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.
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.
> 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.
So what if it does? Yes, if you explicitly say that all donations will be used for site maintenance, then maybe. But even that could include labor?
In any case, the point is moot. Very, very, very few open source projects take in enough donations from the general public to pay for a new iPhone. Most are very lucky to get $100-$200 in a year.
As far as I'm concern, upvoting/downvoting isn't fun, it's an act of public service. I'd be incredibly concerned that corporate entities will have huge incentive to buy fact-upvotes and since there is no limit how many they can use, it would take 5,000 good samaritans to undo the damage of 1-shill with $5.
Basically a deal-breaker to me that the site is that out-of-touch with the problem of internet news. Frankly, I'd like a news site that does the opposite - 1 vote per proven US citizen (no bots, no foreign influencers, no corporations).
It seems like the bulk of your concern is about the voting specifically. I'm curious if the voting aspect of the credit system were removed and voting worked more like it does on Reddit/HN (one vote per user), but the other aspects of it were left intact would that alleviate most of your concerns?
Specifically, it would still cost credits to leave comments, submit stories and facts, but not to vote.
I mean, I don't imagine I'd "pay" to leave comments, submit stories, or facts.
Maybe I'm an odd-breed but I see HN as a charitable place for those in the know to contribute to the pool of public knowledge.
I think the best version of HN (or equivalent) is full of people with that objective (e.g. wikipedia). The worst version is full of people grinding emotional axes (4chan) or self-promoting.
I think you'll find the people who are self-promoting (e.g. trying to start a new cryptocurrency, or a PR firm) will have much more resources to submit articles than good-samaritans.
The thing I do like is breaking an article into a list of cited facts. I like the brevity, and I like sources.
* Horizontally align news item titles
* New Items take up full margined-page width
* Search input at the top of the page
* All facts button has a pointer cursor
* Increase button text size
> 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.
You may be right, but I wonder how many of those people would be ok with their employer saying "we're willing to cover living costs, but your recent trip shows we're paying you too much. We value the work and service you provide us, but we'd prefer to only pay the bare minimum that it takes to maintain that service. By all means, buy food for yourself, and a bed is ok, maybe a modest television, but a trip is right out."
> 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.
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.
> I'm not really sure what changes could be made that would encourage users to explore. Could you elaborate?
Any good site needs to get the visitors' attention from the first moments after they open it. I do not mean to steal the users' attention by showing forms to agree with or blinking elements. I mean showing the most useful content, carefully organized so that it is simple and natural to work with.
Currently, hoxly news site looks like n-th iteration of a typical corporation site with content blocks in the middle replaced with a modified HN-style list of links. There is the top bar, some account-related stuff in the top right corner, the about and policy links at the bottom. Nothing really new, no interesting design elements.
To most visitors, such a site appears like they have already seen it and they may wonder what makes this one stand out. The content, obviously, could be the answer. But with the current generic look, some people may think that it is yet another link aggregation site which aims to artificially boost its PageRank score and simply leave.
I do not have any exact ideas for improvement, but in my opinion, the site should have a more unique look and be more practical to use. The main areas I would focus on are:
1. Bad usage of space. At a normal zoom level, on a typical 16:9 screen, the actual news content is restricted to a column whose width is about ~30% of the available display width. The rest is blank. When I zoom in so that almost all of the display width is utilized, then I see only ~7 news items with overly large font. In other words, there is no way to properly resize the website so that all the space is used efficiently.
I would change that e.g. by moving the top bar to the side or making it hidden until the mouse is moved near its edge. Also, I would use at least two column layout on wide screens.
2. The offered features (timestamp, user, upvotes, comments, etc.) are difficult to recognize for a new visitor, because they do not stand out. It is not clear that those phrases under the news items have some interesting meaning and that some of them are clickable. I would say that many first time visitors would simply overlook them.
3. As was already mentioned, it would help to provide even more information about the particular news item on the main page, so that visitors could decide with more confidence about whether it would be interesting to them or not. A link to the article from which most of the facts are taken, for instance, could be useful.
There's a reason that essentially zero websites default to a dark theme.
I may be in the extreme end, but in the rare occasion that I find a dark website, if I can't run it through a browser extension to make it light and readable: I leave and never return.
> There's a reason that essentially zero websites default to a dark theme.
Yes, it seems like there is. I am wondering what that reason may be.
My preference for dark themes is based on my current typical viewing conditions, which are rooms with low to medium light levels where the brightness of my screen is also low. In such a situation, I do not wish to look at white-themed content because it is uncomfortably bright. In a place with a lot of light, I would not mind the light theme, but it still would not be my preference because of the established habit. With the sun shining directly into the screen, it may even be impossible to use the dark theme, but that is an edge case which, in my opinion, should not affect how a website looks by default.
I assume that many theme-related preferences are habit-based. In my opinion, a reasonable UI design should at least allow simple switching between dark and light themes.
Oh wow, this is very similar to an idea I've had on the back burner for a while. My idea was to crowdsource small units of information as news - atomic statements that correlate to one "fact". i.e. "There was an accident on highway 70". Users could then upvote or downvote based on a set of criteria (grammar, truth, atomicity, etc).
Your site needs some CSS love, but otherwise very cool!
I had been playing with something similar, but I’ve come to the conclusion that any anonymous aggregator / community at any scale runs into the same problem: eventually the incentives of the bad actors to behave badly start to outweigh the incentives of good actors to participate productively. Once that happens, it inevitably runs off the good actors behaving somewhat altruistically and leaves you with an increasingly toxic user base that ideologically slants to one extreme or the other. Sure, you can try to play both sides; but then you just end up with 2 toxic user bases at war with each other (which I’m not sure is any better, and certainly more expensive for the platform owner).
See also YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Instagram is pretty far down this path as well. Unless you have an editorial process that involves real humans with the ability to censor bad actors, this whole situation seems inevitable (remember private editorial censorship is not government censorship)
I’ll second misalignment of titles due to numbers in boxes. And I would prefer “10 days” instead of “1 week 3 days ago”.
Beyond that, the site seems good for its purpose, and I like how multilink+summaries puts the event above particular sources. Its like someone googled a headline for you and presented you a good results page, instead of providing just one domain and its point of view.
Bug: clicked on "About Hoxly" in the footer menu, from that page (link https://www.hoxly.com) I was unable to open the top menu (device: Android, browser: Brave)
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.
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.
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?".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Feedback is appreciated.