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Tell HN: I wrote a website with a unique method of recommending links.
16 points by njay on Dec 19, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments
Check it out at http://medaform.com

What's different? Well, links are randomly selected with a weight relative to their score and age (think of it as a raffle system where links with higher scores have more tickets). So instead of using votes to rank content, I use them to alter how much exposure a link gets.

I'd appreciate feedback on where I can improve and some advice on how to make the site grow.



Two Tips:

1) I would default on the light screen. Just easier to read (and change the orange text up top).

2) A WTF link somewhere may be good to explain how it works / what the idea is.


I would default on the light screen

This is essential.


Some quick thoughts:

1) Indispensable: add a rss feed: many people read news sites using a RSS Reader instead of going to the site.

2) Two or three columns will be nice for a quick view without scroll.

3) Quickly add an openid/facebook/google login.

4) Comments: Although I don't like to distribute for the same URL in a zillion of sites, add something like disqus and forget to develop comments again.


By default, open the link in a new tab/window, a la Google Reader. And I agree, some kind of standard syndication is key: Atom, RSS, etc.

That said, it's got a decent hit rate of showing me links I'm interested in so far.


http://medaform.com


I think an AJAX-based refresh would feel more snappy than a full page reload to shake out a new set of links.


"links are randomly selected with a weight relative to their score..."

And their score is selected how?


Why on earth are you making me register? Can't you just hash my IP address?


In an age of nat routers and dynamic addresses IP addresses are not suitable as identifiers. That doesn't mean you should have to sign up, though. It would be much better to use your existing login from another service via openid or something.


How about just using a cookie?

No, it's not going to keep track of me as I go from computer to computer, but if I care about that, I'm interested enough to login.


Oh please, give me a break. I don't want to have to log in at all. If ip address collisions become a problem THEN you can implement openid. Until then you will never get big enough to make it a problem.


Source IP as an identifier is a really bad idea. As an example, I work at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Do you know how many internet IP's we NAT them all behind? 2.

Also, while most ISP's don't assign customers new IP's frequently, they do do it occasionally. (At least, Comcast in Denver does). I finally signed up for dyndns because I got sick of not being able to access my home machine from work every 6 months or so.

OpenID/Facebook connect (like another poster suggested) would be a good choice, but source IP as a login identifier? That's just plain dumb.


are you missing the point entirely? i highly doubt that more than one person at your company will be using this service. i highly doubt that anyone at your company besides you will be using this service. this service probably has a total of 300 uniques, and maybe 5 active users including the creator.


Stack Overflow did essentially this, didn't they?

How did they do that?




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