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What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

jaanix.com

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#12
post #5

I'm a founder of jaanix. Just a bit of background - jaanix is not a regular social news site. First of all everything is personalized - and not just by tweaking some settings or selecting your favorite tags, but in a machine learning way - the system tries to guess what you will like and acts accordingly. It uses implicit feedback too, so it tracks your clicks and tries to learn from it, but you can always see how it…

Loving the concept. I had always imagined that sliders or dials would provide a much more intuitive and accurate feedback mechanism than simple up or down votes.

Still, a slider is not as fast as a click, so curious to see how that affects user participation.

I'll give it a whack for a few days and see how I like it.

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#13
post #12
post #5

I'm a founder of jaanix. Just a bit of background - jaanix is not a regular social news site. First of all everything is personalized - and not just by tweaking some settings or selecting your favorite tags, but in a machine learning way - the system tries to guess what you will like and acts accordingly. It uses implicit feedback too, so it tracks your clicks and tries to learn from it, but you can always see how it…

Loving the concept. I had always imagined that sliders or dials would provide a much more intuitive and accurate feedback mechanism than simple up or down votes. Still, a slider is not as fast as a click, so curious to see how that affects user participation. I'll give it a whack for a few days and see how I like it.

On jaanix sliders serve two purposes - they let you know where you are and why the system is showing you stuff on the left, at the same time they let you quickly change your view of the world.

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#14
post #5

I'm a founder of jaanix. Just a bit of background - jaanix is not a regular social news site. First of all everything is personalized - and not just by tweaking some settings or selecting your favorite tags, but in a machine learning way - the system tries to guess what you will like and acts accordingly. It uses implicit feedback too, so it tracks your clicks and tries to learn from it, but you can always see how it…

It's cool, I have used it before but stopped after a while because it didn't have critical mass (enough users contributing links). I hope you would be able to gain that mass or already have. Would you share something like the number of active users and how old is the site?

Edit: Have you considered importing bookmarks from del.icio.us and voting from digg, reddit, news.YC? Facebook style. This can really boost the site's content and would give the learning algorithm plenty of data even for new accounts.

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#15
Great concept, but you're a little late. The userbase seems small, and the user submitted content is definitely lacking so much so that I can't find anything on the front page (after adjusting sliders) that interests me. Had this site launched pre-Digg/Reddit, I definitely would have jumped on board.

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#16
post #14
post #5

I'm a founder of jaanix. Just a bit of background - jaanix is not a regular social news site. First of all everything is personalized - and not just by tweaking some settings or selecting your favorite tags, but in a machine learning way - the system tries to guess what you will like and acts accordingly. It uses implicit feedback too, so it tracks your clicks and tries to learn from it, but you can always see how it…

It's cool, I have used it before but stopped after a while because it didn't have critical mass (enough users contributing links). I hope you would be able to gain that mass or already have. Would you share something like the number of active users and how old is the site? Edit: Have you considered importing bookmarks from del.icio.us and voting from digg, reddit, news.YC? Facebook style. This can really boost the si…

As of today about 1000 unique visitors a day. ~100 people are posting. But I'm sure the site can bootstrap from that, as it can be useful even if you have just a few friends there.

Jaanix has been running as a closed system for almost a year. Opened up in December last year. Usable UI is less than 2 weeks old.

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#17
post #9

There is an interesting idea growing bigger and bigger in recent months. Some say that proliferation of feedback-based recommendation engines and machine learning algorithms for predicting "what I may like to read next" is bad for our society, because eventually people will be revolving in their own little narrow worlds of interests, reading/watching/listening same stuff without exposure to anything new, disruptive a…

This is only true if the recommendation engine is primitive. There must be a relationship between the stuff you currently like and subset of "new" stuff that you like because it's disruptive and mind-stimulating.

But I don't want a news site to figure out what articles I will like. I just need it to filter out the stuff it knows I definitely dislike so I have less crap to filter through.

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#18
post #15

Great concept, but you're a little late. The userbase seems small, and the user submitted content is definitely lacking so much so that I can't find anything on the front page (after adjusting sliders) that interests me. Had this site launched pre-Digg/Reddit, I definitely would have jumped on board.

[deleted]

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#19
post #15

Great concept, but you're a little late. The userbase seems small, and the user submitted content is definitely lacking so much so that I can't find anything on the front page (after adjusting sliders) that interests me. Had this site launched pre-Digg/Reddit, I definitely would have jumped on board.

Called network effect - true for network-based systems with similar functionality.

Jaanix will have much more, soon, this is just to bootstrap.

Start posting, and people like you will stay :)

Re: What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit?

#20
post #5

I'm a founder of jaanix. Just a bit of background - jaanix is not a regular social news site. First of all everything is personalized - and not just by tweaking some settings or selecting your favorite tags, but in a machine learning way - the system tries to guess what you will like and acts accordingly. It uses implicit feedback too, so it tracks your clicks and tries to learn from it, but you can always see how it…

Looks neat.

I think after voting you should replace the up with "jaa" and the down with "nix" because I didn't understand the name until I read the explanation that will presumably not always be on the fp.

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