
Show HN: Amuzor, a new content curator we've been building - sebastianmck
http://amuzor.com/submissions
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shortformblog
It's a nice concept (and the fact that you have ads off to the side is great
because too few sites of this nature worry about business model), and I
appreciate the focus on credit, but I guess my question is this:

Clearly the site that this reminds people the most of is Tumblr (I also see
shades of imgur and 9gag in this), and Tumblr has some distinct advantages in
that it allows you to create a site around the stuff you curate, and also has
a few other options. But — and here's something key — you can customize the
experience as much or as little as you want.

Does this design focus too much on the centralized angle of the site as a
whole and too little on the end user? It seems like the design of this site
doesn't offer much in the way of customization and doesn't seem focused on
letting end users make the content "theirs" as much as the collective whole.
This is reinforced by the fact that you discourage repeat posts — a key
difference between this and Tumblr, where they have a reblog button
essentially _designed_ to allow repeat posts. While that kind of approach
makes sense for an individual blog, if you're looking to build this out as a
wider content-curation tool, you should focus on the end user pages.

Now, this approach doesn't need to look like Tumblr. Look at what RebelMouse
does. While it's somewhat Pinterest-y, it has a few key differences, such as
the ability to customize HTML and embed on user websites.

I guess that, if you sold this as an alternative to imgur that can do a couple
of extra things for Reddit users that imgur can't, that would be an angle. But
I think the reason why people use curation tools is that they're trying to
curate for themselves and not the site itself.

Let me know what you think.

~~~
terabytest
We're still experimenting with various ideas and the main point in our release
was to get an MVP out as soon as possible. This is the first major publicly
released website for the both of us so it's still a learning experience.

~~~
shortformblog
I appreciate that consideration. I guess that was my effort to offer
constructive criticism as far as scope goes.

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geuis
"Mobile devices are currently unsupported."

What, exactly, is there to support?

Is your site Flash or java based? If so, that's a decision that should be
reconsidered.

Assuming its html and js like most other sites, it turns out my phone has a
perfectly capable and modern browser on it. Indeed, I'm using it right now to
leave this very critique.

Don't tell the user they can't do something because their browser "isn't
supported". Of course their browser is supported if its anything made in the
last 4 years.

I'm hypothesizing you think you need some dumbed down "optimized" mobile
experience. That might be a nice thing to have down the road, but is
absolutely no reason to put up a wall when you're trying to launch.

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sebastianmck
Sorry about that. I've deployed a fix that removes the mobile block. It seems
to work fine on the Android browser, but on iOS if you zoom in any further
than the default zoom level then the sidebar floats and gets in the way of the
content. We'll work on fixing that, but at least you're now able to access the
basic content.

~~~
aidos
That's an issue on narrower desktop browsers too (for me in Chrome at least).
Kudos though, it looks really nice!

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brador
You might want to check the rules on floating adsense/locking adsense position
on scroll. Last time I checked it was not allowed. Yes 9gag does it.

~~~
sebastianmck
Oops we weren't aware, thanks for the heads up!

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lnanek2
The page looks really beautiful in general. A single scrolling list feels
really old fashioned though compared to modern grids like Pinterest. The
Google Ads are huge and white and ugly and don't fit at all as well. I'd
rather even image ads, but don't think you should have ads at all while you
are trying to build traction/users. You might be driving off 10% of users to
earn a few pennies a week when starting out, and your product may have lots of
bugs and be lower quality then it will be later on, so may not be strong
enough to keep a user around despite the ads.

~~~
sebastianmck
We've tweaked the ad color scheme so it doesn't clash as much with the rest of
the site. As for having ads now, we plan to run off advertising income and
we'd rather be honest about that up front, rather than launching without ads
and potentially giving our users a rude shock when we add them in later.

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JshWright
A video consisting of a single profanity... A picture of a pink lake labelled
"Nobody knows why" (it's fairly well understood that it's bacteria that gives
the dozens of pink salt lakes around the world their color)... A picture of a
harbor seal bizarrely labelled a 'manatee'

I realize this is more about the platform than the content, but the content
kinda sucks...

~~~
hnriot
the whole thing reeks of being extremely poorly thought out.

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hiddenstage
Automatically downloaded a soundcloud file. It then told me "This site is
requesting you download multiple files. Allow or Deny." Running Chrome for
Android.

~~~
terabytest
That's strange, I have never seen it happen. Could you please give me the URL
it happens on for you? Thanks.

~~~
cliff
It happened to me on chrome on Windows on the front page. Kinda freaked me out
as it started downloading a strange file immediately.

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Hawkee
At first I didn't know what the site was about. There is no introduction or
tagline to make it clear. And while the layout looks somewhat Bootstrappy it
is not responsive at all. It scales very poorly to the point that the
navigation slides away to the right as I resize my window. I wouldn't
introduce a new site without first making it responsive. It does look like
you've got some decent content, so you're off to a good start in that regard.
It just needs to work on any size display.

~~~
terabytest
Thanks for letting us know. We've added a quick introduction to the site for
new users that appears on your first visit.

We're also currently working on bringing out a responsive/mobile interface.

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jeffehobbs
You should check this on an ipad. The layout is doing some squishy, floaty
things.

~~~
nasmorn
You should check it on your phone. "mobile devices are unsupported" Very nice.
How can this be more helpful than the desktop version

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barredo
Nice design. I'll add a few tag recomendations on the left menu so users can
find them easily, and maybe even create their own list of tags they like to
browse

~~~
terabytest
Thank you! We already have a tab subscription feature, you can subscribe to a
tag by visiting its page and clicking on 'subscribe'. We're also looking into
new ways to present suggestions to our users.

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jeffjose
1\. URLs should update with the filters I choose. It looks like all of them
are POST requests. This breaks bookmarking, backbutton and slew of other
things. HTML5 makes it easier for webapps like this with their pushHistory
feature. Take a look at that

2\. When I hover on the item to see what it is linked to, I get a "fake"
amuzuor/../outbound_link - I like to see where I'd end up, _before_ I click. I
couldnt find a place for that.

~~~
sebastianmck
I've replaced the outbound_link urls with the direct ones. The original intent
was to track clicks so we could do some analytics on it but it's not worth it
at this stage. I'll look into changing the behaviour of filters, thanks!

edit: Deployed a patch that will change the filters to permalinks.

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mattdeboard
Can you share a bit about the technology behind it?

edit: Also one very very minor pet peeve of mine is when you have an
activation code in email with punctuation around it, e.g.

> Your activation code is 123456.

Chrome actually does a good job of disregarding the period when I double click
to highlight. Sorry for the bikeshedding!

~~~
sebastianmck
Sure. It's powered by a custom framework running on NodeJS. Links screenshots
are taken by PhantomJS and images are compressed/optimised by ImageMagick,
Jpegtran, Pngcrush, and Optipng. If you have additional questions I'd be more
than happy to answer them.

edit: Ahh good point, I'll be sure to remove the dot.

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billturner
Visiting in Chrome on OSX, it started a download of the SoundCloud widget
HTML.

~~~
geargrinder
This was an unwelcome surprise for me too.

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terabytest
Does this happen to you when you interact with it or when the page loads?

EDIT: might it also be the effect of one of the extensions you might have
installed?

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EwanG
It happens to me on Windows also, and the particular copy I was using is my
sandboxed Chrome with no plugins (for sites I'm not sure of). It happened as
the page was loading, I immediately got a DL requestor, and the same warning
message. That pretty much had me closing the window ASAP.

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marknutter
I like the site design - the darker them really makes photos pop. I am not a
fan of the name though; I've always found that names that have ambiguous
pronunciations are always the easiest for people to forget.

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DanBC
I like it!

I was gently confused by the "We put a feedback link on everypage" comment.

(<http://imgur.com/YoB3G>)

Is that only for people signed in?

~~~
terabytest
Oh, yeah it is! We'll clarify it on the page. Thanks!

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g2e
Awesome! I like the dark colours but I think it would be wiser to have a much
lighter theme as a default.

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liljimmytables
Very clean, and I like the content. What platform did you build it on?

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jnazario
digistagram++

