

Show HN: News site solely based on what people share - throwaway1270
http://newsscale.com

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grey-area
Nicely done - I like the simple styling for pulling in a multitude of news
stories and presenting them in a format proven to work for news sites (The
Daily Mail uses this for example to pull readers in to other stories).
Unfortunately the content doesn't really live up to the website, because it is
popular content, not quality content.

I'd love exactly the opposite of this - something celebrating slow news and
thoughtful reactions to the world around us. Unfortunately it seems all the
pressures in our society militate towards instant and ephemeral bite-sized
nuggets of information, and we enjoy novelty and excitement above all. I
wonder if there is a place somewhere for quality, even if it is not popular,
it might be worthwhile.

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huhtenberg
It looks like people share just the tabloid and sports news.

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revscat
This was kind of depressing to see, but not all that surprising.

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harlanlewis
Not even remotely surprising - BuzzFeed/Mashable/etc content are the
definition of viral.

Of course, not all of these viral schlockers are happy about the world they've
wrought... [http://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5742148/facebook-product-
direct...](http://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5742148/facebook-product-director-
furious-at-facebook-s-effect-on-news)

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declan
Interesting. I like the idea of currently/today's/yesterday's news.

The scores, though, are rather buggy. On the home page right now a Forbes
article about Apple's headphone jack is listed twice in the top right with two
different scores (8,046 and 7,908).

On the CNBC subpage, Marc Andreessen's interview in which he called Snowden a
traitor is listed three times, with three different scores. All are probably
very low -- the article was well-discussed online, has 300+ comments, and the
discussion topped the HN home page yesterday for a while:
[http://newsscale.com/site/cnbc.com](http://newsscale.com/site/cnbc.com)

I'd probably narrow categories considerably. Two of the top three articles in
"entertainment" deal with random human interest stories (a sick 4-year old and
a puppy video). That's what I'd call "cute" or something, but not what most
people would think of in an entertainment category.

Similarly, in business the top articles include student debt (should be in
personal finance), landlords and dogs (should be in real estate or pets), an
Obama story (should be in politics), a musician obituary (should be in music
or entertainment), and guns (politics or law enforcement).

The problem is that solving those problems and taking Newscale to the next
level requires rather more work than merely crawling RSS feeds and making some
calls to Facebook's graph API to get sharing counts. :) I've looked into
similar problems while working on creating a recommendation engine and
iOS/Android app for personalized news (I quit CBS to found
[http://recent.io](http://recent.io) this year) and it gets a bit more
difficult from here. Happy to chat offline if you like. I think my email
address is in my profile.

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tonyennis
Worth mentioning [http://www.newswhip.com](http://www.newswhip.com) here also

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bryanhun
I found it difficult to scour the web to find the most shared links when
building trendn.com. You will find that the top news sites get the most
shares, and the little guys never get to the top (unless your scoring takes
that into account).

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vidyesh
/r/all ?

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dalerus
I like it.

I would change "Currently on the Web" to "Currently Trending" or something
like that.

Currently on the Web sounds strange as all the articles are on the web.

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anigbrowl
What I really want is the inverse of this...

...although I blame that on what people share rather than the creator of this.
The layout and implementation are great.

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btbuildem
Wouldn't this produce the lowest-denominator "news" \- ie the noise you see
ppl sharing on Facebook, Reddit et al?

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kumarski
Isn't that what huffingtonpost.com is?

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kmfrk
At least it's not pretending to be something it's not.

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PauloManrique
Would be nice to have that in another countries. Good job!

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masivemunkey
Not a fan of the typography, it really needs an overhaul.

