Show HN: A minimal feed reader that uses ML to streamline your reading list

by dsri • 13 years ago

6 3 13 years ago

dsri• 13 years ago

This is a twist on the basic web-based feed reader concept that a friend and I have been working on in our spare time for the past couple of months or so.

Users can mark items as liked/disliked, and the app will not show the user new items it thinks they won't want to read. It's done on a per-user basis, i.e. my preferences won't affect your reading list and vice versa. It's built on Rails.

It would be great to get some feedback about layout and marketing copy if anyone has any.

We'd be happy to go into more detail if you have any questions about any aspect of the project.

ghosttie• 13 years ago

I don't like having a narrow strip of content with acres of whitespace on either side.

Also the font for the article title is HUGE and why is it not a link to the article?

I don't like that the way it shows that an article is read is by making the "Mark as read" button pressed in.

You don't have any social sharing stuff - people are going to want that.

I think you should have keyboard shortcuts for like/dislike so people can zoom through their feeds going nope-nope-yep.

There's no unread count.

There's no indication of how old an article is.

Also I don't know if it was trying to download every article from every one of my feeds or something but it maxed out my internet connection for a couple of minutes.

As far as marketing copy goes, I found "Free during beta No credit card required or commitment." scary. Who would pay for a beta? It feels like you're thinking about money before I've even had the opportunity to see if your product is any good. There are a lot of feed readers out there right now and a lot of them are free or cheap, so it's got to be GOOD for me to consider cracking the piggy bank.

neilbowers• 13 years ago

* might be an idea to have a feedback link (why I'm posting this here) * scrolling becomes tedious very quickly. Needs a better overview mechanism. Eg only show the first N lines of a story unless I'm interested. * Without some notion of how you're going to define relevance, I quickly became way of disliking something. * You could have a way to like/dislike the author, as well as the post. Ie a way to say "I always/never want to read stuff written by this person".

Show HN: A minimal feed reader that uses ML to streamline your reading list

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