Ask HN: What would you like to see in a social news site?

[leejw00t354]

I'm currently working on a new start up, called Athesyn. It's a new kind of social news site with some new innovative features. I thought it would probably be a good idea to see what people here would like to see from the future of social news sites. In case you're interested in Athesyn and the progress we are making, you can sign up for our private beta and news letter here: http://www.athesyn.com/

[CWuestefeld]

One thing I believe is lacking in news today is follow-up. It seems that so many things are all the buzz today, even an outrage, but by next week it's all but forgotten. I'd like to be able to track the life of an issue.

So a nasty crime is committed, and somebody is arrested; is he later convicted? Responding to complaints, a corporation pledges to make changes; do they ever materialize? An earthquake puts thousands out of their homes; have they been restored a year later?

[leejw00t354]

Good point. Having some kind of bookmark feature where users can keep track of the progess would be a great feature. I will be taking note of everything suggested.

[revorad]

Timelines, timelines, timelines. I want to see stories in the context of days, weeks, years, not just right this moment. I often search for old stories and I'm yet to see any tool that let's me clearly see things by date.

If you don't build it, I will. :-)

Edit: All I get on your homepage is a login form and a restricted access message.

[ScottWhigham]

If I have to scroll to see more than 20 headlines, I won't use it. So I'd say compact the space so that I see the headlines that I want to see in those first 20.

Example of a social news site that I don't like: http://www.newsvine.com/

There are three problems for me:

1) It doesn't fit 100% of my screen

2) This results in too few headlines so I have to scroll, scroll, scroll

3) There are no categories so I can't self-select

I like the MSNBC page about midway down where it lists the category, lets me select how many stories I want in a category, and crams a lot of headlines into a small area.

My $0.02 since you asked!

[leejw00t354]

The UI is something we are focusing on a lot. With social news there is a big problem to overcome with how to deal with the massive number of articles being submitted. Mainly finding the best way to display all of them articles in a way that the user can find what they want to read about as easy as possible. Our main focus with Athesyn is 'news you care about'.

[markmccraw]

If it is the kind of thing where people vote up stories, you are going to have to fight very hard to avoid the influx of low calorie news (same goes for crappy comments). Unless that's what you want of course, but people already get that from digg/reddit/gawker/fark.

From one of PG's essays: "Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."

It would be nice to see a social news site that ends up with an intellectual feel instead of the polemic vibe that a lot of places give off.

[ChrisNorstrom]

Oh my Science yes! That's why I quit Digg long ago and same with Reddit. That "democratic" free-for-all shit got old real quick. I won't hide it, Digg and Reddit upset me because my content never got upvoted or paid attention to.

I submitted a link on a article about a "morning after" pill for Aids that actually works and is already available, it's been available for a long time, if you have been exposed to the aids virus you can take it within 24-48 hours and it won't allow the virus to attach to your cells or something like that, it was created for people working in sanitation, in case they get pricked. It's pretty toxic but it works. It was called the Aids prevention pill you've never heard of.

NO ONE cared. Not on Reddit, not on Digg. And when I compared it to the articles that did make the front page it seemed like my contribution would be just what Digg/Reddit wanted.

With Reddit, I hated how good stories get overlooked yet kittens and pictures of "my girlfriend made this for me" and "nailed it" and "found kittens what should I do", "here's a picture my autistic nephew made" and all that other shit makes it.

I looked at what Reddit wanted and I submitted appropriate content. My submitions were ignored, yet other people's submitions of the same category and quality were upvoted. Wtf?

With Digg, the problem was if you weren't part of some circle of elite friends, or didn't submit your article at the right time of the day it didn't get upvoted. Again, it's shit like this that really drove me away. Reddit just pissed me off by going from a 'sacredly intellectual' site to '4chan for educated people', complete with kittens and politics and memes in a year or two.

Hacker news, although I've heard it has changed, seems to have avoided the lobotomy. 2 out of 2 of my submitions made it to the front page. It worked the way I expected it to work. Hacker news is a place for startup news, tech news, entrepreneurship, show and tell. So I submitted content that matched and it got upvoted to the front page. I feel like I contributed and helped the community, and I don't feel abandoned or pushed away like I did with Reddit.

My only annoyance with Hacker News is how it works. I'll visit the home page and see some amazingly interesting links, 4 hours later I'll refresh the page and many of those links are gone, 1 or 2 of them have moved back 2-4 pages... wtf? So if I'm not on 24/7 I'll miss out on content?

So that's how I feel about social news sites. I'm either confused as to how they work or annoyed by the communities that make them up.

I personally want something more static. I know constant incoming news is great for traffic but it's terrible for our productivity and brains. I'd like to try out a site that updates once a day at midnight or twice a day at most instead of constantly updating. And the community votes on what links will be posted tomorrow, once that list of links is finalized, they are posted, and they don't change order or dissapear. Each Page on the site, is exactly one day, if I click 2 pages back then I'm going exactly 2 days back, that way I can keep track of all the links I've gone through easily. That's what I'd like to see, I'm not sure if it would work out as well as I theorize it would, but it would be a nice experiment.

[jdonato]

1. More intelligent and diverse discussion. I don't know how you would do that, but try to make it the opposite of reddit.com/r/politics.

2. Convenient links to relevant background information for the article. E.g. relevant statistics, opposing viewpoints, press releases, wikipedia articles, a summary of "just the facts" from the article, previous quotes from the people the article is about.

Also, I know you weren't asking for feedback on the site, but the name would otherwise make me assume that it's a site about atheism.

[leejw00t354]

Promoting intelligent, diverse discussion is definitely something we hope to do. It's something that becomes harder when you have a wider range of topics, which in turn, attracts a wider range of people. It may be better to promote discussion that is sensible to the topic at hand.

The name comes from combining the words Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom) and syntax (meaning arragement).

[notahacker]

Filters that show what's popular and controversial with people that have similar tastes in articles to me