Building a Newspaper-Like Feed for Hacker News
Last month, I shared 'Your Hacker News' on Hacker News. The project tackled two improvements I wanted for HN: previewing content and showing more relevant stories.
When browsing Hacker News, I don't get a good idea of whether I'll like an article or not from the title. But I know for sure after reading a few paragraphs. Your Hacker News tries to solve this by showing you a snippet and an image from the article.
The design drew inspiration from traditional newspapers, but several users pointed out that it's not the same. Print newspapers have visual hierarchy and are manually curated, with editors carefully placing chosen images and headlines.
Since our frontpage is automatically generated, my attempts to emulate a newspaper-style layout didn't look very good.
I could've improved it, dividing content into columns, filling in whitespace etc. But I realized it would take too much time, and I decided to go with a feed-like design and focus on adding personalization.
