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Show HN: Rank a random subject every day

by pattle on 2/5/24, 12:24 PM with 47 comments

Hi my name is Chris, I'm the creator of Rank a Day.

I don't know if it's just me but I love ranking things and discussing them like "Who's the best sports person?" or "What's the best Matt Damon film?", so I decided to create a simple web app that gives you a random topic to rank every day.

Once you've selected your top 3 answers you can submit them, see how they compare against other peoples answers and share them on social media.

I have a few Whatsapp groups I'm in and every morning we share our answers, it's just a really good conversation starter.

I'd appreciate any thoughts and feedback.

Thanks!

  • by stabbles on 2/7/24, 12:31 PM

    Would probably be better to show X and Y and let people select which is better (or skip), and compute an ELO score. A list with hundreds of items isn't great

  • by BenoitP on 2/7/24, 12:49 PM

    Apple is #1, but a lot of other fruits are way less known. This is the equivalent of every not-well-thought map visualization being a population density map.

  • by hooby on 2/7/24, 12:24 PM

    Funny.

    The question asks "what is the best fruit?" - but the answers only show you what the most widely available fruits are.

    Anything that's lesser known or more expensive to mass produce or harder to ship fresh - is a complete non-starter to begin with, regardless of how good it is.

  • by martyvis on 2/7/24, 12:08 PM

    I noticed that Apple and Banana rank in the top two. While clearly they are very familiar fruit to your audience, they are also near the beginning of the alphabet. I wonder if alphabetical order creates a bias.

  • by jiffygist on 2/7/24, 11:34 AM

    I'm interested what are the logistics of adding new topics for such "random thing every day" sites. I would guess that you maybe have a queue with topics for the next few days that you add to whenever you have fresh ideas. What would happen if you forgot to add new topics?

  • by derbOac on 2/7/24, 11:38 AM

    This is fun.

    A couple of things:

    It's a bit confusing because I wasn't ranking anything, I was voting for things. I thought I was going to rank the three things I selected, for instance. Some explanation of this might be helpful.

    Maybe it's just because there's so many fruits I like, but I would have liked to pick more than 3. I was left feeling like the 3 didn't reflect much meaningful about my preferences, and was mostly about attention at that moment. Choosing up to 10 seems better to me. Or better yet, why not have it be unlimited? Unlimited with ranking? Unranked are set equal and last (except for unranked)?

  • by thaumasiotes on 2/7/24, 11:55 AM

    It might be fun if you allowed people to submit reasons or categories that make their choice the best. Today is "best fruit". What if I could submit the subcategory "best as a basketball substitute" and other people started populating that?

    I'm imagining something like this:

    1. I pick the three best fruits.

    2. You show me the table of which fruits are the best fruits.

    3. To the side, there's a list of subcategories, ways to be the best. Choose which ones display by some combination of recency and how many votes they have.

    4. If I click on one of those, I vote for three fruits from the master list, and see another table for that category.

    0. Somewhere there's a way for me to submit a category.

  • by sys13 on 2/7/24, 12:15 PM

    There's a lot of possible choices presented to the user, some of them totally out there like 'Ximenia'. Maybe there should be fewer choices, or can group them by what the author might guess are the common choices (where I can focus my attention), then a group with the less common choices. More elaborate things are possible like dynamic grouping and using web/LLM searches to come up with the initial choices.

  • by jiwidi on 2/7/24, 12:41 PM

    Try to shuffle the order of options to avoid bias (you can see apple and banana at top, both also in the beginning of the alphabet)

  • by thih9 on 2/7/24, 12:26 PM

    This list of fruits includes avocados, but not olives - both are arguably fruits. There are more: https://www.treehugger.com/vegetables-are-actually-fruits-48...

  • by streamfunk191 on 2/7/24, 1:44 PM

    I really like the general idea. I’m constantly doing this solo or with friends so good to see what others think. The long lists are a difficult UX, not sure how you completely get around that. Glad to see mango second (at the time of posting)

  • by dvh on 2/7/24, 11:50 AM

  • by umanwizard on 2/7/24, 12:51 PM

    I have never heard of “kiwifruit” in my life. In the U.S. I and everyone else (AFAIK) just call them “kiwis”. Is “kiwifruit” really the full name?

  • by indigoabstract on 2/7/24, 12:08 PM

    Bananas, apples and watermelons. I have pretty mainstream (or predictable) tastes it seems. Nice!

  • by jpsouth on 2/7/24, 1:35 PM

    I had absolutely no idea the Monstera Deliciosa produced fruit!

    Nice idea, thanks for sharing.

  • by badcppdev on 2/7/24, 11:42 AM

    I personally hate this concept because it treats the world as a homogenous group where the largest number of people with a common opinion is noteworthy. It's as bad as the "Top ten songs from the 70s" or "New and Trending" anything. It's a process that literally destroys the diversity of human thought.

    Rant over. Sorry Chris, but for me the Tayberry which is the bottom of your results page at the moment is a trillion times more interesting than Apple, Banana, and Mango at the top.

  • by matthewfelgate on 2/5/24, 1:08 PM

    Oh, I like this!