
What is your opinion on Jaanix? Does it work for you? Is it better than reddit? - hashtable
http://jaanix.com/
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gaika
I'm a founder of jaanix. Just a bit of background - jaanix is not a regular
social news site. First of all everything is personalized - and not just by
tweaking some settings or selecting your favorite tags, but in a machine
learning way - the system tries to guess what you will like and acts
accordingly. It uses implicit feedback too, so it tracks your clicks and tries
to learn from it, but you can always see how it learned and what it thinks
about you in the sliders.

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ntoshev
It's cool, I have used it before but stopped after a while because it didn't
have critical mass (enough users contributing links). I hope you would be able
to gain that mass or already have. Would you share something like the number
of active users and how old is the site?

Edit: Have you considered importing bookmarks from del.icio.us and voting from
digg, reddit, news.YC? Facebook style. This can really boost the site's
content and would give the learning algorithm plenty of data even for new
accounts.

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gaika
As of today about 1000 unique visitors a day. ~100 people are posting. But I'm
sure the site can bootstrap from that, as it can be useful even if you have
just a few friends there.

Jaanix has been running as a closed system for almost a year. Opened up in
December last year. Usable UI is less than 2 weeks old.

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tx
There is an interesting idea growing bigger and bigger in recent months.

Some say that proliferation of feedback-based recommendation engines and
machine learning algorithms for predicting "what I may like to read next" is
bad for our society, because eventually people will be revolving in their own
little narrow worlds of interests, reading/watching/listening same stuff
without exposure to anything new, disruptive and mind-stimulating.

Many Americans are already largely ignorant of what's going on in the world
partly due to CNN+friends that have been doing somewhat similar "content
suggestion" for years and now the matter will get only worse. People are being
enabled to build these "walls of ignorance" around themselves.

From personal experience, it is especially noticeable with music: if it wasn't
for my friends who introduce me to their music, I'd still be listening to the
same old stuff (or similar, coming from suggestions on sites like Pandora)

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cstejerean
This is only true if the recommendation engine is primitive. There must be a
relationship between the stuff you currently like and subset of "new" stuff
that you like because it's disruptive and mind-stimulating.

But I don't want a news site to figure out what articles I will like. I just
need it to filter out the stuff it knows I definitely dislike so I have less
crap to filter through.

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thaumaturgy
I've been quietly rooting for Jaanix for a while, ever since the creator first
posted a link to it on Reddit. You guys have been constantly tweaking and
tuning the site, and listening to suggestions, and it's looking great now.

That said, the infinite scroll thing drives me a little nutty. Since I'm
usually stealing time away from something to screw around on a news site
somewhere online, I try to say to myself, "I'll just read 2 pages", or "I'll
just scan the first page, I only have a couple of minutes". But, I can't do
that on Jaanix. On the other hand, I think it's a cool feature, and I get why
you want to use it.

Is there an on/off switch for it in user settings maybe? (I'm not currently a
registered Jaanix user.)

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Alex3917
I heard the guy who patented those sliders (to narrow search results) made
about 60 million dollars for about two days work. One of my friends went to
interview at some company he was associated with.

~~~
sabat
Ick

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douglask
I love it... the recommender actually works (in extreme contrast to Reddit).

I still hit reddit / digg / slashdot / other sources, but that's to find
things to post here. More articles on JaaNix is a good thing.

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bharris
Great concept, but you're a little late. The userbase seems small, and the
user submitted content is definitely lacking so much so that I can't find
anything on the front page (after adjusting sliders) that interests me. Had
this site launched pre-Digg/Reddit, I definitely would have jumped on board.

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gaika
Called network effect - true for network-based systems with similar
functionality.

Jaanix will have much more, soon, this is just to bootstrap.

Start posting, and people like you will stay :)

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urlwolf
One quick note: I'm using admuncher, and Jaanix somehow displays a lot of
javascript from admuncher that it shouldn't. I don't know how many people are
using this ad blocker, but it could be an issue for mass addoption of Jaanix
if admuncher is popular!

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mynameishere
Maybe I'm stupid, but I can't figure out how to post. I see the toolbar, but
I'm not about to install a toolbar. Sorry.

Also, I really dislike the "infinite scroll" feature. Otherwise the site seems
attractive.

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gaika
You do not have to install anything, just bookmark a link that lets you post.
The best way is to put it in the links toolbar of your browser, but it doesn't
have to be there.

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mynameishere
"Bookmark a link" in my browser? (???) A link that lets me post? (What does
that mean?) I'm more confused than before. I want a button that says "post",
and presents a textfield that I can put a URL in.

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theoneill
Is this site yours? If so you should say so.

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hashtable
No. It is absolutely not. I just found it on reddit the other day and thought
it was interesting. I think it is an intriguing idea but I don't think it will
work because tagging cannot capture enough information about a particular web
page. Personally I didn't find it to be very useful, but I was wondering what
other people's opinions are.

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gaika
It is not just tags, it is using a netflix like recommendation system inside.

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ropiku
I like it because it lets me vote even if I do not have an account. +1 for
making email optional.

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DanielBMarkham
I like it. I've kicked around this idea for a couple of years now.

Now automate the sliders for me.

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gaika
the sliders are updated based on your feedback already, you do not have to
touch them, they will work as indicators of your interest just fine.

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pieceofpie
Jaanix is a segway into a broader platform. It's great but needs work.

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kingnothing
What?

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gaika
he wants it to be google :)

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nanijoe
I'm sure you wouldn't mind if it ended up as google :)

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zeantsoi
What's the segue into becoming a segway?

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sabat
I like this. It's not a direct competitor of reddit IMHO -- it's an
interesting corollary site. I like everything I've seen so far, especially the
sliders. I'll try and stay on the site over the next few days to support the
launch.

