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Draft
p/draft-6If Hacker News and Medium had a child
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Rian Touchent

Draft - If Hacker News and Medium had a child

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Draft is a community-driven news app inspired by Hacker News and Medium.
You can read news articles posted by the community or add new ones to the news feed.
Then, you can discuss and share your thoughts with the community in the Discussion Space.

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Rian Touchent
Maker
Hi Product Hunt ! We are a team of four engineering student in Paris that tried to create a more active experience for news reading. We read Hacker News and Medium daily and got inspired by their user experiences. We think that combined, they could benefit from each other. So we built Draft, a community-driven news app. Here are the main functionalities : - You can read the summary of news articles posted by the community or read the full article on their officials websites. - You can also post articles you liked by submitting their links. - The articles in the feed are ordered by the community, you can up-vote the ones you found interesting. - Each article has a "Discussion Space" where you can share your thoughts and questions using an easy and complete Rich-Text editor. - Don't hesitate to put images or links to any other resources for further reading on the subject ! Feel free to give us any advices or feedback !
Iam J
@rian_touchent Is there limit on the number of posts we can view? the scrolling ends after ~15 news items
Rian Touchent
Maker
@htnawsaj There is no limits ! You can add all the news articles you found interesting in the feed ! We don't want to put articles ourselves or from an algorithm or other sources as we believe that we could benefit from a more active news consumption. The news feed is entirely built by the users.
shira jeczmien
Hey guys, this looks cool, I like the design, but how is it different for Reddit?
Rian Touchent
Maker
@shira_jeczmien Thanks ! I think you won't find fundamental differences with Reddit in terms of functionalities, except for the editor maybe. On Reddit, everything goes super fast, there is a lot of content everywhere every time, and this doesn't push you to take your time. We do believe that by a simpler and slower app, we could feel more comfortable to take our time and discuss more profoundly about news we read. The design of our app is aimed to be clean and simple so we can focus on what really matters. Also the feed reset every week on Draft as we believe than we could benefit from a slower news feed, where on Reddit it's more like every day. We are probably more complementary than an alternative to Reddit.
shira jeczmien
@rian_touchent thanks for the reply and clarifying! OK I'm intrigued then how this will be made to move slower than Reddit?
Rian Touchent
Maker
@shira_jeczmien First, technically, as on Draft the news feed works on a week time frame, where on Reddit it is more on a daily time frame. Then, we also try not to throw too much information at the user. We believe that with a simple and clean design, we create a context that will push you to take your time in your news reading and in the Discussion Space as we can more focus on what matters. We don't use Push Notifications as well.
NIsham Mahsin
UI looks cool.and all the best
Rian Touchent
Maker
@nisham_mahsin Thank you ! 🤞
Tobiasz Jankowski

Huge potential. Honestly, I'm loving this app, it's well-crafted and actually feels like it was made with ♥️ Snippets of articles with valuable content are located conveniently in one app. As a person, who prefers to read bullet points, this is just perfect. Speaking of sources, the ones I've seen and read are actually pretty solid. The UI - fantastic, sleek and eye-catching. It simply feels modern. Performance - no issues encountered so far. Works smoothly on an older device. Very quick sign-up. On the worse side of things, it needs a couple of UX tweaks. Finding the link to article source could be located a bit more conveniently; sign out button should be located differently (it feels weird to have it on the bottom of the page); the roll-out menu feels pretty empty. Also, the feature to add news - it's pretty small and requires to paste a direct link, I think this could be improved furtherly or even automated. On top of that, a filtering feature might come in handy - i.e. to see only the topics I'd be interested in or the highest-rated.

Pros:

Performance, content, UI

Cons:

Lacks a couple of features, UX should be improved furtherly

Rian Touchent
Maker
@tobiasz_jankowski Thanks a lot for this feedback ! 🙏 We will think about this for our next update !
Vivek Adithya
Pretty cool concept. Like the idea and the design of the app. Saves me a bunch of time while reading. However, I ran into an article with bad quality summary. I know this is a community driven content. Hence do you have any plans/checks to improve the content quality?
Rian Touchent
Maker
@vivekadithya Thank you very much for the feedback 🙏 The summary is made by our algorithm based on the content of the article, we want it to be as neutral as possible. We don't want to be an "authority". We are looking at how he behave to all the articles our users are posting, so we can improve it in the future.
Hippolyte Taliercio

Worth trying it

Pros:

Smart and interesting concept

Cons:

There are always other alternatives, but Draft is a different way of checking the news and focusing on what you are interested in.

csgator
app is super smooth! what tech did you guys use to build the app ?
Rian Touchent
Maker
@sourab_reddy Thank you ! We used Flutter, feel free to ask if you have any questions about that !
csgator
@rian_touchent thanks for reply! I’ve been playing around with react-native and just recently came across flutter, will give it a try :)
Rian Touchent
Maker
@sourab_reddy You won't regret !
csgator
@rian_touchent out of curiosity , what would you say about the learning curve and time taken to make this app ?
Rian Touchent
Maker
@sourab_reddy I would say that the learning curve of Flutter is like an extreme Dunning-Kruger effect. You will very easily succeed to do the basis of an app which is great but you after some days you will be pretty confused about what is happening in your app. But don't give up, after I have learned Flutter, I won't go back to native development again. It took us around 1-2 months part-time to make and we are 2 on the code. But the front-end in Flutter was the easy part. The hard part is in the back-end in Node.js and Python