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Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

grasswire.com

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Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#81

Post by xwowsersx »

have_faith wrote: post #75

I really like the idea of the site, it's an idea I've toyed with a lot myself and I think you've done a decent job but I think there are few usability issues: Can't signup without clicking Login (slightly confusing to non technical users perhaps?) The block layout gives no visual affordance to what is new / most active / has the most people verifying data etc. I can't see where the action is happening at a glance. Th…

Thank you this excellent feedback.

1. You're absolutely right that we need to do a better job of giving a sense of where the action is happening. 2. The text issues in the boxes are definitely a problem and we have some tinkering to do on that front. 3. As far as videos go, we will add the titles. In general, the videos are not a great experience. It's difficult to find relevant videos using the YouTube API. We are considering not using YouTube directly, but instead surfacing videos that are mentioned in tweets that are deemed relevant; they usually seem to be more relevant and raw. 4. Being able to see who has confirmed/refuted what is definitely important and we need to make that experience better. For now, we don't even have profile pages that let you see what someone has done. We'll be implementing that in the next iteration. 5. The security/spam issue is a tough one and we've given some thought to it, but honestly, not enough. In some ways, we wanted to prepare for it, but we also didn't want to work on a problem that didn't need to be solved just yet. I am sure this will be a constant battle, but as we improve both our algorithms for filtering tweets and our API security layer, hopefully we can prevent bad actors from completely overruning the site.

Thanks again for your thoughts. Any other feedback is welcome and very much appreciated!

Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#82

Post by austenallred »

lihorne wrote: post #79

Some comments and bugs: - The videos in the live stream are all really unappealing (not the content but the way they're presented), there should really be titles or comments or something on them. - The tweets move too quickly and the flashing is annoying, I have to keep scrolling to read them properly - The content above the black bar also needs some context besides just being pictures - Hitting the ESC key I expect…

Holy crap, I think you just read off my "todo" list! Haha, thanks so much for the feedback. Anything else you don't like?

Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#83

Post by jivid »

xwowsersx wrote: post #57
palakchokshi wrote: post #56

When tweets start coming in it becomes very annoying when I'm trying to read a tweet and it keeps pushing it lower and lower and I have to keep scrolling down to read it only to have it get pushed lower again. But really good place to get a handle on all the news happening.

Thanks for the feedback. You're absolutely right, that is really annoying. We're going to implement pausing that live feed when you scroll down.

Instead of pausing the feed, maybe a simple 'Load X new tweets' banner at the top of the feed would do a better job? Twitter actually does exactly this when loading new tweets on the feed.

Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#84

Post by xwowsersx »

jivid wrote: post #83
xwowsersx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. You're absolutely right, that is really annoying. We're going to implement pausing that live feed when you scroll down.

Instead of pausing the feed, maybe a simple 'Load X new tweets' banner at the top of the feed would do a better job? Twitter actually does exactly this when loading new tweets on the feed.

Yeah, that's a good suggestion. Thank you!

Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#85

Post by lihorne »

austenallred wrote: post #82
lihorne wrote: post #79

Some comments and bugs: - The videos in the live stream are all really unappealing (not the content but the way they're presented), there should really be titles or comments or something on them. - The tweets move too quickly and the flashing is annoying, I have to keep scrolling to read them properly - The content above the black bar also needs some context besides just being pictures - Hitting the ESC key I expect…

Holy crap, I think you just read off my "todo" list! Haha, thanks so much for the feedback. Anything else you don't like?

No worries :) Sure I can list off a few more things:

- The videos under the bar seem to have consistently low resolution thumbnails, maybe try making them a bit smaller (to a resolution where they are meant to be in)?

- Many of the tweets aren't in English so they don't mean much to me, maybe detect languages and remove ones that aren't my native language / translate them?

- Just generally I prefer text over images or video for anything news related, and right now it seems like an overflow of images. e.g., Pinterest is almost all pictures but their 'main' content literally is whatever is in the picture (usually), whereas your 'main' content is the news, so I want to be able to just glance at a page for a news item and know without having to interact much further what is going on, similar to reddit.com/r/news.

- Also some other minor UI things that I noticed, the magnifying glass just seems strange, I guess it is a way to signal that this isn't a normal tweet but something I'm meant to pick out and observe further, but I might try doing that in a different way because it is just unconventional.

- It would be great to have a "score", like how many people have upvoted, how many confirmed and what their reference was, how many refuted and why; some level of discussion to go with it, etc.

Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#86

Post by randomtask »

austenallred wrote: post #35
randomtask wrote: post #34

This really needs a "disturbing content ahead" warning on the parts of the site that have graphic images. I really don't expect to see decapitated bodies when I randomly click a link.

In theory we aren't pulling in any content that qualifies as "disturbing" from Twitter. In practice you're absolutely right. Will get on that.

Cool. Otherwise I wholeheartedly endorse this effort.

Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#88

Post by austenallred »

lihorne wrote: post #85
austenallred wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap, I think you just read off my "todo" list! Haha, thanks so much for the feedback. Anything else you don't like?

No worries :) Sure I can list off a few more things: - The videos under the bar seem to have consistently low resolution thumbnails, maybe try making them a bit smaller (to a resolution where they are meant to be in)? - Many of the tweets aren't in English so they don't mean much to me, maybe detect languages and remove ones that aren't my native language / translate them? - Just generally I prefer text over images o…

Thank you so much!

Re: Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone

#90

Post by jonnyscholes »

lalwanivikas wrote: post #40

Frrole[1] tried a similar thing through their endeavor Frrole News [1]. Instead of manual fact-checking, they relied on Twitter data. They developed very advanced ML algos to separate signal from the noise. It grabbed attention with close to a million visitors a month, but ultimately shifted to another business model. Maybe you can get in touch with them. [1] http://frrole.com [2] http://news.frrole.com/world

This seems to happen a lot. Someone makes a wicked way to consume the news, but cant find a way to monetize it other than pivot into social analytics or premium content aggregation. Storyful is the other example that springs to mind. It's nice that frrole at least kept their old product around in some capacity though :)
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