Hi, I think discovering blogs and articles by other engineers is quite hard. Particularly non-commercial content.<p>I made blogosphere last Summer in order to improve discovery. It’s seeded with personal blogs that have at some point appeared on the HN front-page.<p>The intent of the site is to recommend blogs and articles to you, with the objective that it’ll get better the more you use it.<p>The site uses a co-occurrence matrix to recommend articles and bloggers to you based on the articles you ‘star’ and topics you follow. If you’re not logged in, the site will show you popular articles. It doesn’t track what you read, and doesn’t have google analytics. I have some ideas for improving recommendations (i.e. people like you also like.., and improving the auto tagging of articles), but I thought I’d get feedback on whether people want this first.<p>The site is at an MVP stage, there will be bugs and missing features, but feedback on whether this is interesting to you would be useful.
Good stuff here. I have tried to build something similar before but nothing came out of it.<p>1. Repeated content.<p>I don't want to read what I have already read from a different place. I built a simple LSH based filter. I experimented with few ways to sort out text and process it. It worked.<p>2. Filter controversy.<p>I tried Bayesian fitler initially and moved to logistics regression using tf-idf. I settled on Bayesian because my dataset became very expansive. I used news-site corpus and manual entries from reddit/HN. I used sentiment analysis using a dictionary but it worked only in very specific cases. I <i>do</i> like some controversial and pessimistic content.<p>3. Filter clickbaits.<p>I couldn't filter the clickbait and gave up. There are ton of clickbaits on HN which I loved after I read them but ton of them are terrible and a huge waste of time. No reliable way to distinguish based on an article too. Length is not a good feature, negativity is not a good feature (I like to read strong opinions from say, founder of an open source analytics company criticising a big company for malpractices and how they fix those), sentence complexity is not good feature, and ton more.<p>4. Relying on user input is bad.<p>I read ton of nonsense everyday that I could go without knowing. I click on those links and that is a not me saying you should show me more of that. I don't want to do manual work of training something either. It's friction and I don't like it.<p>anyway, good luck on your site!
Some time ago this discussion happened, someone suggested a search engine. It was not much of a search engine but random site finder, but the database only comprised of user submitted sites that were expressly approved.<p>I found random posts from people's garages and amazing projects, one of them being a dad's nanosecond counting clocks to prove time dilation to his kids over the weekend.<p>I was pretty sure I bookmarked it, but I don't find it anywhere now.
Some quick feedback on the mobile layout, there isn't a lot of the actual blog post text visible due to the margins. I would suggest allowing the url and text to span the full width of the page. Also I would increase the margin between the title and the icon and star button, and potentially remove the word "star" to give more breathing room. It might also be nice to make the sidebar buttons an overlay to give more width as well.
Refreshingly MVP broken design. Love it (non sarcastic, shows a focus on the value add).<p>But I can’t create an account on mobile (iPhone Pro Max). :(
I love your site Bill. It’s a great idea, I use HN as a source, but the submission rate is so high that I often miss great posts.
Could I suggest my blog as a possible addition please? Markgreville.ie
I tried it. Already benefitted. Thanks for putting this together. Let us know how we can contribute, if any, to the features/code.<p>Thanks again.