

Ask YC: Review my project: meta.li News for Startup Hackers - zzzmarcus

The link: http://meta.li<p>The description: I like the Drudge Report. In a glance I get what's happening in politics and major news. Chances are, if I spend 10 minutes reading Drudge I'll up on any major news related topic that comes up in conversation. It also has a sort of scandalous feel to it, which is fun.<p>I created meta.li as a Drudge-like site for startup news. It pulls from a few sources and ranks them by authority (notably HN, the highest ranked source) and sorts articles based on a number of parameters. I've used it as my primary source of news for a couple months and I'm pretty pleased with it. Feedback is welcome.
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topynate
Two issues, one with design, the other with your algorithm.

Design-wise, I'm no expert but you need to make better use of space. The grey
boxes are spaced too closely together, and the text in each box is too close
to the border. The uneven vertical dimensions of each group of boxes is subtly
disturbing and stops me taking in the content. Your colour palette is a bit
odd too.

Algorithmically, you're relying too much on your "authority" rankings. The
result is that the top of your site is over-stuffed with HN links. My solution
would be to assign an "exhaustion" parameter to each source. Each time your
algorithm picks the next article to show, it increments the exhaustion
parameter for that source. Then you can just subtract the exhaustion parameter
from the authority score in order to give other sources a chance for the
remaining space on the page. Tweak the weighting of the parameter to taste.

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pedalpete
I don't think you need to put 'feedback is welcome' on a entry where you are
asking for a review.

I think you may have a bit too much of a crush on "drudge resport' as well.
Just like Drudge, your site is almost unusable. Forget the 3 column layout. It
might work for them, it doesn't work for you. Your text is too small for
headlines. You want to grab the users attention, and make them click, right
now, i'm barely reading what you've got.

That top section with the centered text and yellow border, i thought it was an
ad and ignored it at first. Now I see it is a headlines section.

In general..not good.

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zzzmarcus
Ha. Okay fair enough. 'feedback is welcome' is redundant. You're right.

RE: Drudge. Yes, it is entirely possible that I am just used to seeing it
after looking at it daily for about 8 years. I can see how it'd be sensory
overload if you're not accustomed to that style of news.

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minalecs
initial impression is overload. I tried to scan quickly, and it was just too
much. You should do a layout similar to this site, hacker news. Easier to scan
for content im interested in.

