Show HN: Team newsletter instead of sharing links on Slack | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Team newsletter instead of sharing links on Slack

app.itemsy.com

64 pointspiotrgrudzien27 comments

I do like to share links @ work, so sounds like I'm the target audience. But this is a near empty landing page, asking for my e-mail with almost no information about what the product is or how it works.

It would be nice to get a little more information. Screenshots, descriptions, pricing ... anything. Why would I want to just blindly sign up for something based on one sentence & 3 bullet points?

I perfectly agree with this. Frankly, who knows if the page is a phishing page targeted to HN users?

I never want to blindly sign up for anything when there is absolutely no information/demo in the first page.

I blame the Lean Startup/Indiehackers mentality of validating, validating, validating before building anything. I mean, I get where they're coming from but it really hard to distinguish it from phisihing attacks.

Does it ask your HN (or any other) credentials? How would it be a phishing attack then?

First step of sign up requires an email. Second sep verifies the email is active. Third asks you to set a password. They could be harvesting credentials and reverting on password reuse.

Isn’t reasonable to expect that a tool made to send you email newsletters requires you to give them and verify your email address?

Our goal was simple: we wanted to share interesting links without constantly being distracted by messages or Slack notifications.

Itemsy is a free, shared bookmarking tool. All you have to do is:

1. Create an account at app.itemsy.com

2. Create a new private channel for your company

3. Invite your colleagues

4. Add interesting links to the channel (via the web app or by emailing it to share@itemsy.com with the name of your channel in the title)

As a result, you and your colleagues receive a daily newsletter with all the links to read, e.g. while commuting. You can also browse them all via the web app.

If you have a habit of sharing interesting reads within your team, we'd love for you to try it out!

Slack notifications are cancer.

Why would people want to read work related articles during their commute?

Honestly it's just another newsletter I don't click on. Email is filled with way too many newsletters as it is.

EDIT: At first I didn't Get it, but now I grok that it integrates with Slack, not replaces it. Cool idea.

How does it integrate with Slack? This would be interesting but details are sadly lacking.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. What happens when someone follows my public profile?

They receive a daily newsletter with all the links you share on your public profile.

2. What are private channels?

You and friends or teammates you invite contribute links and receive the newsletter.

3. What happens when I invite someone to a private channel?

They receive an email notification. They need to log in to the web app and accept the invitation in order to be able to contribute to the channel and receive the newsletter.

4. When are newsletters sent out?

Channel admin can adjust it in newsletter settings (daily, by default).

Needing an account to read articles is a bit much, IMO. Unless I’m misunderstanding something.

I dont want to make people sign up for something new just to read my shitty links

I need to spend at least 15 minutes a day cleaning up my inbox at work, which can easily grow to an hour if I neglect it for a few days. This product sounds truly awful.

I couldn't find the option to delete my account, so, how can I delete my account?

Hi Piotr, great to see your work make the front page of HN!

Will there also be an option to generate a combined pdf of the links for when you’re out of signal (like on the tube)?

You should probably also have some special handling for arxiv links. Those are the bulk of what we send on slack at Featurespace

How do I follow people?

For this kind of thing Zotero[1] is a better solution. Moreover, it can be self-hosted and open source[2]. They even have a web browser extension (Chrome and Firefox), and a rich set of various plugins [3].

[1] https://zotero.org/

[2] https://github.com/zotero

[3] https://www.zotero.org/support/plugins

Actually I'm doing something similar [1] - but beside sharing links, tiomsu.com allows sharing (markdown) notes as well. There is YT video with brief overview [2].

1. https://tiomsu.com

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx7Ai-PhvAM

This looks interesting, but I have to say the screenshots that only show outlines and no real content make it really difficult to get a feel for what the product actually does. I had to watch the video to get a better understanding.

This sounds like something that should be built into Slack. Some heuristics could be applied to whether or not a message is really indeed important, and only notify me if that's the case.

It'd be nice to have a bot listening to a channel and doing that work too. Maybe as a secondary method of data acquisition.

Good suggestion! At the moment, there are 3 ways to add links to Itemsy:

(1) publish links via web app

(2) add to personal #myitems channel via

- Chrome/Firefox extension (see itemsy.com) - email to my@itemsy.com

Which one sounds best to you at the moment?

The browser extension.

I've noticed there are 3 types of people when it comes to sharing interesting things on Slack work channels: 1) hates the distraction and would love a summary by email (me), 2) is fine with Slack and 3) doesn't really care and doesn't want to be involved.

The less work 1 and 3 have, the better. I think I'm proposing a slack-email brdige now. Things are getting out of hand :)

So is this designed to mine / crowd source “organic” user data in reading habits and trends for people who can’t keep up with the speed of slack, or store articles and reminders to read them on their own?

It's gonna be the latter. It's something we initially set up for ourselves because we really enjoyed the idea of receiving a daily newsletter of stuff to read rather than constant notifications.

This is a very nice experience and concept! Nice Job!

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