
Show HN: A new way to view IAmA's on Reddit - xpose2000
http://www.topiama.com/
======
spindritf
Very cool. It picks all the important stuff and presents it sans the fluff.
Where do I subscribe? Really, where's the rss feed for new AMAs?

Also, links to questions in their original context would be nice.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Some questions are in response to other questions - some indentation to show
this might be handy.

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xpose2000
I have emailed Reddit about the legality of this project. (Have not received a
response yet) So far it seems likely that I will have to take down the site.

So consider this a small preview I suppose. I plan to port this to a Chrome
Extension.

Do you guys find this format much more readable than the current completed
IAmA?

~~~
Gnolfo
I ran into the same problem. I started a pet project that involved scraping
reddit (though for a different purpose than AMAs). Their robots.txt and an
admin writeup from somewhere on their site made me realize that I'd probably
just have to take it down and/or my scraper would just get blacklisted. It's a
bummer because there's 1001 great ideas out there for filtering, categorizing,
and viewing reddit's data in different ways. And it seems like they encourage
3rd party interaction to some extent with their API and all, yet scraping is
kind of needed in most cases.

I do like the format for sure. The only thing I would consider is maybe
nesting the Q/A divs (.qitem) for threads because a lot of times the Q/A
content is contextual to past Q/As. You already order them that way and that
helps a lot but on one of the ones I was reading it got confusing on whether
they were speaking in the context of a thread or if it was a fresh Q/A. Maybe
set it as a view option to toggle or something (maybe have it be a carousel
where each frame contains all the Q/A divs in a thread starting with the root
level, and keep it displayed flat like they are now).

~~~
xpose2000
I made sure to be nice to reddit. The scrapper is set to crawl reddit once
every 12 hours for new "top monthly iamas".

Very good suggestion for nested threads. A good example of a reply to a
question is on the westboro-baptist-church thread. I think it's possible to
implement this suggestion. Will fool around with it on localhost and see what
I come up with.

~~~
Gnolfo
Yeah, I had a limiter put in mine as well so that it only made a request every
6 or 8 seconds.

No worries on the suggestion. Those threaded comments can be tricky sometimes.

Hey, if you do hear back from them about their stance on this sort of thing,
I'd really appreciate if you could let me know what they say. I sort of halted
my project after a certain point because I had the fear I'd just have to take
it down as soon as I completed it.

~~~
buttscicles
You should be able to up that to 2 seconds with no problem, provided you're
following the other usage rules of course.

<https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API>

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redslazer
The concept is good and its easier to scan than IAMA but the design/typography
just hurts to read. I would probably fix that asap. Make it bigger, easier to
read and change the font.

In regards to your concerns of legality. Reddit seems to be ok with scrapers,
bots and the like as long as you dont make more than 30 requests per minute.

~~~
twistedanimator
A couple months ago, reddit started refusing requests from my web scraper.
Figured out they started checking the user agent and refusing connections that
didn't look like they came from a user's browser. Unless I missed an
announcement somewhere, it doesn't seem like they're overly friendly about
allowing web scrapers.

~~~
randomdrake
They just don't want to be abused.

 _"We're happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and Greasemonkey
scripts, but they have to obey some rules:"_

<https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API>

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mmaunder
Thank you!! Serious time saver when you cut the ding-dong-ping-pong Reddit
karma whoring replies. Just enjoyed this AMA with a former Rosetta Stone
employee:

[http://www.topiama.com/r/21/iama-former-rosetta-stone-
employ...](http://www.topiama.com/r/21/iama-former-rosetta-stone-employee-who-
speaks-8)

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achompas
Surprisingly compelling. The IAmA's are some of Reddit's best content, and
this is so much easier to scan than a real IAmA thread. Thanks!

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kmfrk
An alternative that we know is legal, you can use
<http://reddit.com/r/tabled>.

To expand on that, you could create a stylesheet or such that modified the
look of it. Something similar to the mobile HN sites where banner ads are
preserved could be considered as well.

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scalable
Minor problem: Zero based indexing, combined with not showing current page in
navigation, is confusing. At main page I saw links to page 1, 2. Thought that
1 was current page, 2 was next page.

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Alex3917
I like this, although I do think it would be better if each comment had a
permalink back to the original so that we could see all the responses, not
just the one by the person who created the thread.

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pygorex
Very cool. Reading the Nate Phelps AMA:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v99eg/iaman_exmember_o...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v99eg/iaman_exmember_of_the_westboro_baptist_church/)

Right now the top-rated comment by Nate Phelps is not in direct response to a
particular question.

This top-rated comment is not on topiama.com:

[http://www.topiama.com/r/4/iaman-exmember-of-the-westboro-
ba...](http://www.topiama.com/r/4/iaman-exmember-of-the-westboro-baptist-
church)

I don't know if this is a feature or a bug or if hasn't been crawled recently.

It would be great to see these top-level comments!

\------------

Linking to an answer's context would be super-useful as well. A great deal of
the fun and value reddit supplies is the community commentary and responses to
an AMA's answers. This can range from the funny to the insightful to the scary
- something topiama.com doesn't capture. Which is great - sometimes you don't
want the peanut gallery.

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intended
There used to be a comment bot/person who put all the reddit AMA questions
into a tabular format - I recently discovered it has a pretty useful
subreddit: <http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled>

I actually prefer that format over this one.

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Jun8
Super, thanks! Saw a lot of stuff that I missed, e.g. the physicist who can
calculate anything:

* If I gain a kilo of weight here on earth, how much more will my wife be attracted to me? Ans: 4x10^-9N

* How large would the wings of a pegasus have to be to allow a horse to actually fly? Ans: 1000m2

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mattmaroon
Substantial improvement. Now can you make one that shows r/funny minus all of
the cat posts?

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Foomandoonian
Neat. The presentation would be vastly improved without the text-align:
justify; though.

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waxjar
This is awesome, so much cleaner and easier to read. I hope it stays online.

I'd make questions link to the original comment threads on Reddit, though.
Sometimes comments by other users are useful too.

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jcfrei
I'm doing something similar with all the funny pictures on reddit. not really
successful though, and basically leeching.

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unwiredben
Really enjoyed this... so much easier than navigating through hundreds of
comments on Reddit's main interface

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simonbrown
Does this also support <http://www.reddit.com/r/ama>?

~~~
xpose2000
It is not supported at the moment. However it could be added down the line.

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aditiyaa1
Beat me to it!! I am currently working on the exact same problem. Lets see how
my version turns out!

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jackhammer2022
This is much more readable than IAmA's interface though I suggest some work on
the font. Great job.

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joshschreuder
This is great! I second the request for an RSS feed for the new IAMAs. Thanks
for the site!

~~~
pwenzel
I came here just to say say the same thing. RSS please and thank you!

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comex
There definitely need to be context links to the original comments.

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xtc
Once it denotes nested questions it will be perfected. Nice work.

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jonmarkgo
This is great, would love to see it as a chrome extension!

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human_error
Paging is buggy.

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jdechambeau
This is great! Thanks for making it :)

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akoumjian
Fantastic job.

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samspot
RSS Please!

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mck-
How about one for HN?

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wilfra
I guess we should be glad Craig Newmark does not own Reddit.

