

Ask HN: How can we improve our website? - weston

Hi HackerNews,<p>My name is Weston and we launched http:&#x2F;&#x2F;SwarmSports a few months ago.  We provide sports fans with a quick overview of the top news articles daily.<p>Our website is sort-of a hybrid between the new Digg and TweetMeme. That means, some of our content is hand curated and some is automated.<p>What we&#x27;re looking for is any feedback in how we can improve the website and if it&#x27;s good.  We&#x27;re still Beta.<p>Also, any advice on getting the word out to users?<p>Thanks!
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zachlatta
I'm no designer, but here are a few of my immediate takeaways.
[http://files.zachlatta.com/65gw](http://files.zachlatta.com/65gw)

I like the site!

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agentsaran
How do you calculate the viral rank? How about letting users visiting your
site, upvote/downvote articles? More importantly, for a sports website, I
think the style/theme of your site is too simple. Check this for example:
[http://bleacherreport.com/](http://bleacherreport.com/). what I really like
about your site is that's its ad free.

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weston
Hi AgentSaran, thanks for commenting!

• Without giving away our 'secret sauce,' the ViralRank is calculated based on
a users actions on the original article. As an example: If you click on a link
from SwarmSports and then Like the article on Facebook, we take the action
into our calculations.

• That's a good idea about the upvoting/downvoting! For right now, we're
simply trying to make sure the content is relevant and the ViralRank is
calculating correctly. Eventually we'll add more stuff like
upvoting/downvoting directly on our site. Thanks for the idea!

• We're trying to stay super simple right now since we're still MVP/Beta.
Eventually we'll add more stuff. BleacherReport is a very good site and we
give them kudos for their huge exit to Turner.

• We actually come from an ad-tech background. We're avoided ads so far since
we're still MVP. Once we get enough traffic, we'll probably ad advertising...
or go the Wikipedia route and survive off of donations.

Thanks again for the awesome feedback! :-)

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weston
Clickable: [http://swarmsports.com](http://swarmsports.com)

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wikwocket
Try submitting the site to criticue.com. You can pose a question for reviewers
to answer. I have gotten some good, actionable feedback for my sites this way.

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weston
Awesome, thanks for the tip!

