

 Feedback on a new project - KickPost - calebelston
http://kickpost.com/beta

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ajg1977
If there's one thing it needs right now, it's a one sentence "What is
KickPost?" blurb in the top-right somewhere. If I hadn't read the comments
here I'd have assumed it was some sort of aggregator and moved on.

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calebelston
Totally agree. We will add that.

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calebelston
Hi

KickPost is new tech news aggregator that uses a predictive algorithm based on
historically popular stories to predict which stories will be popular in
realtime. We are about 20min faster at predicting hot stories than Techmeme.

What do you think?

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minus1
Great design.

One thing I noticed was that it's very difficult for me to scan the headlines
quickly. I think the reason is that right now the focal point is the time,
with the red and black, while the headline and description blend together a
bit. I think you could change this without hurting the aesthetic. (Also, as
others mentioned, a brief description would be great)

Good luck!

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coryl
The red pulls my eye towards the time as well.

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woodall
This is way better than what I was working on[1]. Mine is still under
development. I wanted to go after more of the top things being searched- i.e.
Google Trends, Bing, Yahoo!, all that jazz- and somehow do something with that
data. Along the lines I added Youtube popular list, Reddit, and other things.

I like it, wish you had an RSS feed. If you are going to want it to stick you
are going to need a way for me to either a)share this content with my
friends(twitter, facebook), b) let me comment on the stories you are giving
me, c)let me bookmark these stories- there are tons of ways but right now I'm
just reading. I'll keep checking back to see what you are doing. Great work!

[1]christopherwoodall.com/trendy

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photon_off
Please, please, please ditch the "disruptively scroll a huge chunk of page
upon reaching the bottom" feature. Even if it does come bundled with the "show
more content in a passive manner" feature, it's not worth it.

I'll gladly click to load more stories if it means I don't have to bear with
the jarring effect of the page moving down a chunk while I scan stuff.

It works fine if you use a scrollwheel, but if you drag the scrollbar it is a
horrible experience that I would not wish upon my greatest enemies.

Especially for content that is repetitive in design, I find dragging the
scrollbar to be a more effective way to scan. I assume I'm not alone?

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modeless
I find dragging the scrollbar thumb almost the least effective way to scroll
(second only to clicking the up/down arrows), and I'm a big fan of the auto-
loading. Browsers really ought to wait until you stop dragging to change the
range of the scrollbar.

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pdx
I propose a test. Set up a fake HN account, and use kickpost to submit
stories. With a 20 minute head start, you should be the first poster on many
stories. Later, you can reveal the account name for our amazement.

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shajith
Great clean type! Love the non-fussy auto-loading at the bottom of the page
too (is there some kind of fade-in happening there?).

I don't know if the italicized time of the post at the beginning of each blurb
is useful, it feels like cruft when I am looking for information (I just skip
over that piece). It also loses meaning lower down in the list (6:45PM 3 days
ago? Do I care?)

Also: Have you played with de-emphasizing the time box on the left of each
post somehow? Like, make it use muted colors unless :hovered?

I'd kill for an RSS reader that worked like this, though.

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calebelston
Awesome feedback. Glad you like the auto-loading, it does fade in a bit to
keep it feeling 'gentle'.

Interesting that you find the time unnecessary. May consider removing.

Will play with the timebox on the left a bit. It is a bit strong, but its
something we think emphasizes the speed and realtime nature of the app, so
don't want it to fade back too much.

What do you think of the mix of stories?

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shajith
Re: the timebox. I noticed that the 'strongness' of it makes the whole page
jump visually when you update them en masse at each poll. I don't know what to
think about the time-ago being updated live, too, while we're on it. Maybe
some kind of subtle way to change them will help?

Re: mix of stories. I'm currently staying away from Techmeme (had to disable
my no iPhone/Android news user script to actually compare the headlines), so
my input there is of marginal use. I'll say that the headlines didn't put me
off - there was good diversity of content instead of half the page being
filled with hoopla about cellphones. I learned about Real Time Farms[1] from a
lifehacker story via the Kitchn blog, so that's something!

1: [http://lifehacker.com/5589590/real-time-farms-is-a-
user+supp...](http://lifehacker.com/5589590/real-time-farms-is-a-
user+supported-local-farmers-market-guide)

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calebelston
Cool. Will think through ways to update the times in a less bothersome way.

I liked that post too!

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carbocation
Looks great! I agree that there should be a blurb to the effect of "predicting
hotness while it's still lukewarm," or something less lame but more
informative. Do you use a form of Poisson regression, by any chance?

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calebelston
Glad you like the look of it! We are using Bayes inspired algos at this point.

Do you like the mix of stories? Do you think you will use it tomorrow?

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carbocation
I do like the mix of stories. To be honest, I probably won't use it tomorrow.
But you know what? I would probably use it tomorrow if you juxtaposed (a) the
time when you predicted it would be hot, with (b) the time when it became hot
by some other metric. Obviously the newest stories wouldn't have that yet, but
the ones that are ~30min old just might. In other words, if I felt like I was
getting in on something special, I probably would use it.

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mikeknoop
Yes, totally agree. If you indicated how much later it appeared on websites
such as Techmeme, Google News, maybe HN, I would totally come back to this.
Also might be nice for comments sometime down the line?

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kacy
I'm interested to see it working during the weekday. This weekend is kind of
dull for tech news. :-) Nice job though. I really like the simplicity.

I typically refresh the Techmeme page 10-20 times throughout the day. Does the
KickPost page automatically pull down new posts, or do I have to refresh to
get the latest news? Also, is there a list of blogs that you're pulling from?
Thanks!

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calebelston
It def is more interesting when news is breaking :). Thanks for the kind words
about the simplicity. We are focusing on that.

The page automatically refreshes when new posts come in! One of my favorite
features.

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ThomPete
Great stuff.

I would make the headlines stronger than the rest.

Also I would play around with sizes. You might be able to squeeze it down a
little and get more headlines at any given time.

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Indyan
New items appear in an annoyingly jerky fashion as I scroll down the page
(Opera 10.6). Can you add a smooth animation for the same?

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ssn
Care to share any technical details? Hosting, language, storage... Thks.

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antichaos
Have you considered applying the predictive model on HN submissions? It'll be
interesting to compare your predictions against top voted news articles.

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blueberry
totally kicks ass.

