Show HN: Storystreamer – Snap/Instagram Stories UI Inspired News Reader

I've always been a big fan of the Snapchat/Instagram Story UI format but I wasn't the biggest fan of the content on those applications. At the same time I wanted a single place where I could get up to speed on various topics. I ended up combining the ideas.

This works exactly as Snapchats 'Discover' Section. There is a collection of 'streams' of various topics (news, gaming, nature, etc.) You click a stream, and you can tap or click to go forward or back. When done the stream viewer closes and the stream link is greyed out until new items are available. It has embedded video and picture support and feels like modern day 'channel surfing'.

Would love feedback and any section ideas!

Hey, thanks for checking it out!

Unfortunately, not all items have a picture associated with them as that depends whether the associated webpage has an open graph meta tag image.

Making sure items/their pictures looks nice is another thing, which I'll definitely take a look at.

or give us the option to set time

Not a bad idea, and implementation is solid mvp.

Some thoughts:

1) Given that you have clear categories available, it might be worth it to show the name of the category on the reel as well. Sometimes headlines are very broad, and they might not clearly imply the category. I tried a few categories, and in the end forgot which one I was currently watching. -> By showing category indicator you would give additional context for the watcher, on why a specific story is important. I get there's background color doing more or less the same thing, but only if a picture is missing. Color is great for seasoned users (additional pattern would be great for color blind people), new users would probably need clearer information.

2) after the reel ends, you might want to show a final screen, before jumping to the home screen. This way, people could still tap the prev button, if they wanted to recheck some headlines that they missed.

I think bloomberg's tictoc, in it's earlier incarnation, was doing something very similar. It seems to be now renamed, redesigned and merged with some other project.

Their version was heavily based on video. I might remember it wrong, but I think video was also their core problem. I tried it once but didn't really get it, as I hadn't used Snapchat nor Instagram.

Because Tictoc was a sort of old school, video first solution, they were missing the crucial "would you like to know more" step. You could just consume it, but not on your own terms, which kind of makes all the difference.