Surprisingly compelling. The IAmA's are some of Reddit's best content, and this is so much easier to scan than a real IAmA thread. Thanks!
Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
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Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#12I have emailed Reddit about the legality of this project. (Have not received a response yet) So far it seems likely that I will have to take down the site. So consider this a small preview I suppose. I plan to port this to a Chrome Extension. Do you guys find this format much more readable than the current completed IAmA?
Why would scraping their site be illegal?
I figured displaying their content in full is illegal.
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would scraping their site be illegal?
I figured displaying their content in full is illegal.
Ah, I hadn't clicked any of the links. I thought you had just linked back to their site.
By the way, I like your site. It makes it easy to cut through the cruft that always appears in reddit threads. Do you just grab all responses by the poster and the parent comment?
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#14The concept is good and its easier to scan than IAMA but the design/typography just hurts to read. I would probably fix that asap. Make it bigger, easier to read and change the font. In regards to your concerns of legality. Reddit seems to be ok with scrapers, bots and the like as long as you dont make more than 30 requests per minute.
A couple months ago, reddit started refusing requests from my web scraper. Figured out they started checking the user agent and refusing connections that didn't look like they came from a user's browser. Unless I missed an announcement somewhere, it doesn't seem like they're overly friendly about allowing web scrapers.
They just don't want to be abused.
"We're happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and Greasemonkey scripts, but they have to obey some rules:"
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#15Fantastic job.
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#16I have emailed Reddit about the legality of this project. (Have not received a response yet) So far it seems likely that I will have to take down the site. So consider this a small preview I suppose. I plan to port this to a Chrome Extension. Do you guys find this format much more readable than the current completed IAmA?
I've wanted to build something like this for a long time, the problem I encountered (which I couldn't solve) is how to effectively and automatically find not just the questions and answers, but the discussion that stem from them. A good AMA is one that creates discussion between the subject and commenter's so the majority of good content is buried underneath multiple comments. For example I did an AMA and it had a fe…
The problem of dealing with nested comments is very tricky as you mentioned. I did my best to grab the "best" comments, but I know that it does miss some in a deep thread. I will try my best to further enhance its accuracy and ability to continue a discussion.
I will also work on the font sizes and perhaps even modify the font choices to further enhance readability.
Thanks for your suggestions and feedback! :)
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#17[deleted]
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#18I'm doing something similar with all the funny pictures on reddit. not really successful though, and basically leeching.
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#19Very cool. It picks all the important stuff and presents it sans the fluff. Where do I subscribe? Really, where's the rss feed for new AMAs?
Also, links to questions in their original context would be nice.
Re: Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
#20I have emailed Reddit about the legality of this project. (Have not received a response yet) So far it seems likely that I will have to take down the site. So consider this a small preview I suppose. I plan to port this to a Chrome Extension. Do you guys find this format much more readable than the current completed IAmA?
I ran into the same problem. I started a pet project that involved scraping reddit (though for a different purpose than AMAs). Their robots.txt and an admin writeup from somewhere on their site made me realize that I'd probably just have to take it down and/or my scraper would just get blacklisted. It's a bummer because there's 1001 great ideas out there for filtering, categorizing, and viewing reddit's data in different ways. And it seems like they encourage 3rd party interaction to some extent with their API and all, yet scraping is kind of needed in most cases.
I do like the format for sure. The only thing I would consider is maybe nesting the Q/A divs (.qitem) for threads because a lot of times the Q/A content is contextual to past Q/As. You already order them that way and that helps a lot but on one of the ones I was reading it got confusing on whether they were speaking in the context of a thread or if it was a fresh Q/A. Maybe set it as a view option to toggle or something (maybe have it be a carousel where each frame contains all the Q/A divs in a thread starting with the root level, and keep it displayed flat like they are now).