jrussbowman

For the past several years I've been working on https://www.unscatter.com as a hobby. Used it first as a project to keep up to date with python and a few years ago rewrote it to learn go.

For the past several years it's primarily been not much more than a proxy for APIs for sites like Faroo, Reddit, Youtube and Tumblr.

I recently just started a rebuild of the site that's now live. Instead of just being a proxy for API's, I now use the reddit api to determine what news is trending. Mostly I'm pulling from r/all, r/worldnews and r/news. I'm then pulling and analyzing the stories and creating a searchable index of them.

My goal is to have it act a 1 month archive of what news has been trending. What's driving me is what I have perceived as a lack of trust of the press based on my interactions with people. My goal with the Unscatter brand is to provide tools people can use to see if the press is giving them news or driving a message. This index is just the first tool I'm pushing out.

I am doing a Show HN in the hopes of getting some feed back. My goal is for it to be a 1 month archive, articles that haven't been seen by my fetcher in over a month will be deleted. I don't have the full 1 month archive and probably won't start deleting until June as I'm still tuning.

Another reason I'm doing the Show HN is to see if anyone has some suggestions on other sites that might have an API I can work with? I realize that pulling just from reddit I still risk getting a bias based off of the visitors of that site being their own small society. I'm hoping to find other sources to pull from in an attempt to try and avoid bias.

I should also note if you have a great tool you wish to sell me, at this time I don't have a real monetization strategy. I do serve adsense adds but I also have /search blocked in robots.txt so it's not like google can really tune the ads that well. This is 100% pure hobby, I'm only paying $20 a month for hosting.