Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea is very good, though I don't see why this should only be restricted to porn. The concept could easily be adapted for pretty much any tagged content.

But there's also room for improvement. For example, there is no real option to provide feedback on an item's quality (except maybe if you track the skip button presses). I believe a project like this might profit from either a global ranking system or even an individualized learning filter. For example, you often don't seem to get what you selected initially, the system should learn from this for the benefit of other users.

Also, the UI is already very minimal, but could be made even simpler and cleaner, though that may be a minor point.

On a semi-unrelated note: most porn still sucks, and not in a good way. Maybe that's one more reason to explore advanced filtering :-P

View on HN

there's nothing restricting it to porn except for the fact that porn is one of the only types of video that humans tend to watch without desire for context. it's not as often that you find someone lining up 100 tv shows in a row, watching 10 seconds, and then skipping to the next. i intend to to use the technology in the future (on a different site) to give a `gist` of a style of film. so you would choose "show me what noir film looks like" and you could just skip through clips real fast to learn.

i agree, there's plenty of room for improvement. i spent about a month building the player, and it's my first project in Flex. i am however keeping track of all the clicks, which i can use to provide natural ranking later.

agreed, i could really benefit from a UI designer... unfortunately i build and design all by myself, and my design aesthetic isn't necessarily simple/obvious.

> there's nothing restricting it to porn except for the fact that porn is one of the only types of video that humans tend to watch without desire for context.

I don't think that's true, it's a great concept for other topics as well. For example, I enjoy tech talk videos, it would be nice to have an app like that for lazily looking at new and random stuff. There should be other areas where a lot of videos are sifted through in search for random nuggets, like cooking videos, and stuff like that. Youtube playlists just don't cut it...

> i agree, there's plenty of room for improvement.

I didn't mean to be overly critical, I like both the idea and the simplicity of the design very much. Any improvements would at best be incremental and very small.

yeah, i guess when you think about it... people just sit in front of the tv and flip through the channels until they see something they like. though i would argue that the main cause of that is due to commercials.

if you're interested in trying to rig this up for a different purpose (cooking vids, etc...), i'd be game to try it out. it really wouldn't take much code-wise. shoot me an email.

Come to think of it, a friend of mine was asking me for a site just like this, for movie trailers. I looked around and found there was no such site for movie trailers (that I knew of). So, you could be the first, if you were so inclined. :)

http://video.stumbleupon.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com