Show HN: Like Button for Hacker News

http://www.hnlike.com/index.php

by sbashyal • 15 years ago

568 65 15 years ago

pestaa2• 15 years ago

I like the idea but if I ever use it, the reason would be backwards: to show how many hackers already upvoted the entry.

Most articles hit the front page on HN and in a good case stay there for a day, but rarely more. The votes after that point are so distributed over time the entry would disappear anyway from the most visited page.

I'd rather link back to the proper page on HN (where I'd want to read the comments anyway, I think I'm not alone with this).

If there was a way to link back and upvote with a single click, I'd raise my hat.

Nonetheless, really nice work for a weekend.

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

Did you read my blog post on the topic? I was wondering if I didn't do a good job explaining my pain point well. Just like you have mentioned, I also wanted to let my readers know that the content has received some HN love.

So would you be interested if I came-up with a version of the button that displayed the HN Points and Comment count for the content sans the 'like' call for action?

pestaa2• 15 years ago

I do not maintain content sites or technical blogs, I just tried to clearly think through what my use case would be. If I had a blog I'd be as interested now as with the new version. :)

However, these additions would in my opinion resonate with other authors.

lubutu• 15 years ago

It's impressive how lossy-compressed that PNG image is. The button artwork really needs some love...

ayanb2• 15 years ago

Also, the text beside the button could well be center aligned vertically.

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

You bet! Let's think of the current version as a mock-up :)

RobertHubert4• 15 years ago

I can mock up a few for you if that helps? Then we can let people "hnLike" the button to see what people prefer? Ill keep adding more to the set throughout the day.

http://roberthubert.com/hnlikes.html

^ edit: these now include the buttons from acous too! :)

ap3mantus• 15 years ago

absolutely, there are alignment issues as well

ahmetalpbalkan2• 15 years ago

It actually does not make users "like", right? First it sends you to submit page, then you submit and then you're counted as liked?

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

Yes, that's the workflow. HN rightly counts re-submissions by different users as an upvote.

biturd2• 15 years ago

Maybe after the submit the window should go away, because this is what I get, which looks odd http://i.imgur.com/BCvWV.png

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

It does look odd! Because the submission page is a Hacker News page, I can not control its behavior. One of the things I would like to do, after being convinced that the HN community wants this feature, is to discuss possible options with the YCombinator folks.

biturd2• 15 years ago

I thought you mentioned you were using the HN API? Even without it, can't you use something like `curl` to make the post and perhaps some gross regex to strip away the bits you want and load it into your own domain space?

dshah• 15 years ago

Nice work!

A big improvement would be to not go through the submission step if the article has already been submitted (and has votes). Would be more like the reddit button.

Speaking of which, making this look more like the standard social media buttons would be good too.

I'll put an open $100 Amazon Gift certificate reward out there if you want to make those changes, and release back to the community.

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

Thanks! I am willing to convert this hack into a service for the HN community.

sahillavingia• 15 years ago

Can you email me? I'd love to make it prettier.

diminish• 15 years ago

hackernews-ed! i cant reach the site.

artursapek2• 15 years ago

Speaking of which, making this look more like the standard social media buttons would be good too.

Why!

alphakappa• 15 years ago

So it can share space with other buttons without sticking out as an odd button.

Andi• 15 years ago

If you have a good story, you will go to hackernews and post it. I think this "innovation" is going to lead to a lower post quality.

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

That's a possible side-effect. But it has benefits (for e.g. better content discovery) that I think out-weighs the side-effect.

On the other note, if vote count is the measure of content quality, the ease to vote should not adversely affect the system but improve it.

RobertHubert4• 15 years ago

Yeah Im kind of realizing this too, we dont want rampant mindless liking. Part of what makes the vote here work is that you can compare posts with one another and see if similar stories were already submitted etc... What if we make the like button really small..."^" so that only people familiar with it will notice it? lol

pg• 15 years ago

It's worth thinking about the question of whether this will make HN better or worse. I'm inclined to think worse. It will bring more random people to the site, and (to the extent it works) it will mean that an article's score on HN will depend partially on the completely random factor of whether the author included this button.

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

I agree that this will lead to HN point inflation which in itself is not bad. The community has to decide whether the features out-weigh potential content quality degradation. I have maintained so far that I'll build this service IF the community desires it.

In any case, a button that displays the HN points (without upvote feature) for a given content is useful. The question is whether to include the upvote function in it or not.

update: there already is a bookmarklet and a Chrome extension for it so this is only an addition to the list in this regard

shadowsun7• 15 years ago

@sbashyal: Nice hack. That said, read pg's comment carefully: the issue here isn't simply about HN point inflation. It's about submitting stories thoughtfully, upvoting carefully (after evaluating signals such as the quality of the conversation around an article, alongside the article itself), introduction of random strangers to the HN community - these are potential factors tied in with the creation of the like button.

pg's raised these issues, and I must say I'd like to see some discussion about them.

PLejeck2• 15 years ago

I think if it never links directly to HN, we'll be safe.

skeptical• 15 years ago

I've been reading hacker news for maybe two years (not much I know) without registering. It is noticeable that hacker news is becomming more of a so-called social marketing tool and less of a news source. This is not a blindly negative critique, I'm simply stating what I can observe. Possibly this is a milestone for what hacker news can become. I'm not sure that's the right direction either. Personally, I wouldn't mind if hacker news would put the foot on the break and become more content centered rather than community focused. It is my understanding that the site guidelines kind of state this too with different phrasing...?

kaiuhl• 15 years ago

I came in this thread to say exactly this. The value of HN is the thoughtfulness and conscious submissions people make to this site. I'd hate to imagine what would appear here if people just had to click a button in between the +1 and the Facebook like to submit and upvote articles. It'd become a different version of Digg.

Great idea, but this makes me scared.

benologist• 15 years ago

I'm not sure it would make much difference on submissions. People and bots submit articles indiscriminately from a number of sources within seconds of them hitting their RSS feed:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/auto+submission+bots+on+Hacker+Ne...

What it would do is give the large-trafficked sites a significant advantage since they can leverage their own traffic. You could see that on Digg years ago, the front page was largely devoted to a selection of sites - Engadget, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Ars etc.

Yhippa• 15 years ago

That's the first thing I thought when I read this. There's something about the current state of visitors where I'm seeing really good discussion and interesting articles. When Joe Random starts submitting and hanging out there I hope the content quality doesn't drop.

intellection• 15 years ago

Is it reactionary?

Could beginning more minds and data beget innovation?

Wherein here we innovate without sin, I do not understand why enabling new power is.

chunkybacon• 15 years ago

It will make HN worse if there is no corrective, but a corrective could be to further devalue the upvotes of people with little or no karma. To implement this you would need to further differentiate between displayed points and true points or change displayed points to one of the suggestions received before for the point display on comments (e.g. gradations of color/hue instead of numbers).

This hidden valuation will probably also have to exist for user karma. Curiously, this is what is claimed in many esoteric schools concerning karma itself. The mechanisms are deliberately hidden "by the gods" so that one does good for the sake of good and not with any intent of gaming the system.

rodh257• 15 years ago

Is there a way to make it display only to people logged into HN?

volida• 15 years ago

Maybe a simple weighted vote (relative to how new is the member/karma) would solve the problem. Or at least the mean from random sample from older members and another sample from newer ones, and use variance to check if there is significant difference, and maybe register another sample from members who are voting through the like button (but haven't already gone to the article from HN). A simple comparison of IP timestamps would help doing that.

(these are just suggestions I have no idea how the current algorithm works)

jedberg• 15 years ago

As someone who has experience in this area, let me just say that it probably won't drive all that much traffic. Most people ignore those little buttons.

It will however put an insane amount of load on whatever server it is served from.

Supporting buttons was the first thing that drove reddit to getting a CDN. We also made it cache the score for a few minutes for non-logged-in users, which helped alleviate a lot of load.

g-garron• 15 years ago

It was just the day before yesterday that I've written this http://garron.me/blog/what-i-have-learned-at-hacker-news.htm...

About how I like HN, and why it is not yet-another-social-site full of kids trying to push their post to the top.

Sorry if this sound negative, but I'd rather prefer HN as it is now, If I find something I think might interest this "mature" community I'll come here and post it, It does not matter if this is not as easy as submit the story to Facebook. It worth the "effort" as here I get real good comments about my submissions.

We already have Facebook for the "brainless" people. I've to admit that I blog a lot and only maybe 1% of my own posts deserve being here. With this button in my blog, maybe lots of me posts might end up here.

Anyway great job designing and creating this. :).

Hope my opinion adds something good to this discussion.

jeremyarussell• 15 years ago

I figure a good compromise exists. Just release the source code and let everyone host their own hackers like button. Then people get to choose what they want. (and even choose to alter the code to not allow "likes" at all.) And, just show details of how many liked it. This ways they can integrate hacker news info with their own blogs displays, etc.

Personally, I can see through pulse and news.ycombinator.com how many votes something has. If I want to upvote something I'll take the thirty seconds to find the article on hacker news.

Just my two cents.

RFE: Typo

artursapek2• 15 years ago

Do we really want submitting a story to HN to be as easy as getting fed inside of a Skinner box?

dartma• 15 years ago

I would suggest not doing it, although it seems like a nice idea.

I honestly do think that content will suffer on HN as a result.

thelovelyfish• 15 years ago

A "like" button instigates nothing more than a childish popularity competition.

hm2k2• 15 years ago

I'm sure I saw a better implementation of this on someone's blog only last week, but I don't recall where.

I can't be the only one who saw this...

hm2k2• 15 years ago

Why did someone downvote this? That's not helpful towards finding what I was looking for.

ahmetalpbalkan2• 15 years ago

instead of showing an image, have you considered doing that orange 'Y' logo with HTML+CSS?

sbashyal11• 15 years ago

Yes, that is one of the option I am considering. I could surely take someone's help in getting things prettier :)

dwynings3• 15 years ago

Something like this maybe?

http://jsfiddle.net/dwynings/6Fm9M/1/

mike-cardwell• 15 years ago

The way this button works suggests to me that it would be easy to use CSRF to get people automatically upvoting your articles if they happen to be logged into HN when they come to your site.

mvts• 15 years ago

I have the feeling, that a social network is the exact opposite of what HN is aiming to be. I'd rather like to think of it as a community.

PLejeck2• 15 years ago

Hacker News is like Digg but without so much sucking.

If Digg were 100% programmers, it would be Hacker News.

I personally think this is a good idea if only to reduce duplicates and such.

As long as we never explicitly link to Hacker News itself, no noobs will come here, and the benefits should outweigh the negatives.

impendia• 15 years ago

So there are 378 upvotes (and counting) but that could be a little misleading. I venture no opinion on whether this is a good idea or not, but I confess to having upvoted the link because I was curious to try out the button.

jamesrom• 15 years ago

This is the exact moment when HN jumps the shark and becomes digg/reddit/slashdot/et al.

donniefitz2• 15 years ago

Please don't do this to HN. I really like it here.

Show HN: Like Button for Hacker News

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