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Comment by neilsharma | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the suggestions -- looking into them now. Clever idea to sign up for a site's weekly email instead of skimming the site.

I used to sign up for an HN newsletter that'd only show the top posts. I thought that was an effective way of pushing only the best content to me every few days. Realized later that I enjoy reading a some articles that didn't get a lot of upvotes.

I also tried to create an open google doc where a small group of friends could share links to articles they found particularly noteworthy. Participation was 0, so I gave up and now just store interesting articles in my bookmarks folder. Messy.

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I've been thinking about setting something like this up, but over email. Anyone who opts in to the mailing list would be able to submit a link+description, and once a week some software would automagically send out an aggregated email to everyone who opts in.

The problem is getting it to the optimum size. If it's too small, it won't work because nobody will want to post. If it's too large, then the signal-to-noise ratio drops and it's no better than Reddit or HN.

Also, moderation is hard.

Yeah, I hear you. Community-driven newsletters / news sites have a very narrow success zone -- too small and it'd lack fresh content, too large and it'll have SNR problems.

I think the best solution is to find one or two people who know their stuff to curate everything. Add community engagement mechanisms incrementally. For example, enable social media sharing and commenting before account creation, upvoting, and article submissions.

Wonder how a Quora/Medium model (invite-only) or The Information (paywall) would work for newsletters, since content isn't original?

Dave Farber's long-running (over 20 years now!) mailing list is a bit like this, moderated by Dave Farber of course.

That's a good idea. But had you thought of making it on any topics at all, or for some domain?

The Google doc is an interesting idea.

I think the stuff I line most on HN doesn't always correlate with what has the most upvotes, so I don't think I'd be happy with a best-of-HN summary either.

Are there any email newsletters you already subscribe to and would recommend?

Aside from mattermark daily, I've haven't found a single newsletter that has had consistently good material. Tried several, but kept unsubscribing when they started to feel like spam.

I found some of the human-made playlists on 8tracks.com to be better than a lot of the algorithmically generated ones on Pandora/Spotify/Youtube, but music is highly subjective.

Been meaning to give product hunts collections a solid attempt: https://www.producthunt.com/collections

For book recommendations, I find an intellectually-minded friend on Goodreads who has similar tastes to me, and just go down his/her list.

I think a general pattern here is: there are positive deviants in society whose tastes and interests correlate with my own far stronger than the average's.

For tech, Peter Cooper has a bunch of newsletters - JavaScript Weekly, Ruby Weekly, etc.

Great original question, BTW.

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