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Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news

morningreader.com

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Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news

#3
1.) You never set background-color. Not setting background-color results in unintended consequences on any browser configured to have a default other than the expected white background. A good example in your case is visited links become grey on grey (assuming a browser with grey default background).

2. You need to be cautious of and properly handle notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net":

"Wal-Mart Scammed Into Selling PlayStation 4 for $90" http://recode.net/2014/11/19/wal-mart-scammed-into-selling-p...

Which leads to:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102197050

Which leads to:

http://consumerist.com/2014/11/18/terrible-people-create-fak...

Which leads to:

http://kotaku.com/people-are-scamming-walmart-with-bogus-che...

Finding the original source can be a PITA, but it's still much better than rewarding spam regurgitation sites with traffic.

3.) Having a "sign in" icon link on every single article listing looks odd. Is it the default replacement for some voting mechanism that's only available to logged-in users?

4.) Grey text on a white background is common fare on the web (including hn) to de-emphasize some text, but it's a poor design decision in terms of accessibility. People with even minor visual impairments (i.e. poor vision) have difficulty reading grey text on white backgrounds.

All in all, it looks interesting. Good Luck With It!

Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news

#4

How are the stories selected?

The stories are curated and ranked by an algorithm. We give it a list of publishers, and it does most the work, however sometimes a little human moderation is still needed for more clean, on-topic results. The newest and most popular stories appear at the top, like on Hacker News (we use a similar ranking algorithm). To measure the popularity of the stories, the algorithm uses social signals.

Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news

#5
post #4

How are the stories selected?

The stories are curated and ranked by an algorithm. We give it a list of publishers, and it does most the work, however sometimes a little human moderation is still needed for more clean, on-topic results. The newest and most popular stories appear at the top, like on Hacker News (we use a similar ranking algorithm). To measure the popularity of the stories, the algorithm uses social signals.

I think I'd echo what jcr said: it needs an additional human layer, to nail down the original source of articles. Else it's just another random aggregator site with a random set of sources, however pretty.

Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news

#6
post #3

1.) You never set background-color. Not setting background-color results in unintended consequences on any browser configured to have a default other than the expected white background. A good example in your case is visited links become grey on grey (assuming a browser with grey default background). 2. You need to be cautious of and properly handle notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net": "W…

1. Got it. We'll set a background color in the body.

2. I agree. We will think about ways to handle it. As a last resort we may blacklist those kind of publishers.

3. Sign in is only needed to favorite stories (using the little bookmark icon below each line). I agree that it is not clear what the sign in is for, we will fix that.

4. Yup, we will increase the contrast a little.

Thanks for the feedaback!

Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news

#7
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stories are curated and ranked by an algorithm. We give it a list of publishers, and it does most the work, however sometimes a little human moderation is still needed for more clean, on-topic results. The newest and most popular stories appear at the top, like on Hacker News (we use a similar ranking algorithm). To measure the popularity of the stories, the algorithm uses social signals.

I think I'd echo what jcr said: it needs an additional human layer, to nail down the original source of articles. Else it's just another random aggregator site with a random set of sources, however pretty.

The algorithm is still a work in progress. We are constantly tweaking it to make it more autonomous and better at selecting stories. Thanks!
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