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Show HN: HN as TikTok, welcome to HN hell by sirobg

18 Comments

  • Post Author
    danieldevries
    Posted February 5, 2025 at 11:51 am

    Me likey

  • Post Author
    joseppudev
    Posted February 5, 2025 at 11:54 am

    [flagged]

  • Post Author
    redbell
    Posted February 5, 2025 at 12:02 pm

    Oh, thanks! That was such a quick implementation—and a nice addition to the Show HN gallery, especially for HN-related projects.

    When I came across WikiTok yesterday, the first thought that popped into my mind was how this format could work for HN. And here we are!

    With the abundance of AI coding assistants available today, creating prototypes, demos, or MVPs can now be done in just a few hours instead of taking days or even weeks. As developers, we should absolutely take advantage of these tools to stay ahead and remain innovative—otherwise, we might risk being left behind!

  • Post Author
    MasterScrat
    Posted February 5, 2025 at 12:07 pm

    I think both of these projects miss what makes TikTok (and reels in general) so effective.

    A good TikTok video gets "injected into your brain". You have zero effort to provide and suddenly this stuff is in your mind. I'm not saying it's a good thing, I realize the danger, but that's the core mechanism.

    A friend in marketing describes this in terms of "brain calories". Eg if people have to think in order to understand your landing page, you failed to communicate your ideas efficiently, as it "requires too many brain calories". TikTok content requires zero brain calories.

    One could say that only very shallow information could be spread this way (eg people dancing, video game clips) but I'm not sure that's true. The real challenge would be to turn an arbitrary source of information (wikipedia, hn) and make it immediately graspable. I suspect modern AI models could already go quite far in this direction.

    Veritasium is a good example of interesting yet very graspable content:
    https://www.tiktok.com/@veritasium/video/7329576935317622058

  • Post Author
    pipeline_peak
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 9:44 pm

    Use an LLM to summarize each page in one sentence. This takes too much effort to feel like TikTok.

  • Post Author
    carabiner
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 10:14 pm

    Both URLs blocked by corporate firewall because of bad SSL.

  • Post Author
    sebastiennight
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 10:16 pm

    The concept has potential…

    It's still an aggregator of links though.

    You're missing the "zero effort" factor, which could be achieved by summarizing the content and generating some AI cartoon or video based on it. It would be somewhat costly but much more fun to browse.

  • Post Author
    busymom0
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 10:26 pm

    Bug report: On iPhone (with Safari url bar set to bottom), the titles are all clipped at the bottom. I think it has to do with your website using the screen height instead of the visible part only.

  • Post Author
    ge96
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 10:33 pm

    haha clicking on this link in the app

  • Post Author
    Liftyee
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 10:39 pm

    Fun little project! And possibly my future productivity black hole…

    I noticed that on mobile Firefox the bottom part of the screen (username, date) are cut off by the address bar. Just a nitpick

  • Post Author
    Funes-
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 11:13 pm

    Make it generate a short video for every thread, with a summary of the subject and some of the quarrels in the comments section and you're set. Make sure it uses all the ridiculous shenanigans tiktok users resort to, as well.

  • Post Author
    Jotalea
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 11:30 pm

    I like this.

  • Post Author
    capela
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 11:42 pm

    Use 100dvh!!!

  • Post Author
    tempodox
    Posted February 7, 2025 at 11:56 pm

    I expected dancing teenagers singing the texts of the posts.

  • Post Author
    subarctic
    Posted February 8, 2025 at 12:05 am

    This is actually pretty good. Would be nice if it supported arrow keys to scroll down/up on your computer

  • Post Author
    lxgr
    Posted February 8, 2025 at 12:08 am

    Pretty good! Could definitely use more thunder and subway surfers overlays, though.

  • Post Author
    themrredbeard
    Posted February 8, 2025 at 12:33 am

    I kinda like it for discovery. It plops content in my face that I might have missed or ignored. Not a replacement but great for skimming.

  • Post Author
    lopatin
    Posted February 8, 2025 at 12:55 am

    The bad SSL cert is the perfect feature for this.

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