

Show HN: hubski; I built my first web app using news.arc - markkat

I’ll put the tl;dr up front: I built my first web app with HN’s news.arc: http://hubski.com<p>The long version (I can be verbose): Recently, I was in a startup that sputtered out. It was my seed idea, but my contribution was on the design/UI end. We applied to YC fall 2010, and were rejected (rightfully so, in retrospect). My previous coding experience entails a bit of Fortran from undergrad research, and building a couple of simple websites (Frontpage even. o-O). Anyway, I had tons of energy for the project, but lamented not being able to contribute to coding, where it was badly needed. After that experience, I resolved to teach myself something, so I could at least build a MVP, and not depend on anyone else to launch it.<p>I’ve been a redditor since near the beginning, and I’ve been on HN for about a year now. I have many ideas for these types of community sites, and (unlike many who lament the clones) think there remains a lot of potential in this space. As a result, about three months ago, I got news.arc, put it on Linode, and started to try to figure things out. The results of my efforts to date are Hubski, a general site for thoughtful sharing and discussion.<p>A number of my ideas are for Hubski have been implemented, some are not. Here are some that are:<p>Tags: each submission can have a hashtag. These are organic, the submitters choose. You can click a tag, and it will sort out submissions with that tag.<p>Following: You can follow users. The submissions of these users go into your ‘hubfeed’, your personalized version of the site. You can also follow hashtags. Submissions with those tags are put into your hubfeed, regardless of the author.<p>Scoring and voting: Karma is a currency. When you vote up or down, it costs karma, which gets converted to clout. Clout cannot be spent. Everyday you get a small bit of karma. This daily portion increases as your clout and number of followers does.<p>Hubs: The stream of someone’s submissions looks kind of like a blog. It may even more so over time if it seems to make sense from usage. I even imagine Hubski could be used as a blog eventually. I have more thoughts along those lines. I’ve enabled image embedding, to see how it works. I’m going to do the same for video.<p>There are a number of smaller changes as well, such as tabs (opens 2 tabs, the url and the comment page), hovertext (hover over a title while logged in), and some others.<p>I have much more planned, but from here on out I want to implement further changes to be a bit more informed by usage. Also, I am learning, so it takes extra time.<p>I know that this won’t be my last app, (I have designs for a completely original one) but it’s my plan to maintain and evolve Hubski going forward. I’ve been using it with my wife and some good friends, and it is serving a need that I have.<p>BTW, I want to thank the folks in the Arc forum who have been really friendly and helpful to someone as green as myself.<p>Any feedback is greatly appreciated, especially if you can take the time to bounce around the site. Who knows, maybe pg will find it worthwhile to try a hubski function or two on HN. :)
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kmfrk
Considering the low activity, I think you should dial down the number of
submissions on the front page. It feels so barren.

The design also makes it very difficult to scan the titles. I can't put my
finger on exactly what creates the problem.

The most important thing is to restrict downvote priviledges. You have an
opportunity to restrict this to a very high (comment) karma threshold, while
the karma economy still allows it.

The same can't be said for reddit.

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endlessvoid94
It's hard to read because the letters in the title typeface are too close to
each other (condensed?). Also, if you have a very wide browser, the main
content hugs the left side of the page. Give it some room to breathe!

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markkat
clickable: <http://hubski.com>

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phlux
Had a thought:

I am a bit on forum overload right now and just clicked through to see some
comments on HubSki and saw the format was very Reddit-esque - which is great.

However then I realized... hmmm I dont have enough hours in the day to read
all the HN Reddit, and potentially HubSki posts and threads I would like to.

But - it might be interesting to have a meta feed of stories and threads from
all three plus others.

Except not having categories/subHubs is a severe limitation IMO... as with HN,
Quora and others - its all one big bucket. Can refine your interest...

/r/ handles this very very well.

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markkat
I agree that a feed of these might be useful. One of the functions on my
shortlist is an RSS feed of your hubfeed. That way you can get filtered
content from Hubski, not so much of a fire-hose.

One reason why I took the approach of following topics and users, rather than
subhubs, is that some of the most interesting submissions might only qualify
for a hub with very few readers, which is a problem I've encountered with /r/.
Here, you can construct a feed in a way similar to the reddit custom
frontpage, but you can choose to follow people as well as topics themselves.
Thanks again for the thoughts.

-It's too bad this fell off the new page so fast. Maybe I'll try again in a few weeks after some more work. Maybe at a slower time of day too.

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phlux
One site I used to look at daily was <http://linuxhomepage.com/>

I would like something like this... but with the ability to drill down into
comments rather than jumping to the actual site.

BTW - what did you learn to build this? Was it done with Rails? Or did you
state this and I missed it?

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markkat
Hm. That gives me an idea. Maybe I could build an alternate 'followed tags'
page that have a view broken up like that. Each box would be the content from
a different tag. -Thanks for pointing that out.

I'm using Arc, which HN is written in. It is a dialect of Lisp. I love the
language actually, but there isn't too much support. I'm just learning. I
think I might try another language for my next project.

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phlux
Fantastic.

I am in a very similar situation, minus having something to show yet.

So the content currently shown on HubSki came from where? Users/Yourself
submitted it?

A UI note, the color scheme for me is really tough on the eyes... far too cold
and makes i hard to read the links (I have the same issue with Quora - the
cold blue links are too tough - which is interesting because the temp of blue
used on reddit isnt a problem - but I would suggest doing A/B with some other
colors.

The karma/clout model sounds really really interesting.

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markkat
Thanks for the feedback, phlux. I'll try some variations with the colors.

The content is from myself, my wife, and several friends. We have a couple of
dozen users atm. Hope you check back and see how things progress.

