Ask YC: Some feedback before we launch NewsCred publicly | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Some feedback before we launch NewsCred publicly

5 pointsshafqat6 comments

Hi guys. As always, coming to HN community for some feedback for new features that we're pushing out on NewsCred soon. There's a sneak preview live on http://www.newscred.com now for you guys to take a look.

Please let me know what you think. Specifically, we've added the concepts of 'Topics', which can be people, events, places, companies and organizations. We have automatically generated 'Topic' pages, as well as breaking topics within each category page (business, world etc).

My favorite: clicking on any article, we can tell you what related topics are discussed in the article.

Also, we pushed out search, and we now offer search on articles and topics, as well as figuring out related topics to your search.

Would love to hear what you guys think. As always, thanks so much...

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Two small things I found:

1) The javascript scrolling for the top articles is not always reliable; I was able to break it by clicking furiously. Also, the scrolling can be distacting; I would vote for a simple hide and appear, along with a distinction that you have selected a particular article, like on Yahoo's front page (Featured, Entertainment, Sports tabs).

2) In the "buzz" section, the tinyurl's are not linked: http://www.newscred.com/topic/show/name/barack-obama

Overall, I love the idea and applaud you and your team on your work. Site looks great, easy to get to the content and understand. Great work!

1) Very clean design, though wordy. Some things like cred/discred could be better expressed as icons or illustrations.

2) I hope you have a very good maths background. Calculating cred is a much harder problem than it appears.

3) Best of luck!

I like the nice clean lines - above the fold anyway, then I think it gets confusing as you scroll down and the main articles move left, and what I think are less popular articles (thinner items) move into the center.

Your eye doesn't go smoothly down the page.

Also, as you probably know, most people won't customize the news sources, so maybe do that as an accordian or something like that. That would also make the 'people in the news' section move up the page nicely.

It may also be more interesting if you could add images to the article listing.

Good work, and good luck.

I should add, my least favorite part is the slowness. We are working on memcaching now...

How do you calculate credibility? Right now it seems to be a simple average...

how are the articles added? RSS? or by editors?

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