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Show HN: An Alternative to Reddit
- ryanmelt 14y agoHi Everyone. This my new product - Narf - A user curated news site. A lot like Hacker News, which I love, but where people use their real identities. My theory is that real identities will help produce great conversations... Would love any feedback you have to give.
- ktsmith 14y agoLooks nice, with a clean/simple layout. The only thing I found to be distracting are the weight and position of the discuss/comments buttons. As they are aligned with the end of the byline for each article they aren't in the same place between articles, and being buttons they are significantly larger than the surrounding text. Of course if your intention was to draw attention to those buttons it worked on me.
- ryanmelt 14y agoThe goal is to draw attention, so that people will discuss the stories. Glad it worked. :)
- dwynings 14y agoMaybe you could use embedly to pull in a picture from the submission, instead of using the alternating robots.
- ryanmelt 14y agoI'm hoping the robots are temporary. When users submit stories it shows their pictures. I've considered using embedly or writing something of my own though. What do you think is better, user pictures or a picture from the linked to page?
- ktsmith 14y agoI'd rather not see the users pictures at all. With most sites it seems you end up with a few bulk submitters in each category. Seeing their faces/avatars over and over again would get really old really fast. I could see it also potentially altering voting behavior. There are certain users on all social media sites (reddit and hn included) where some users will be upvoted/downvoted just due to their popularity or "fame". A visual indicator might increase those trends as they are faster to spot.
- ryanmelt 14y agoOk. I'll look into using pictures from stories and maybe try some A/B testing once I get more users.
- dwynings 14y agoDefinitely a picture from the linked story. I don't really care who the submitter is.
- ryanmelt 14y agoThanks for feedback guys. I'll try and implement this tomorrow.
- ryanmelt 14y agoStory pictures are now implemented!
- yoasif_ 14y agoLooks nice -- is this built on Twitter bootstrap?
- ryanmelt 14y agoI am using bootstrap... only for a few things like the topic completion javascript and for a basic css framework. It was a great way to get the site going. I hoped it wasn't obvious. :)
- syaz1 14y agoA sorting & filtering feature would seal the deal for me!
- ryanmelt 14y agoHow would you like to sort things?
- joshprismon 14y agoI like the name ;-)
- kolev 14y agoNice, but it's departure from HN's and Reddit's minimalistic clean UI, so, often the lack of any design attempt is the best design!
- ryanmelt 14y agoPerhaps, but I need to differentiate myself. I think the design is a good mix of functional and good looking... could always be better of course. Thanks for the feedback.
- JohnGolt 14y agoHi narf's! What do you use for search? Don't you want to try hosted search like IndexDen (IndexTank alternative) and move search management to our shoulders? BTW: We're helping everyone with integration ;-) Kind Regards http://IndexDen.com http://IndexDen.com
- greyfade 14y agoFacebook login. Cannot use. :(
- ryanmelt 14y agoThis was one of the first comments I expected to get. :) My theory is that people using their real identities as provided by Facebook will improve the quality of the site. We'll see how it goes.
- greyfade 14y agoIt's a nice theory... Until you look at the sheer range of quality of postings on Facebook. Have you seen Lamebook? It's utterly mind-boggling. I don't believe that identity has even the slightest effect on stupidity. Facebook proves that, in my mind. Metamoderation has always demonstrated the ability to support quality, especially in the absence of identity. People lacking history or demonstrating poor behavior punish themselves and self-select in that environment. I'm not complaining except for the fact that I'm deliberately avoiding Facebook - there are people on there I want nothing to do with and from whom I wish to isolate myself, and the utter complexity of privacy issues on Facebook further turn me off to it. I feel safer when I can dissociate my accounts across various sites, however misguided that may be. I'd like to participate on your site, as it looks interesting, but the requirement of a Facebook account is a complete dealbreaker.