Very nice. At first, I didn't really see the point of it - another voting/wiki type thing, sigh - but the interface is so fast and compelling that it just drew me in.
I registered so I could vote on something, decided to see what creating an article was like, and it was so smooth it made me want to start more, and then eventually realize I have been looking for something like this.
I started a list of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA" because I remembered that I had been looking for just such a list the other day. I figured it's mostly HN users on there now, probably, and a fair amount of us are from here. I'm not positive what types of lists you're wanting, though, so I won't be hurt if you delete it!
Feature request: I would love to add some simple custom attribute to each list. For instance, with the coffee shops, it'd be nice if I could define an attribute for that list of "Free wifi?" and then each item could select either yes/no as it's created. An article on vim color themes could define an attribute of "Background?" with options "light, dark, both".
At some point in the future, then, you could filter and look at just the items in the list that match an attribute. E.g., I can look at the coffee shops and filter to look at only the ones that give free wifi.
Your other article, "Best Text Editors for Programming", is a perfect article for Listry I think. The Cambridge coffee shops one would be good if there were a lot of Listry users that lived in Cambridge and could vote on it, I'm not sure there are enough though.
Your feature request is a good idea, I'll keep it in mind for down the road.
Are votes really a 1-5 rating? I thought it was bit counterintuitive (I guess in my experience "votes" are typically binary). How about allowing just thumbs up/down?
This question (5-star?) was also the first to my mind once I signed up and jumped into interaction with the app.
Given that each item shows a positive or negative number as its rating, it is unclear to me what the effect of a 5-, 3-, or 1- star ratings is against the net score for that item. I'm reasonably certain what the net effect will be, but it isn't totally obvious. The fact that it isn't so obvious is a friction point that makes me somewhat less likely to interact.
Using the familiar pattern of the binary up/down as arturadib has suggested (and taking a page from StackOverflow, Reddit, etc.) would make the interface much more familiar to me.
Though a binary up/down system would make this point irrelevant, I'll add it to the conversation anyway: It seems to me that over a long enough period of time, the rating for many items (using a 5 star system) will average near 3.
Congratulations on getting Listry out in the wild. Looking forward to witnessing future developments!
A corroborating argument for dropping the stars: A lot of people who've tried multi-value rating systems have found that they get a heavily bimodal distribution anyways: people vote when they think something is awesome, or when it sucks, but rarely when they think it's just meh.
So you really won't be losing much information with a two value (eg, upvote/downvote) system.
Should I keep the 5 star rating control for rating articles, and change the voting on items to thumbs up/down? Or should I change both the voting on items and voting on articles to thumbs up/down?
Both articles and items should have the up/down vote options, rather than the 5 star, IMO.
There may be value in the determination of consumer-side article rank by a (weighted) average that encompasses both the net rank of items posted to the article + the rank of the article itself.
I'm sure you've already thought about the item/article interaction in terms of effect on overall article ranking. UI/X-side, the effect (of ranking an item within an article) is unclear now, and I am fine with that as an early user.
Moving forward, developing a ranking formula that weighs article rank against net rank of all of the article's items will be a usage-informed improvement that provides great value to users.
That ranking formula, as well as making the result of a "ranking" interaction obvious to the user, will help the understanding of how such interactions work.
With a social answering/ranking/voting application, creation of, and/or tweaks to, the formula that determines the effect of interactions will have a huge influence in shaping the culture of the individuals that interact with the application.
Judging from the concept of "decision fatigue" outlined in that NY Times article the other day * , you're better off with thumbs up/down since it's less work to decide that than to have to choose 2 or 3 or 4 stars for an OK article.
Think about it from a game theory perspective. If the rating of something is higher than you would like it to be, why would you vote more than a 1? If the rating is lower, why would you vote less than a 5?
Some people may express their honest preference, but a major motivation for people to interact with something like this is to change the average, and voting at the extremes maximizes their power.
This is the project I've been working on for the past 6 months. It combines the features of wikis with a voting system that determines the best parts of an article. There's still a lot of improvements I need to make, but I wanted to launch early and get feedback.
Congratulations with your launch! It looks like you've got a nice hybrid between HN/Reddit-style voting and Stackoverflow-topics, - personally haven't seen such a site before. It'll be interesting to see whether you'll succeed building a community around it. Any plan-of-attacks on gaining traction?
Thanks! Yea, building the community will be the tough part. I was planning on writing high quality articles on Listry and then hopefully some of the people that read the article would want to add their own input to the article and that's how they would get started contributing.
I'm not sure, - that could be a way, but only if you actually enjoy writing those articles.
Just thinking out loud, your time could also be spend editorially adding more and more subjects and quality lists. The whole problem with such a site is that you need to maintain some level of quality, which is best maintained by attracting people that care about that quality. If you have a lot of quality lists with quality subjects, the next thing you need to ensure is that Google (and other search engines) pick up on that.
If I search for "emacs color themes", for example, you want listry to be the #1 match in Google with a list of links to color themes.
That, and just balls: try to get some popular bloggers to cover your site. If they like the concept, they won't mind vouching for you.
- or do the tripadvisor approach (read Founders At Work for this story) and spend massively to seed content for several years to reach critical mass on your own
Few other thoughts:
- I think your design is better
- Is "Articles" the right word here? Esp given your domain would "lists" work better?
I was debating between calling them "lists" or "articles", and decided on "articles" because my hope is that over time they will become full-fledged articles (true that my domain name makes that a bit confusing). Paul Graham's article on "the 18 mistakes that kill startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) is the type of article I am shooting for with Listry. Where each item of the article has 1 or more in-depth paragraphs of explanation or details.
congrats on launching! why not eat your own dog food and start a [sticky] list for feature requests? i think it'd be a nice way to get early adopters get hooked up.
I tried starting a list of "shops in india that would be of interest to Hackers and Makers": http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-that... on the lines of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA"... And I added two shops that I had painstaking discovered a few months ago for buying a few things I needed.
I was a bit annoyed that getting things you want from your own country(minimizes shipping and taxes) is still so hard in the era of google. So I wanted to share it with the world hoping that others would populate the list further and I could benefit from this. But it was voted -2. Now I have no complaints against that... Maybe such a list is unsuitable for this type of site. But I think it may be a smarter idea for you to make it more obvious as to what constitutes a bad list. Why "Coffee shops in Campridge" is kosher and why "Shops interesting for hackers in India" is not.
I voted you down because I thought it was spam, sorry. I've undone my vote now so you are back to 0. When I voted there was just one item with a link, and it looked like someone just wanted to advertise their online store.
Your article seems fine for the site. An optimum article would be more than just a list of links though.
Ideally, I want articles to become full-fledged, comprehensive articles. Like the article for "Reasons to Quit Smoking". In time, I hope that article can become a comprehensive resource of all the best reasons to quit smoking. Then someone who is trying to quit smoking can use that article as motivation to quit.
I'll be working on a commenting system so that in the future it'll be easier to discuss this type of thing on the actual article page.
Thanks for trying out the site and providing feedback! And sorry again for thinking it was spam.
1 little thing -> Your "Browse Popular Articles" and "Contribute to New Articles" buttons are not vertically centered. The white space above them is 6px less than the white space below. It looks like you wanted them to be the same in your css but the #mainbuttons is 65px in height and the buttons are 59px in height.
If you change #mainbuttons height to 59px and bump the margins a little bit more to 29 or 30px you get a nicer look I personally think. A little bit more white space separates the buttons from the top header and to me is easier on the eyes.
I really like the site thought. There's lots of these but yours is different, the content stands out more than the site, and to me that's what matters.
- Allow entering just the "details" part of an article Item. Current workflow restricts articles to be more of a sub-level categorization. For simple lists that the article title already describes the article, there's no reason to require an item title.
- Allow option to auto insert list bullets/numbers into text that separated by empty lines.
Feature request: For each list allow users to link to lists in the wild. For Eg there could be a 10 reasons to quit smoking on some magazine. The user may not want to recreate the list, but just provide a bookmark. You could even provide a "listify" bookmarklet. For Eg Paul Graham's list of reasons why startups fail and a lot of startup failure story post mortems could be Supplimentary materials for a list of the same name.
The list which begins life as a list of useful bookmarks to external lists about the same topic could over time be deduplicated by the community to create a Master list that would be much more useful than the external lists themselves.
Congrats on the launch. I'm curious how your "popular" tab works.
If it is simply sorted by votes with no time-component then your going to have the same "self-fulfilling prophecy" problem that Stack Overflow had when they first launched.
Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items.
Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and "popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".
At least at this early stage with little content, the site seems very snappy. Looking at the blog, I'm assuming you're running on Google AppEngine? Can you give us an overview of how the site is implemented?
Thanks for noticing the speed :) I spent a lot of effort on that.
I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are updated with javascript.
So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you different links if you are logged in.
Congratulations on launching a Beta! The site is visually pleasing and the layout works.
I noticed one small detail that is jarring and it should be a simple style fix. The location of content contained in a div or span shifts when you change categories on the "New Articles" tab. You should be able to see what I mean by selecting "New Articles" then watching the Listry icon in the upper left move to the right (or left) after selecting another category from the list.
Thanks :). I see what you are talking about, it's because the main page is long enough to have a scrollbar, and then when you choose a category, there isn't enough content to need to show a scrollbar, right?
Great so far! Very minimalistic and easy to navigate.
Notice that you're using Google App Engine to send your welcome emails, and I'd love to offer you PostageApp (http://postageapp.com) while you're in beta. We'd be happy to help you out with that. :)
Nice app and congrats for the launch! I'm into list based services but there aren't too many around. One really similar that I came across about an year ago was http://listiki.com/ I really like their wiki/fork-style approach.
I've seen that site before. Mine's more about creating comprehensive articles rather than just a list. Something where each item of the article has paragraph(s) of detail.
Congratts! Great idea and implementation! Clean, quick, nice!
One design tweak I would do... Have the descriptions of the lists collapsable so the reader can skim the list and only get the full scroll effect if they need.
For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough. Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that don't fit the format.
For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though.
If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify malicious edits.
Oh man. You are going to get a lot of traffic. Please do something to block a spammer's ip. Have a flag button and do a soft delete it after a certain number of flags. Soft delete because you can review to make sure its actually crap and not the top item in your page :) Good luck
I just felt the need for that a few minutes ago, a troll overwrote all of the articles with junk text, and I had no way to easily block his IP. I'll be working on that ASAP.
Thanks! Spam edits can be reverted in the history tab, there's still more work I need to do to make that easier though. Spam articles can be voted down, and that will take them off the front pages, and I can manually delete them. I'll probably need to have a "flag article" link down the road though.
One reason could be if you wished there was good resource on a topic.
For example, if you wanted to convince someone that they should develop for iOS instead of android, you could start an article on Listry titled "Reasons to develop for iOS". Then add a few reasons of your own to the article, and then other Listry users could add their reasons, everyone would vote on the best reasons, and then in the end you would have a good resource of all the best reasons to develop for iOS.
A reputation system would definitely be a good thing to have too. I was thinking about creating one, but decided to launch early, and then improve the site over time.
Thanks. I'll probably write about the implementation once I get some spare time. I got a lot of great feedback today that I'll be busy implementing for a while :)
It's very easy to set up, and it works alright. There is a delay for things to show up in the search results though. I think once app engine (which is what Listry runs on) implements full text search, I'll probably make my own solution using that.
hey man this is slick, congrats! btw just curiuos, what's your underlying tech stack, your website is lightning fast! (given the fact i live in SE asia where internet quality is crappy)
yet another douchebag with nothing constructive at all to add or any real feedback in for a member who started this thread explicitly to obtain feedback from HN
I registered so I could vote on something, decided to see what creating an article was like, and it was so smooth it made me want to start more, and then eventually realize I have been looking for something like this.
I started a list of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA" because I remembered that I had been looking for just such a list the other day. I figured it's mostly HN users on there now, probably, and a fair amount of us are from here. I'm not positive what types of lists you're wanting, though, so I won't be hurt if you delete it!
Feature request: I would love to add some simple custom attribute to each list. For instance, with the coffee shops, it'd be nice if I could define an attribute for that list of "Free wifi?" and then each item could select either yes/no as it's created. An article on vim color themes could define an attribute of "Background?" with options "light, dark, both".
At some point in the future, then, you could filter and look at just the items in the list that match an attribute. E.g., I can look at the coffee shops and filter to look at only the ones that give free wifi.
Great work!