My first impression of the site is that no big value jumps out at me when I look at it -- nothing makes me think, "Hey, this is really a lot better than trawling Google News and the Yahoo! Most Popular page, plus a few niche sites I find interesting."
Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but without arrows for some reason."
Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site uniquely valuable.
The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun.
Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me -- they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S. population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push past that.
Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but without arrows for some reason."
Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site uniquely valuable.
The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun.
Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me -- they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S. population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push past that.