
Show HN: An ad-free news website with crowdsourced summaries - thekyle
https://news.hoxly.com/
======
thekyle
Hey folks creator here. I often find on sites like HN/Reddit that I tend to
mostly just read the headlines/comments and not necessarily the articles
themselves.

I wanted to build a site that is more aligned with that use case. I was
partially inspired by Wikinews but wanted to lower the barrier to entry for
participation. On Hoxly News, each story is a collection of facts which link
to a source URL. Facts can be independently up/down voted and in aggregate
form a TLDR style summary.

Stories also support a threaded comments section similar to HN.

Instead of ads to fund the site I decided to build a "credit" system where
users purchase credits to perform various activities around the site. You can
read more about that here:
[https://news.hoxly.com/credits](https://news.hoxly.com/credits).

Feedback is appreciated.

~~~
pbasista
> Feedback is appreciated.

Ok. In my opinion:

1\. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark.

2\. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real content,
which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further.

3\. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content. Thanks
to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the number's
length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned.

4\. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link
you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase
page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is not
transparent at all.

It is also unclear to me why the credits system has been introduced in the
first place. The linked page mentions that it is supposed to "limit spam and
reward quality contributors". It seems to me that the same goal can be
achieved by using upvoting-based reputation system with carefully configured
entry barriers that is already in use at many Stack Exchange sites.

In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs
is to ask for donations. But it needs to be done in a very transparent way.
For instance, show a chart of real Google Cloud / Amazon AWS bills offset by
donations. People need to be 100% sure that when they donate money to "running
costs", it would not end up being used for something else like your new iPhone
or a vacation in Mexico.

Edit: add line breaks

~~~
thekyle
Thanks for the feedback!

> 1\. The UI is unappealing. I would prefer the default theme to be dark.

I'll see if I can add an optional dark mode.

> 2\. Site layout resembles generic link aggregating sites with no real
> content, which discourages the viewer from exploring the site further.

I'm not really sure what changes could be made that would encourage users to
explore. Could you elaborate?

> 3\. The boxes with numbers stand out too much among the other content.
> Thanks to the fact that they take various amount of space depending on the
> number's length, it causes the entire list of articles to appear unaligned.

Yeah, this is a problem. I think maybe it can be partially solved by
abbreviating 3,000 as 3k, etc.

> 4\. I was not able to find a link from the main website to the credits link
> you have posted. Also, it is unclear how much the credits cost. The purchase
> page is only available once you register and log in. In my opinion that is
> not transparent at all.

Okay, this is something I hadn't even considered. Originally the entire
credits pack actually required authentication to view but I changed that last
minute. I'll see what I can do to make the pricing more transparent.

> In my opinion, the most reasonable way to cover your website's running costs
> is to ask for donations.

I have run websites in the past on the donation model. In my experience it
hits a wall once you have more general web surfers on your site than power
users. Reddit tried the donation model with a transparent meter that showed
the sites costs each day but it eventually had to pivot to ads.

~~~
johnnyfived
A dark mode would definitely be nice, but I think there are some larger UI
improvements that can be done. Some basic ones would be better padding and
spacing for legibility, and making use of the large empty spaces for
additional content. And being able to see the number of comments a post has
without clicking on it is a must.

I really like this project and the credits system in place. If you're open to
the idea I'd be down to collaborate on some of the frontend / design work.
Feel free to message me.

~~~
thekyle
> If you're open to the idea I'd be down to collaborate on some of the
> frontend / design work. Feel free to message me.

Sure, I'd like to hear more if you had some ideas. It doesn't look like your
profile has any contact info, but you can email me: contact@kylepiira.com

------
rienbdj
I really like this. it cuts out the padding most articles have very
effectively. Can anyone post links? How automated is the fact extraction?

~~~
thekyle
Yes anyone can post links/facts assuming they have an account with at least
one credit.

When you submit a story you can specify an initial seed source which will be
summarized using the gensim summarization module and used to prepopulate the
facts section. If gensim isn't able to generate a summary then we just use the
headline of the linked article as the first fact.

After that, facts can be added manually by adding some text (max 160 chars)
with an accompanied source URL.

Gensim:
[https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.htm...](https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.html)

------
kfk
This is interesting, how do the summaries work? By the way I have just added a
“salesforce buys tableau” article and the summary of my source link doesn’t
seem to work.

Here: [https://news.hoxly.com/story/165](https://news.hoxly.com/story/165)

~~~
thekyle
When you submit a source url we try to download and parse it using the
Newspaper python library then use the Gensim summarization module to create a
summary.

Sometimes it doesn't quite work. In the case of Bloomberg I've noticed that
they aggressively block AWS IPs which is why it says "Are you a robot?".

Newspaper:
[https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

Gensim:
[https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.htm...](https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/summarization/summariser.html)

------
smenis
If you added RSS, I would like to add it to my news site [https://news-
hud.com/](https://news-hud.com/) which has a similar philosophy of cutting
down on cruft.

~~~
thekyle
We have RSS!
[https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.*](https://news.hoxly.com/search.atom?q=.*)

You can change the query string to whatever you want depending on what type of
news you want.

------
maxheadroom
If you speak Swedish and care about Swedish news, there's a Swedish
equivalent[0].

[0] - [https://nyhetsnotiser.se/nyheter/](https://nyhetsnotiser.se/nyheter/)

~~~
kreetx
Are those just scraped, or are they curated somehow?

~~~
maxheadroom
They have synopses and linked/related articles ("Relaterade Nyheter")[0] from
different news sources and their archive goes back a year[1].

Given this, I'd be inclined to believe that it's curated. _However_ , I
haven't studied it enough to verify if news links > x months are added as
"related news" to current news articles.

[0] - [https://nyhetsnotiser.se/ekonomi/merkels-eftertradare_-
ecb-s...](https://nyhetsnotiser.se/ekonomi/merkels-eftertradare_-ecb-skapar-
problem-for-smasparare/1201918)

[1] - [https://nyhetsnotiser.se/arkiv/](https://nyhetsnotiser.se/arkiv/)

------
mellosouls
Excellent, clean minimalist UI that seems to work without JavaScript on first
recce - unlike some of the projects showcased here.

Just the thing for my text browser.

Bookmarked!

------
founderling
Tried to create an account. When I try the activation link, it gives me a 500.
When I try to login, it sends me back to the login page.

Requested a password reset. Reset my password. Login page still sends me back
to the login page every time I try to log in.

Ha! Figured it out! I cannot login with my email. Need to use my "username".
That is an unusual choice.

Which tech stack did you build this with?

~~~
thekyle
> When I try the activation link, it gives me a 500

That should not be happening I'll have to look into it.

> Which tech stack did you build this with?

It's Django with registration powered by Django registration.

Django registration: [https://django-
registration.readthedocs.io/en/3.0.1/](https://django-
registration.readthedocs.io/en/3.0.1/)

------
Pamar
Looks interesting, but I have a question: who provides the titles and who (if
anyone) can edit them?

I ask because one of the top news is "Facebook launches _it 's_ own currency"
(instead of "its") which I find a bit grating/unprofessional.

This, in turn, would make me question the sources.

Edit: typo

~~~
thekyle
You're right that's a typo. I've fixed it manually in the database.

To answer your questions, the titles are provided by whoever submits the story
to the site. It's up to that person whether to use a title from an article
they found or come up with their own. There are some guidelines for that here:
[https://news.hoxly.com/guidelines](https://news.hoxly.com/guidelines).

As for editing, there is no automatic way for anyone to edit a title once it
has been submitted (I did have an idea for allowing people to submit
alternative titles and vote on them but never got around to it). Obviously
under special circumstances someone with access to the database can edit them.

------
tyzerdak
What stack do you use?

~~~
thekyle
It's Django running on AWS Lambda. The frontend is done in Bootstrap MD. No
other JS besides the Bootstrap stuff and some handwritten.

Django: [https://www.djangoproject.com/](https://www.djangoproject.com/)

Bootstrap MD: [https://mdbootstrap.com/](https://mdbootstrap.com/)

------
indalo
Love the idea and execution! How do you deal with repetitious fact/links being
added to an article?

good luck!

~~~
thekyle
I don't think having the same fact submitted multiple times from different
sources is necessarily a problem. The voting mechanism on the facts should
cause the version of the fact with the most reputable source to rise to the
top.

------
Cub3
Love the idea!

Would be cool if you supported left and right arrow keys to quick navigate to
next / prev article

And because there's not that much content you could probably preload it

------
tomcam
Love this idea, and the implementation. Well done.

------
amelius
Very nice! Perhaps you can join forces with HN. I'd love to see this idea
implemented here.

By the way, would HN allow bots to post summaries?

~~~
detaro
Someone made a bot to post automated summaries from their site a while back
and quickly got told to stop.

------
below43
Have you considered adding categories?

~~~
thekyle
I have been thinking a lot about how to implement a categories type feature.
Right now the closest thing is "Filters" which allow you to basically follow
keywords and customize your homepage based on what text appears in the
headlines. Kinda like Google News alerts.

Right now, I'm thinking maybe it would be good to add tags to stories which
would reduce some of the problems with filters.

------
brylie
Will you consider making the project open source?

~~~
masukomi
if it were open source I would have submitted a fix for the alignment css
issue. ;)

I don't see a good argument for NOT making it open source. The value of sites
like this is not the code so much as the community that builds up around a
particular instance of it (witness all the open source HN clones that don't
detract from the value of HN at all).

Even if other folks created their own instances they'd still need to build up
their own communities, which is fine, because, for example, we don't really
want cute kitten posts here on HN but totally on a clone dedicated to cute
animals.

------
macpete
I wonder what the business model is?

~~~
thekyle
You can read about the business model here:
[https://news.hoxly.com/credits](https://news.hoxly.com/credits)

------
lolptdr
A feature idea: intentionally include fake news links or fake facts (that you
verified are fake of course) and add them to the website as you see fit. This
will hopefully reduce bots and ill-mannered actors.

~~~
technothrasher
This sounds like the tried and true method of defeating a schoolyard bully by
punching yourself in the face before the bully can!

