Introducing Kaia: Longer than a Tweet, shorter than a blog post | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Kaia: Longer than a Tweet, shorter than a blog post

kaia.io

8 pointszendev10 comments

If the only differentiator between this and the competition is the length of the content you're in for some serious trouble.

It looks like a Medium knock off and I don't see the appeal. It's not like Medium keeps you from writing a short post.

Boundaries are important. Boundaries define entire new worlds of content.

It functions way differently than Medium. It's a follow/follower feed structure.

Medium doesn't prevent you from writing a short post, but we all feel the psychological pressure to not publish something on medium unless we have at least a page of writing. For this reason, blogging is very inaccessible for most people, and most of our daily thoughts.

I invite you to read the introduction to understand Kaia a little better.

I do have read it and as I said there's really nothing that sets it apart from Medium. First of all Medium provides collections, secondly a blog is intrinsically a follow/follower medium. And finally boundaries are not important, there's an article of late last year regarding long form content which applies here too:

"Reader, do you feel enticed to plunge into a story by the distinction that it is long? Or does your heart sink just a little? Would you feel drawn to a movie or a book simply because it is long? (“Oooh—you should really read Moby-Dick—it’s super long.”)"

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/against-...

The same applies to short content.

Twitter wouldn't be Twitter without strict content boundaries.

I would say your other competition is Tumblr, which can be adapted for short, medium and long content but seems overwhelmingly to be used for slightly-longer-than-twitter posts.

If it's supposed to be different from Medium, why does it imitate the look and feel of Medium?

Medium invented a new design style. Many sites are creating variations of this style now because it is a beautiful way to display content. (Ghost, exposure.so to name a couple).

My point is: It'll be hard for your blogging platform to stand out if it's garnering first impressions that it's a "Medium knock off". I do agree with the idea of constraints and boundaries in shaping a product. Unfortunately, humans are cruel visual creatures

I really like the design. Nice work.

Question: How will custom feeds work? You mentioned smart lists. A big thing that bothers me about Twitter is I have to unfollow people to remove their content from my main feed.

Thanks. When you follow someone on Kaia, you are immediately prompted to choose a list to add them to (or easily create a new one on the spot). Then in your settings, you can choose which lists show up in your main feed.

The lists are smart in the sense that as more and more people add a person to a certain list like "startups", then it will just suggest this list for you immediately when you follow them.

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