Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

http://www.listry.com/

by Spines11 • 15 years ago

174 80 15 years ago

Spines1124• 15 years ago

This is the project I've been working on for the past 6 months. It combines the features of wikis with a voting system that determines the best parts of an article. There's still a lot of improvements I need to make, but I wanted to launch early and get feedback.

darwindeeds3• 15 years ago

Agreed... launch early to get the actual users feedback!

ayanb• 15 years ago

Awesome work really, like the concept and totally love the speed of the site. Are you working on this full time?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks! I'm glad people are noticing the speed, I spent a ton of time on that :). Yep, working on it full-time.

stingraycharles2• 15 years ago

Congratulations with your launch! It looks like you've got a nice hybrid between HN/Reddit-style voting and Stackoverflow-topics, - personally haven't seen such a site before. It'll be interesting to see whether you'll succeed building a community around it. Any plan-of-attacks on gaining traction?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks! Yea, building the community will be the tough part. I was planning on writing high quality articles on Listry and then hopefully some of the people that read the article would want to add their own input to the article and that's how they would get started contributing.

Any suggestions?

stingraycharles2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure, - that could be a way, but only if you actually enjoy writing those articles.

Just thinking out loud, your time could also be spend editorially adding more and more subjects and quality lists. The whole problem with such a site is that you need to maintain some level of quality, which is best maintained by attracting people that care about that quality. If you have a lot of quality lists with quality subjects, the next thing you need to ensure is that Google (and other search engines) pick up on that.

If I search for "emacs color themes", for example, you want listry to be the #1 match in Google with a list of links to color themes.

That, and just balls: try to get some popular bloggers to cover your site. If they like the concept, they won't mind vouching for you.

davedx• 15 years ago

Source articles from Wikipedia and Stackoverflow! As long as you attribute it should be fine, and a good way to build some content.

Congrats, cool site :

davidcollantes• 15 years ago

Looks quite nice. Please implement OpenID, or similar. I do not want yet another account. Cheers!

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Haha, okay. That'll be next on my TODO list :)

ch0wn• 15 years ago

Very interesting and - as far as I'm concerned - unique concept, clean design. I really like it so far. Best of luck!

rshm• 15 years ago

Prepare some seed content yourself. Just "listphrase" existing similar sites. It will give a bit of realness to new visitor.

Cheers and best of luck.

techjohn• 15 years ago

Looks like you are using Google custom search. Can you please provide your perspective on the service.

Spines1124• 15 years ago

It's very easy to set up, and it works alright. There is a delay for things to show up in the search results though. I think once app engine (which is what Listry runs on) implements full text search, I'll probably make my own solution using that.

arturadib• 15 years ago

Are votes really a 1-5 rating? I thought it was bit counterintuitive (I guess in my experience "votes" are typically binary). How about allowing just thumbs up/down?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

From this being the top comment, it seems everyone agrees. I'll add it to my to-do list :)

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Should I keep the 5 star rating control for rating articles, and change the voting on items to thumbs up/down? Or should I change both the voting on items and voting on articles to thumbs up/down?

akavi• 15 years ago

A corroborating argument for dropping the stars: A lot of people who've tried multi-value rating systems have found that they get a heavily bimodal distribution anyways: people vote when they think something is awesome, or when it sucks, but rarely when they think it's just meh.

So you really won't be losing much information with a two value (eg, upvote/downvote) system.

tapvt2• 15 years ago

This question (5-star?) was also the first to my mind once I signed up and jumped into interaction with the app.

Given that each item shows a positive or negative number as its rating, it is unclear to me what the effect of a 5-, 3-, or 1- star ratings is against the net score for that item. I'm reasonably certain what the net effect will be, but it isn't totally obvious. The fact that it isn't so obvious is a friction point that makes me somewhat less likely to interact.

Using the familiar pattern of the binary up/down as arturadib has suggested (and taking a page from StackOverflow, Reddit, etc.) would make the interface much more familiar to me.

Though a binary up/down system would make this point irrelevant, I'll add it to the conversation anyway: It seems to me that over a long enough period of time, the rating for many items (using a 5 star system) will average near 3.

Congratulations on getting Listry out in the wild. Looking forward to witnessing future developments!

ldh• 15 years ago

At least at this early stage with little content, the site seems very snappy. Looking at the blog, I'm assuming you're running on Google AppEngine? Can you give us an overview of how the site is implemented?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks for noticing the speed :) I spent a lot of effort on that.

I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are updated with javascript.

So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you different links if you are logged in.

bdesimone• 15 years ago

God damn. The site really is fast. Well done.

drjoem• 15 years ago

cool

btw0• 15 years ago

Nice idea and good implementation! The home page could look cleaner if you use less bold font-style and a smaller number of different font-sizes.

jeff_5nines• 15 years ago

This is a really cool application. How do you intend on keeping out crap article and malicious updates?

Either way, this is a nicely designed interface and great idea.

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks :)

For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough. Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that don't fit the format.

For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though.

If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify malicious edits.

darwindeeds3• 15 years ago

Oh man. You are going to get a lot of traffic. Please do something to block a spammer's ip. Have a flag button and do a soft delete it after a certain number of flags. Soft delete because you can review to make sure its actually crap and not the top item in your page :) Good luck

Simucal• 15 years ago

Congrats on the launch. I'm curious how your "popular" tab works.

If it is simply sorted by votes with no time-component then your going to have the same "self-fulfilling prophecy" problem that Stack Overflow had when they first launched.

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks!

Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items.

Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and "popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".

asadjb• 15 years ago

Congrats on launching. From what I've seen in my brief tour of the site, it's a unique idea.

I agree with stingraycharles that it's a nice and unique hybrid b/w Reddit and StackOverflow.

Best of luck!

avgarrison2• 15 years ago

For some reason the proxy server at my work is blocking your website with the message "Virus detected and blocked" and McAfee reports it as having Medium risk: http://www.mcafee.com/threat-intelligence/domain/default.asp...

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Hmm, thanks for the heads up, I'll have to look into that. I don't know what would be causing that.

avgarrison2• 15 years ago

Ya, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, I know this is the last thing you want to hear on launch day!

viandante• 15 years ago

Only problem I see is incentive to write on your website. People write on SOF or HN for reputation, why should they write on listry?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

One reason could be if you wished there was good resource on a topic.

For example, if you wanted to convince someone that they should develop for iOS instead of android, you could start an article on Listry titled "Reasons to develop for iOS". Then add a few reasons of your own to the article, and then other Listry users could add their reasons, everyone would vote on the best reasons, and then in the end you would have a good resource of all the best reasons to develop for iOS.

A reputation system would definitely be a good thing to have too. I was thinking about creating one, but decided to launch early, and then improve the site over time.

StylusEater• 15 years ago

Congratulations on launching a Beta! The site is visually pleasing and the layout works.

I noticed one small detail that is jarring and it should be a simple style fix. The location of content contained in a div or span shifts when you change categories on the "New Articles" tab. You should be able to see what I mean by selecting "New Articles" then watching the Listry icon in the upper left move to the right (or left) after selecting another category from the list.

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks :). I see what you are talking about, it's because the main page is long enough to have a scrollbar, and then when you choose a category, there isn't enough content to need to show a scrollbar, right?

JonLim• 15 years ago

Great so far! Very minimalistic and easy to navigate.

Notice that you're using Google App Engine to send your welcome emails, and I'd love to offer you PostageApp (http://postageapp.com) while you're in beta. We'd be happy to help you out with that. :)

Let me know, cheers!

eyko• 15 years ago

Yet another web app that solves #firstworldproblems…

kadabra9• 15 years ago

yet another douchebag with nothing constructive at all to add or any real feedback in for a member who started this thread explicitly to obtain feedback from HN

losvedir2• 15 years ago

Very nice. At first, I didn't really see the point of it - another voting/wiki type thing, sigh - but the interface is so fast and compelling that it just drew me in.

I registered so I could vote on something, decided to see what creating an article was like, and it was so smooth it made me want to start more, and then eventually realize I have been looking for something like this.

I started a list of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA" because I remembered that I had been looking for just such a list the other day. I figured it's mostly HN users on there now, probably, and a fair amount of us are from here. I'm not positive what types of lists you're wanting, though, so I won't be hurt if you delete it!

Feature request: I would love to add some simple custom attribute to each list. For instance, with the coffee shops, it'd be nice if I could define an attribute for that list of "Free wifi?" and then each item could select either yes/no as it's created. An article on vim color themes could define an attribute of "Background?" with options "light, dark, both".

At some point in the future, then, you could filter and look at just the items in the list that match an attribute. E.g., I can look at the coffee shops and filter to look at only the ones that give free wifi.

Great work!

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks! I really appreciate your support :)

Your other article, "Best Text Editors for Programming", is a perfect article for Listry I think. The Cambridge coffee shops one would be good if there were a lot of Listry users that lived in Cambridge and could vote on it, I'm not sure there are enough though.

Your feature request is a good idea, I'll keep it in mind for down the road.

mbyrne• 15 years ago

side note: losvedir, if you actually are interested in Cambridge Coffee Shops for startups, check out http://hcombine.com/22/hcombine-start-up-coffee-shops/

losvedir2• 15 years ago

Hey, that looks great. Thanks!

darwindeeds3• 15 years ago

Great idea Kyle. How are you going to clean up spams? I like that its open but if one person decides to spam you will have lot of clean ups to do.

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks! Spam edits can be reverted in the history tab, there's still more work I need to do to make that easier though. Spam articles can be voted down, and that will take them off the front pages, and I can manually delete them. I'll probably need to have a "flag article" link down the road though.

fuzzythinker2• 15 years ago

I like its smoothness and workflow, like others have point out. Enjoy starting w/o forcing account creation as well.

After entering my abridged version of stackexchange's public web site checklist (http://www.listry.com/list/96005/live-app-checklist), I can see 2 features that I like to see:

- Allow entering just the "details" part of an article Item. Current workflow restricts articles to be more of a sub-level categorization. For simple lists that the article title already describes the article, there's no reason to require an item title.

- Allow option to auto insert list bullets/numbers into text that separated by empty lines.

yesimahuman• 15 years ago

I think you can get rid of the password confirm on the popup (you have their email after all for resets). Could make voting a bit more fluid.

jorde• 15 years ago

Nice app and congrats for the launch! I'm into list based services but there aren't too many around. One really similar that I came across about an year ago was http://listiki.com/ I really like their wiki/fork-style approach.

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks :)

I've seen that site before. Mine's more about creating comprehensive articles rather than just a list. Something where each item of the article has paragraph(s) of detail.

Something like Paul Graham's article, "18 Mistakes that Kill Startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) would be an ideal Listry article.

plq• 15 years ago

congrats on launching! why not eat your own dog food and start a [sticky] list for feature requests? i think it'd be a nice way to get early adopters get hooked up.

capdiz• 15 years ago

Very good idea. At least each edit made to a story will have to be voted upon.

ctdonath• 15 years ago

Blocked as "spam/suspicious".

cadr• 15 years ago

One thing I noticed was that under the 'best text editors' list, Vim shows up multiple times. Would be nice for it to know to combine or something.

Pretty!

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks, that happened because a troll overwrote the entry for Vim with junk text, and then the people added vim because they didn't see it.

I've manually merged their entries with the main vim entry.

zmt• 15 years ago

Nice and very fast. Could you give us more info on what stack did you use to develop/deploy this?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks :)

It's developed with the dynamic language Groovy, on Google App Engine. Here's a comment with some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803

barmstrong• 15 years ago

Site looks great. This is pretty similar to an idea i had a few years back: http://buyersvote.com/categories

It has languished since and never took off, but the pieces were all there: user generated listed, votes, wiki style edits, comments etc.

I've had some time to think on why mine never took off and wanted to share a few ideas in case it helps.

- critical mass is hard, StackOverflow (my inspiration for it) was able to launch with two massive blog posts from influencers

- how to counteract this? either empower your users to create their own "sub-listries" and try to attract influencers

- or do the bowling pin strategy http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/

- or do the tripadvisor approach (read Founders At Work for this story) and spend massively to seed content for several years to reach critical mass on your own

Few other thoughts:

- I think your design is better

- Is "Articles" the right word here? Esp given your domain would "lists" work better?

Hope it helps!

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks for your advice and compliments :)

I was debating between calling them "lists" or "articles", and decided on "articles" because my hope is that over time they will become full-fledged articles (true that my domain name makes that a bit confusing). Paul Graham's article on "the 18 mistakes that kill startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) is the type of article I am shooting for with Listry. Where each item of the article has 1 or more in-depth paragraphs of explanation or details.

ChrisNorstrom• 15 years ago

1 little thing -> Your "Browse Popular Articles" and "Contribute to New Articles" buttons are not vertically centered. The white space above them is 6px less than the white space below. It looks like you wanted them to be the same in your css but the #mainbuttons is 65px in height and the buttons are 59px in height.

If you change #mainbuttons height to 59px and bump the margins a little bit more to 29 or 30px you get a nicer look I personally think. A little bit more white space separates the buttons from the top header and to me is easier on the eyes.

I really like the site thought. There's lots of these but yours is different, the content stands out more than the site, and to me that's what matters.

moe• 15 years ago

Small tip: shrink the registration-barrier.

1. Add those social login buttons (facebook, twitter)

2. Make "e-mail address" the only input field, then mail me a password.

3. Delay asking me for a display-name until I try an operation that needs it.

jackreichert• 15 years ago

Congratts! Great idea and implementation! Clean, quick, nice!

One design tweak I would do... Have the descriptions of the lists collapsable so the reader can skim the list and only get the full scroll effect if they need.

sgerrand• 15 years ago

Kudos on a well implemented use of AppEngine - It's really zippy.

Do you have any plans to write a technical overview of your implementation?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks. I'll probably write about the implementation once I get some spare time. I got a lot of great feedback today that I'll be busy implementing for a while :)

wiradikusuma• 15 years ago

hey man this is slick, congrats! btw just curiuos, what's your underlying tech stack, your website is lightning fast! (given the fact i live in SE asia where internet quality is crappy)

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Thanks :)

It uses my own mini-framework for Google App Engine. This comment has more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803

cturner• 15 years ago

I'm using firefox. For some reason when I'm on the text editor page, text navigation like space, pageup, pagedown and end don't work.

pacifika• 15 years ago

I'm trying to subscribe to your blog but I cannot find a feed?

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Ah, didn't implement that yet. I'll get to work on that :)

bnegreve• 15 years ago

Do you have any plan to deal with non disjoint items... that would be an interesting problem to solve. eg, you have the following :

emacs 30

vim 20

vi 15

rbreve• 15 years ago

Cool, I had a similar idea a while back, http://lightsalad.com it never took off, and I abandoned the project. Good luck

SudarshanP2• 15 years ago

Nice Site.

Feature request: For each list allow users to link to lists in the wild. For Eg there could be a 10 reasons to quit smoking on some magazine. The user may not want to recreate the list, but just provide a bookmark. You could even provide a "listify" bookmarklet. For Eg Paul Graham's list of reasons why startups fail and a lot of startup failure story post mortems could be Supplimentary materials for a list of the same name.

The list which begins life as a list of useful bookmarks to external lists about the same topic could over time be deduplicated by the community to create a Master list that would be much more useful than the external lists themselves.

SudarshanP2• 15 years ago

I tried starting a list of "shops in india that would be of interest to Hackers and Makers": http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-that... on the lines of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA"... And I added two shops that I had painstaking discovered a few months ago for buying a few things I needed.

I was a bit annoyed that getting things you want from your own country(minimizes shipping and taxes) is still so hard in the era of google. So I wanted to share it with the world hoping that others would populate the list further and I could benefit from this. But it was voted -2. Now I have no complaints against that... Maybe such a list is unsuitable for this type of site. But I think it may be a smarter idea for you to make it more obvious as to what constitutes a bad list. Why "Coffee shops in Campridge" is kosher and why "Shops interesting for hackers in India" is not.

Spines1124• 15 years ago

Hi SudarshanP,

I voted you down because I thought it was spam, sorry. I've undone my vote now so you are back to 0. When I voted there was just one item with a link, and it looked like someone just wanted to advertise their online store.

Your article seems fine for the site. An optimum article would be more than just a list of links though.

Ideally, I want articles to become full-fledged, comprehensive articles. Like the article for "Reasons to Quit Smoking". In time, I hope that article can become a comprehensive resource of all the best reasons to quit smoking. Then someone who is trying to quit smoking can use that article as motivation to quit.

I'll be working on a commenting system so that in the future it'll be easier to discuss this type of thing on the actual article page.

Thanks for trying out the site and providing feedback! And sorry again for thinking it was spam.

Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

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