Cool! I've been working on a little Chrome extension that does something similar (and has a quite similar name ;) ): https://github.com/napoleond/follow-hn
Have been meaning to polish it a bit more, but I suppose now is as good a time as any to share it. One outstanding feature that I think will be pretty useful is caching user comments--right now it re-constructs the comment feed on every page load, which isn't ideal.
The funny part is that @raquo and I posted our "follow" apps/extensions (separate projects) this week and got no love from HN. And then this thread took off for some reason. Timing? Titling? God I hate the randomness of marketing.
I don't think it's random at all. From a would-be user's perspective it makes complete sense to me that this post took off and yours didn't get too far. I want to explain why, not to be a dick, but because I feel like all hackers (myself included) have a hard time seeing things from the user's perspective.
First, the title of your submission:
> Show HN: Search HN by keywords, user, score, Read online, on mobile or RSS
It's completely unclear what your product is. Honestly it sounds like you packaged up HN with some more CSS and an RSS reader or something? I don't really know. "Read online?" How else would I read HN? "Search HN?" I don't really have anyting to search for, and if I did I would just use Google.
The reason film42's post took off is because people were interested in following. Yours didn't even mention following.
Now let's look at film42's title:
> Show HN: HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN
My first reaction? "Oh cool, I have a lot of friends who use HN, I wonder what they've been saying."
Then perhaps the best part of film42's app is that he used HN's styling in a way that almost felt like you hadn't left HN. It is completely familiar, and, as others have pointed out, it feels like something that should have been part of HN already. The friction of onboarding was completely eliminated - I didn't have to sign up for or download anything, but I could use it and wanted more. The missing auth is probably a mistake in the long-run, but missing that feature probably reduced some friction getting started.
At the end of the day, you have 5 seconds to impress me or I'm gone. It's quite possible, when your app doesn't take off, that the only thing you did wrong was not use those 5 seconds.
Nice! I was working on something similar, except that it was a chrome extension that put a follow/unfollow button by the username, and required authentication via google credentials. But, since I didn't keep a limit on the number of people you could follow, as the number of people I was following increased, waiting for Firebase responses to return (for ordering comments by id) started taking too long and killed the user experience.
I wish there was a way to do a bulk query (ala Elasticsearch), so I could get all comment ids in one request. The response time would still increase with increasing number of users, but it would be marginal compared to the current situation.
Yup. For now that's all it takes. I wasn't really concerned preventing other people from editing a profile up until now. I liked how HN Notify allows anyone to opt-in or opt-out, so I copied that style. I figured HN would prefer it that way.
Because it would undermine HN's goal that we vote for and comment on content on its own merits, not whether it was posted or commented on by someone you like.
I don't think HN is doing that great a job in surfacing the best content or encouraging better discourse in comments, but making it easy to follow favorite users instead of going to the front page would make it worse, IMHO.
... I definitely wondered about this. All of a sudden, it turns HN into a popularity contest where the elite get all the attention and everyone else is completely ignored.
> Because it would undermine HN's goal that we vote for and comment on content on its own merits, not whether it was posted or commented on by someone you like.
That's hardly HN's goal, though. HN itself has code and features that encourage some users to vote for content purely based on who submitted the content or what company they work for. HN's certainly not a democratic voting society where votes are treated equally and we're all encouraged to vote purely on the merits of content.
I do like HN a lot, even with that lack of fairness built in to the system. I agree that letting normal users follow each other would make the 'problem' worse (this is what brought Digg down, as a core issue), but it's not like HN sees this as a problem, exactly.
Is there a current open-source version of HN that one could use to create a small HN for a group of friends? How close of a clone to HN could one create using Wordpress?
Readit News
Have been meaning to polish it a bit more, but I suppose now is as good a time as any to share it. One outstanding feature that I think will be pretty useful is caching user comments--right now it re-constructs the comment feed on every page load, which isn't ideal.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn2go/logdfcelflpg...
https://github.com/fivedogit/hn2go-backend
https://github.com/fivedogit/hn2go-chromex
The funny part is that @raquo and I posted our "follow" apps/extensions (separate projects) this week and got no love from HN. And then this thread took off for some reason. Timing? Titling? God I hate the randomness of marketing.
First, the title of your submission: > Show HN: Search HN by keywords, user, score, Read online, on mobile or RSS
It's completely unclear what your product is. Honestly it sounds like you packaged up HN with some more CSS and an RSS reader or something? I don't really know. "Read online?" How else would I read HN? "Search HN?" I don't really have anyting to search for, and if I did I would just use Google.
The reason film42's post took off is because people were interested in following. Yours didn't even mention following.
Now let's look at film42's title:
> Show HN: HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN
My first reaction? "Oh cool, I have a lot of friends who use HN, I wonder what they've been saying."
Then perhaps the best part of film42's app is that he used HN's styling in a way that almost felt like you hadn't left HN. It is completely familiar, and, as others have pointed out, it feels like something that should have been part of HN already. The friction of onboarding was completely eliminated - I didn't have to sign up for or download anything, but I could use it and wanted more. The missing auth is probably a mistake in the long-run, but missing that feature probably reduced some friction getting started.
At the end of the day, you have 5 seconds to impress me or I'm gone. It's quite possible, when your app doesn't take off, that the only thing you did wrong was not use those 5 seconds.
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Feel free to check out my follow page: https://hn-follow.desh.es/?user=film42
Another example, HN top 10: https://hn-follow.desh.es/?user=hn-top-10
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I wish there was a way to do a bulk query (ala Elasticsearch), so I could get all comment ids in one request. The response time would still increase with increasing number of users, but it would be marginal compared to the current situation.
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I don't think HN is doing that great a job in surfacing the best content or encouraging better discourse in comments, but making it easy to follow favorite users instead of going to the front page would make it worse, IMHO.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn2go/logdfcelflpg... (shameless plug)
... I definitely wondered about this. All of a sudden, it turns HN into a popularity contest where the elite get all the attention and everyone else is completely ignored.
That's hardly HN's goal, though. HN itself has code and features that encourage some users to vote for content purely based on who submitted the content or what company they work for. HN's certainly not a democratic voting society where votes are treated equally and we're all encouraged to vote purely on the merits of content.
I do like HN a lot, even with that lack of fairness built in to the system. I agree that letting normal users follow each other would make the 'problem' worse (this is what brought Digg down, as a core issue), but it's not like HN sees this as a problem, exactly.
I'll take a look. Thanks for sharing!
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
There is a mirror floating around of news.arc[1], the original version of HN from pg, but it's pretty dated and missing tons of the secret sauce.
[1]https://github.com/wting/hackernews
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