Ask HN: List your favourite social news sources • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: List your favourite social news sources

#11

Post by shafqat » Sun, Sep 14, 2008, 8:58 PM UTC

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #9

shafqat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just launched recently, so maybe that's why. I've bounced around a ton of ideas and got a lot of help from the HN community over the past year so you might have come across related posts before. Anyway, do let us know what you think - always looking for feedback!

I really like the ability to filter what news sources I want to see. Excellent job with the site, all around.

Thanks a lot... That's my favorite part of the site, and the feature that eventually became NewsCred.

Re: Ask HN: List your favourite social news sources

#12

Post by shafqat » Sun, Sep 14, 2008, 8:59 PM UTC

_b8r0 wrote: post #8

shafqat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just launched recently, so maybe that's why. I've bounced around a ton of ideas and got a lot of help from the HN community over the past year so you might have come across related posts before. Anyway, do let us know what you think - always looking for feedback!

It might be an idea to put down (possibly here, maybe a separate post) what it provides over Google News and My Yahoo - that's what I saw as the main competitors. I'll definitely go back though and have added it to my list of daily things to check :D

Good point. Will do a post on our blog about in the next few days.

Re: Ask HN: List your favourite social news sources

#13

Post by shafqat » Sun, Sep 14, 2008, 9:03 PM UTC

brandnewlow wrote: post #10

shafqat wrote: post #5

I heard NewsCred.com is full of awesomeness. In all seriousness, we have thousands of visitors a day loving it, so something must be good about it. Personally, my day consists of Hacker News, NewsCred, some Google News, and a sprinkling of the Onion.

I've checked out Newscred before. As a journalist, I'm always interested in new news sites (working on one myself). While I'm very skeptical that newscred ratings actually represent what you say they represent, I'm all in favor of you giving it a shot and seeing where it leads.. One question, though: How are you dealing with copyright issues? For instance, this article featured on your front page appears to be a comp…

Our policy is quite clear - we respect the copyrights of our content providers and do everything in our power to drive traffic to them.

We currently take whatever is in the feeds. Some feeds (less than 5%) have the full content in the feed. In this case, we have a dilemma - what we've done is reach out to the feed providers to ask them what they want us to do. We offer the option of removing them from our site (no one has opted for that), revenue sharing on ads on that page, or we offer to do a bit of development to manually extract just the first paragraph. Its a bit more work on our part, and we'd rather not tinker with the feeds.

Until we figure out an optimal solution, we're not yet running ads on NewsCred (out of respect more than anything else). I've found that starting a dialogue with content producers is the best way forward, and 100% of those who we've reached out to have respected that.