Show HN: Read the best tech bloggers in one app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Read the best tech bloggers in one app

volleythat.com

One small criticism? Your headline says "best tech bloggers", so I was assuming the app was focused on that. Clicked through to your landing page and the screen shot is all about soccer, something that I not only don't care about, but also, is not tech. So now I'm trying to figure out what it actually is, the closest I can find is: "PICK FROM DOZENS OF POPULAR WRITERS AND BLOGGERS"

Thanks for the feedback. Our app lets you follow lots of well know writers / bloggers from various disciplines. It's like curated RSS without the hassle. Tech is one of our main focuses and I wanted to highlight that aspect for the HN audience and list a few of the dozen tech authors we have currently but you're right that it is not completely tech focused.

BTW some people have asked how we're doing our article parsing. We're using the Diffbot article API which has been great for us so far. Recommended if you need similar functionality.

Do you have the bloggers permission? Scraping full text articles and republishing them is generally considered a no-no.

How is this different from feedly other than that it has no android or browser support?

I was expecting a media wall like sc2daily, but with tech information.

edit: it has browser support, I didn't see the button earlier.

We wanted to take a different approach to RSS. We think our app will be more convenient for many people than setting up an RSS reader. It's just a curated selection of great writers. No hassle. It's not for power RSS users but we think it gives you a good, manageable mix of quality content. We also have a read later tool and some powerful social messaging features that we think work great on mobile.

Also - we are adding more authors if you have any suggestions!

I've been using Volley since early betas, and my favorite part is the social aspect. It almost feels like a "private HN" or subreddit for my group of friends. (We used to all be Google Reader addicts, until Google killed the social features, and then axed Reader entirely).

Private HN is a great way to put it. It's been a useful way for me to see what my friends find interesting, rather than having to comb for them on FB / Twitter.

Let me increase the hype from 33% to all 100%: "Read the best tech bloggers in the best app on the best platform on the best phone in the best language of the best country."

Long time user – love the polish they keep adding and adding to this app. And also the focus on quality content. Keep it coming!

Most of the websites, especially bloggers, prohibit contents being scraped and duplicated into other media such as this app. The app creator should try to get the consent of the bloggers before anything else. Otherwise, definitely an app I would like to use. Good work!

Why is it an app? It sounds like a regular compilation of stories by topic, are they exclusive stories and you're trying to protect the content or ...?

Unless I'm at work, I exclusively use my phone to check emails, read news, do anything online, etc. I use Instagram for photos and Volley for articles. Having one app to read, share, and comment on stories just makes life so much easier for me. I use volley mostly for the 'sharing with a few exclusive friends' aspect, but appreciate getting my favorite writers in one place as well. Also, the bookmarklet they have for your desktop browser makes volleying interesting reads you might come across during the day at work super convenient.

You signed up to say that? Or this is a shill account / an uncredited company statement?

Adding a ?a=1 to get around HN's dupe detector is unwise.

EDIT: Per dang's response below, this is OK since there has not been significant discussion on it previously.

Understand it should not be common practice. But that post was 138 days ago and we've made massive improvements to our app in the meantime. No one saw our last post (it has one point). We've changed our entire pitch even. Does that mean we just give up on getting to the front page with one failed posting attempt 5 months ago? Is there a better alternative? I apologize if people still think this is an abuse.

Seems like HN's "dup detector" should only check posts in the last month or so? I have the same thing, I release new features on my site and have to direct them to different pages when I want to announce. I guess I should start to keep some sort of blog section on my site to announce updates. But still, fixing the dup detector would be cool too.

Thanks for watching out for story quality on HN! In this case, though, the submission is fine.

A small number of reposts is ok if a story hasn't had significant attention within the last year or so. Otherwise, what reaches the front page is too affected by randomness and churn. We want the best stories on the front page, not just the luckiest ones. So good stories need multiple cracks at the bat. Especially the Show HNs—a new feature for which is coming soon, by the way.

It might be a good idea to clarify HN's submission policies toward duplicate submissions, especially if new Show HN functionality is being implemented. (e.g. I've seen a rise in submissions recently which bootstrap the "Show HN" prefix for visibility when it definitely isn't warranted.)

Yes. We're deliberately being slow about changing the site guidelines or the FAQ, though we will eventually. Moderation comments in the threads are sort of the laboratory for that.

When we release the Show HN feature (soon!) it will come with some guidelines about what is and isn't a Show HN.

Could be useful to use a public ?showhn=N param, so that the info of how many times one has posted is publicly available?

Empirically, it doesn't seem to work very well to try for that level of precision.

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