> "quality content with a focus on... anything that appeals to the inquisitive mind"<p>This is a source of a lot of uncivil behavior on HN. Startup founders/tech geeks are intellectually interested in a lot of topics but unqualified to discuss them in any detail. This results in comment threads full of knee-jerk reactions and bikeshedding.
> Social accountability is provided by linking your Twitter or GitHub accounts<p>I never understood the reasoning behind this kind of social login. If you're dead set on being an ass, then you'll be one regardless, even if it takes creating a burner Twitter or GH account. Anything short of demanding proof of identity and linking your real name is useless (and now you have two problems.) All this achieves is forcing people to sign up to another service in order to use your own. A low barrier to entry with community moderation is enough to keep the value of the comments high, while keeping noise to a minimum.
At my default browser size I can see 8 items on Monocle at a glance and 21 on Hacker News. I'd suggest, at least, reducing the size of the information about the submitter, number of points, etc. When scanning HN I very rarely look at those.<p>I don't find avatars add to the conversation mostly because I don't first look to see who said something. If I read something interesting I might look to see who wrote it.<p>I'm not sure what the thumbnail graphics from the article are adding.<p>One thing I like about HN is the choice I make between reading the comments and reading the article with no framing.
The application looks good with interesting articles at the time of writing.<p>As a note though, I opened the link because I thought it was related to Monocle magazine (<a href="http://monocle.com/" rel="nofollow">http://monocle.com/</a>) which also provides high quality content (albeit not community-sourced). Maybe reviewing the name is in order?<p>Edit: phrasing
"an experiment in creating a friendly and intelligent community around sharing quality content"<p>Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content. They're all roughly the same and none are that good. Upvotes suck and we need to move past them.<p>If someone wants to take the next step in internet content curation then they need to adapt a netflix style algorithm. Anything short of that I just don't care about.
I don't understand how using your Twitter handle will elevate the level of discourse. Twitter itself is full of trolls. Also, you can create anonymous Twitter accounts that don't use your real name, so accountability goes out the window too.<p>For what its worth, it looks like a modern tech discussion forum built using modern tools. Nothing wrong with that, but that's how it should be branded. The feel good aspect without any real technical backend to enable it falls a bit flat.
Looks like the emberjs tutorial got seeded with some articles and comments.<p>You might consider loading your scripts after the base html is rendered so the initial page-load isn't 2-5 seconds of nothingness.<p>Seems like the content div is blank as a default, you might consider placing the most popular or trending article there by default as you are loading it anyway.<p>I would recommend loading titles and thumbnails first, rendering and having comments load in the background so the initial load time is lessened further, unless you are side-loading comments for another reason.<p>Also, you can only sign up with twitter/github connect?<p>God, it's so negative here.
Am I the only one who don't like this new trend when every second website now is designed with the low contrast and native OS antialiasing disabled? I'm 24 and I just can't read the summaries on this site. Just compare the two versions on this screenshot [1]: default on the top, and native antialiasing on the bottom with the slightly darker text (#67707c)<p>1.<a href="http://monosnap.com/image/OgCT8YKqEoHTAxAmgofKDxDNb.png" rel="nofollow">http://monosnap.com/image/OgCT8YKqEoHTAxAmgofKDxDNb.png</a>
Looks / feels exceptionally similar to Potluck: <a href="https://www.potluck.it/rooms/ee3db6e8" rel="nofollow">https://www.potluck.it/rooms/ee3db6e8</a>
Does it strike anyone else as unfortunate that every new social news site has to be its own completely closed ecosystem? What happened to the age of the protocol?
You may want to reconsider the name. There's already a (quite good) publication with the name "Monocle" if you hadn't checked.<p>Edit: A link to Monocle the magazine: <a href="https://monocle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://monocle.com/</a>
With the way that infinite scroll currently works, I could effectively DDOS, or at least slow down the instance of Monocle I am interfacing with by just scrolling down, and once I got the first story just scroll up and down endlessly. I'm looking at Chrome Developer Tools' Network tab right now[1] and it seems you're sending a bunch of "ignore" fields in a POST request, and from that I gather that the farther down I go, the larger the POSTs get. So, at the very bottom, I'm sending a ton of huge POST requests. Point-being, this is probably not a good thing.<p>1. Developer Tools – <a href="http://grab.by/ohwa" rel="nofollow">http://grab.by/ohwa</a>
I hope this comment is seen as observational rather than the sort of blind criticism that Monocle dreams to avoid.<p>The article discusses the design and performance of Monocle, which are definitely pleasant.
However, the aspects of the community seem more like wishes than anything encouraged by Monocle (except for the Twitter/Github links) nor seemingly present.<p>Monocle is more interesting (though less ambitious) than Atwood's Discourse, but similarly misses the difference between community and charm, and performance and design.
"There can be too much negativity in the tech community. It seems the average response to someone out on a limb, showcasing their latest idea or startup, is one of snark and derision. That is no way to foster an entrepreneurial spirit. Monocle is an attempt to remedy that."<p>So, back-patting and hi-fives, but no actual criticism? Because there are plenty of ideas in the tech community that deserve snark and derision.<p>Disagreement is absolutely the way to foster entrepreneurial spirit. What is an entrepreneur besides someone who disagrees with the way things are currently done. Besides, if good ideas are to filter to the top and learn to survive in the wild, then they need to be able to withstand people disagreeing with them and using colorful language to express that disagreement. Not every idea is good.<p>Friends can fight and make fun of one another. People who care about the same thing can loudly disagree. And I think communities where 100% of the people like one another are probably boring communities. And either trivially small or non-existent.<p>So, yeah. Monocle sounds like it could be neat, but if the idea is to shelter people from negative reactions to their ideas, it sounds like it's going to be kind of neutered and boring.
This looks really impressive.<p>One note -- there is an established current affairs/culture magazine/media brand called Monocle. While Monocle (the magazine) doesn't focus on tech, monocle.io's remit of "anything that appeals to the inquisitive mind" could lead to some overlap.<p>Dunno if there could/would be trademark conflicts. May be worth checking out if you haven't already.
I would consider adding who submitted the article to the list view. It sounds small, but on HackerNews I recognize names of people who have submitted past articles I enjoyed quite often and tend to always click on those. If you're trying to build a community I think this is pretty important.<p>My gut reaction when I first hit the site wasn't "Oh, awesome, there is a community of people here talking about stuff and submitting things", it was "Hmm, looks like a bunch of curated links or an RSS reader".<p>Also, if your username/profile is the same on Monocle as it is on Twitter, I'm even more likely to recognize submitters that I follow there as well.
My friends and I have wanted a personal version of something like this for a while. We have several Facebook groups where we share links/ideas and comment on them but would like to move away from Facebook.<p>Does anyone know of any service that offers this?
Nice start for the interface, though only responsive down to tablet size.<p>Check out <a href="http://qz.com/" rel="nofollow">http://qz.com/</a> for a similar interface that actually scales all the way down to mobile size.
This is super slick, once loaded.
I haven't tried commenting or posting, but as a reader, I'm pleased.
My only criticism atm would be seeing a completely blank page with NoScript on.
Nice minimal design. I like the ability to read a summary before deciding to click through. I was confused at first when the main content frame was empty (like another commenter pointed out - maybe put something there on page load).<p>One bug, the summaries are missing apostrophes.
Sounds like they were inspired, at least in part, by Thoughtly. "Quantifiably Good Content." But I'm partial.<p><a href="http://thoughtly.co" rel="nofollow">http://thoughtly.co</a>
Where's the HTML data? Search engines aren't going to be able to crawl any of your content:<p><pre><code> $ curl -l http://monocle.io/posts/this-is-you-on-smiles</code></pre>
Yes, we should ban all negativity. Looking for problems, vulnerabilities and holes, whether in arguments, suggestions or code is very bad and should be stopped immediately.
Alex did his part by creating something interesting. Just look at the comments on this thread. This, right here is the problem. Everyone keeps complaining about stuff that they haven't done or not capable of doing. If you have a suggestion, just try to communicate with him or the other developers working on it. Any developer would like creative/helpful input. Stop bitching and support people who create stuff.
Interesting idea, but I wonder if "niceness" is really that important when sharing ideas that may or may not be controversial. Being professional and constructive might be a good goal, but these don't necessarily entail "niceness." That is, you can still be professional and constructive while being a giant asshole.<p>Also, I'm not really sure making people accountable by making them use Real Names or whatever account tied to their real name will make them be nicer. It might seem like that because on social networks, you can selectively add people to talk to that you enjoy being nice to. When it is an open forum, the discussion might still turn sour because people have contradicting viewpoints and that's okay, especially in a technical discussion. Finally, tying people to their real names by default sounds like it lends itself to all kinds of Internet Detective-y stuff which will probably lead to more Ad Hominem attacks than discussion.<p>Source: I post on Something Awful where we can still have useful discussion and call each other out on our bullshit. Niceness isn't as important as the free discussion of ideas.