for the feedback vineet. Digging through past comments is a good idea and the quick reactions were in a way derived by doing that - we looked at Show HN comments and tried to distill them down to just a few. As you can imagine, its not easy to capture everything. We are looking at making the selection a bit more expansive but still quick to add. A browser extension is an interesting idea - this is something that was a bit of a struggle to figure out how to make it easier to see feedback from HN. We played around with importing comments from HN and had our own comments on the site along with HN comments, but merging the two was a bit confusing since you couldn't comment on HN from within DevKitchen. We're still trying to improve how this works.

internalfx 9y ago

Like it, wish I could re-submit some new libraries that got nothing. It's probably my fault for posting them late in the day. It was frustrating to see my library slide down the "new" page while a bunch of posts from news sites filled the top.

no_protocol 9y ago

I really enjoy commenting on Show HN posts here but I can hardly think of a time where I would have responded with something as simple as an up or down arrow with one of these short responses. Since this is mostly a UI improvement attempt, I guess you're basically just competing with https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show? My biggest issue with this approach is it seems like a "poll" of arrows isn't really going to give enough useful feedback to be meaningful. If I've taken the time to actually review a Show HN, I'm not going to skimp out on the feedback phase by using a 1-click option. I'll probably have 3-5 paragraphs to write out. Psychologically, it seems a bit rude to leave just a down arrow on someone's best effort project without explaining it. An up arrow alone seems fine. Of course, HN already has these built in. If you want quick-hit feedback, can you also include a textbox for typing a quick note in addition to the short reasons already there? A popup bar alerting about cookie usage is extremely off-putting to me and was almost enough to get me to just close out of the site before doing a review. If there is anything you can do to stop using so many cookies that you need to warn users of them.... The entire list isn't that long, can you get a deeper backlog? The /show page lists them chronologically which seems pretty nice to me since then a DevelopmentKitchen user can always pick up where they left off. You're currently sorting them some other way and it doesn't quite make sense? If I'm going to use JUST this site to monitor Show HNs, I'll want to know which ones I've seen and which I haven't. Good luck!

rchodava 9y ago
Thanks, I can understand the feeling about the depth of feedback here. And I agree when I have felt compelled enough to give feedback on an idea, usually it had a bit more depth than a reaction allows. As a creator, I also agree getting feedback as prose would be better. But this comes from having been on the other side and having posted a few things we've worked on to Show HN and to Product Hunt, and a few other sites and having gotten no feedback. I do understand that no reaction is a reaction in itself but you are left in a place of having no idea why it isn't working. So this is genuinely an experiment to see if making it easier to react will lead to at least some feedback, light in depth as it might be. And we'll continue to experiment to see if we can improve the depth while still making it easy. A quick-hit feedback text box is a good idea. We'll play around with that. The cookie usage notices is a requirement for companies based in the EU - doing analytics as we are does require tracking at some level, we can probably do better. We just reset the HN import from the API today for launch - it should grow longer over time. We'll look at going backwards though that isn't supported by the official API afaik. You're right we do need to improve how we sort them so it matches HN more closely - right now it sorts by day, and the top stories in that day.

NKCSS 9y ago

isn’t that what producthunt does as well?

wuliwong 9y ago
I think producthunt is for actual product releases. Show HN has a much wider range.

aithoughts-io 9y ago

This is helpful. Though I don't know if lack of feedback is due to too many Show HN posts or people skip through them. Isolating them is a great idea. The challenge for your project is how do you get folks to get to your site. Which is the same problem of Show HN posts :)

hack4supper 9y ago

Thanks for making this, like yourself, I have posted my projects on Show HNs about 8 times in the past and didn't receive any feedback. Edit: Talking about I am gonna post one now.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

I hope HN had its top section carved out for some of the latest show HN entries. Kind of like how when you search on Google, the top entries are "sponsored links", but instead of sponsored links you would see latest show HN entries. Sure there is a "show" menu item but who really clicks on that? Which means most of us only find out about show HN projects ONLY IF they come up to the front page, or if we're constantly scanning the /newest page. I've seen a lot of interesting projects just get buried for no reason. You could say "just keep posting until it gets traction", but anyone who's built and posted something on HN knows this is really stressful and easier said than done, because most people--no matter how much they believe in their own project--don't want to spam the site they like.

madamelic 9y ago
>You could say "just keep posting until it gets traction", but anyone who's built and posted something on HN knows this is really stressful and easier said than done, because most people--no matter how much they believe in their own project--don't want to spam the site they like. Wait, you won't get in trouble for sending duplicates? I was always under the impressions that mods were pretty strict about one-and-done. Goes to show me I guess. Edit: Huh. Went back and read the rules, there seems to be nothing against it... It seems like what I thought was "one-and-done" was more "as a guideline, to be well-received, don't submit the same thing often"
- soneca 9y ago
  I read before (but a mod could confirm) that the automatic rules to prevent duplicate posts are purposefully loosely set. There is some rule to not post the exact same link, but a small, meaningless variation at the URL is allowed as a trick to posting duplicates. It is a practical way to give second chances without giving too much room for spamming. The fact that you didn't even know it was allowed seems to prove that it works. What is not ok is to delete your own former posts to pretend you are posting for the first time. With this perception in mind, my own personal rule is if my first post does not get too much traction, I post a second time, 10~12 hours later (to get a different audience). Usually, I stop, sometimes when I am too optimistic I post a third time a couple of days later. And then I give up and stop posting. You can clearly see this pattern in my submission history.

UncleEntity 9y ago

Personally, I tend to check out the ones that go somewhere and not just link to their github repo. Sometimes comment, sometimes don't, depends...

bakli 9y ago

The problem that I see here is that development.kitchen needs quality traffic to provide that feedback, which sounds like the most difficult part of running this service.

udia 9y ago

Why are there some entries with what appears to be a poll with garbage answers? Seems like they're taking up a lot of space and I don't understand the point of them. https://imgur.com/a/FftPd https://imgur.com/a/FftPd

rchodava 9y ago
The questionaires were meant to be a mechanism to allow creators to get additional feedback. They can be posted by the original HN story author and we verify that they are the original author by asking that they post a link to the questionaire as a comment on the HN story. These were the ones posted by those posters - we have work to do here to allow editing and also flagging.

jcadam 9y ago

Yea, I posted something I've been working about a week ago and it got all of 2 points and no comments. I figure I'll wait a few more days and try again. I reckon that's a long enough wait to not constitute 'spam'. I think it's just blind luck, mostly.

joantune 9y ago
There's also the timing - beware of timezones, but yeah
- jcadam 9y ago
  I keep forgetting - I'm on the east coast and have a tendency to post things before the west coast is out of bed. I've also wondered if posting on an otherwise slow day (Sunday?) would be a good idea (less competition) or a bad idea (fewer eyeballs).
  - BartBoch 9y ago
    You might be interested in this article that researches content on HackerNews to answer your question: https://medium.com/msing051/what-is-the-best-time-to-post-to-hacker-news-829fad3eac71 https://medium.com/msing051/what-is-the-best-time-to-post-to...

pmiri 9y ago

I think "hot take mode" is hilarious and needs to be more present in your UI. Neat idea