
Show HN: Like Button for Hacker News - sbashyal
http://www.hnlike.com/index.php
======
pg
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.

~~~
sbashyal
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
@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.

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

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.

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dshah
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.

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

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

------
Andi
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.

~~~
sbashyal
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.

~~~
RobertHubert
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

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pestaa
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.

~~~
sbashyal
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?

~~~
pestaa
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.

~~~
sbashyal
I think that's a good insight

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

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

~~~
RobertHubert
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! :)

~~~
acous
Hopefully I'm not being rude, but I thought I might try my hand at some as
well.

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/103004/hnlike.html>

 _edit:_ I can't reply below yet, but I think I'm done at 4 so feel free to
incorporate them into a sheet!

~~~
RobertHubert
Nice, Perhaps we could put them all onto a single sheet? Have a submission
deadline, then voting time?

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

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mike-cardwell
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.

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PLejeck
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.

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impendia
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.

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jeremyarussell
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

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

~~~
sbashyal
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.

~~~
biturd
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?

~~~
awaz
That would work if I were to submit from a single account but not to submit on
your behalf.

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mvts
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.

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donniefitz2
Please don't do this to HN. I really like it here.

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dartma
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.

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

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

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hm2k
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...

~~~
hm2k
Why did someone downvote this? That's not helpful towards finding what I was
looking for.

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ahmetalpbalkan
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?

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

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

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

~~~
dwynings
Something like this maybe?

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

~~~
omaranto
That would look better with the Y to the left of "Like" instead of on top
covering the i and k (and leaving a blank space to the left of the L).

~~~
dwynings
Probably a browser issue? This is what it looks like on my end:
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10895160/Screenshots/vxfhd-
be9gi1.pn...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10895160/Screenshots/vxfhd-be9gi1.png)

~~~
sbashyal
Which browser did you test it on? Firefox didn't render it properly.

~~~
dwynings
Ah, I just worried about Webkit as it was a quick mockup.

This should work in Chrome, Safari, & FF.

<http://jsfiddle.net/dwynings/6Fm9M/10/>

