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Comment by cedricium | Hacker News Reader

I'm tackling the issue of managing Reddit saves.

Across all platforms (not just Reddit), people including myself like to save/bookmark interesting content in the hopes of getting some use out of it later. The problem arises when you start accumulating too much content and forget to ever check that stuff out.

I'm working on a solution to help resurface Redditors' saved things using personalized newsletters. I'm calling it Unearth and users get to choose how frequently they want to receive their newsletter (daily, weekly, or monthly). The emails contain five of their saved comments or things and link directly to Reddit so that when viewing it, they can then decide whether or not to unsave it.

Basic functionality is all there, just needs some more styling and the landing page could be spruced up.

https://www.tryunearth.com/

View on HN

Signed up, and I love how fast it was to create an account. Literally two clicks and 5 seconds as my password is saved in google crome and you sign up through reddit. I think you're on to something with that onboarding process.

Kinda different, kind of the same but i'd love to use an app with much better search than the 'direct search' currently in most aggrogrator/ note apps. If i searched 'quotes' it would rip out and return all the things in italized, in quotes, or things that the algorithm deems as quotes based on it's scrape of the internet; Kinda like google but 'personal search' based on my notes, articles, all my different emails (work, and my 37 different gmail accounts) and websites I frequent (like reddit, hacker news comments, etc.) There was an HN article the other day that got me thinking about this problem, but i can't seem to find it. However, it approached it from a much deeper technical level, utilizing emacs and searching through his code. If you could bring that into an easy to use, consumer facing GUI I think it'd have potential to be pretty game changing.

'Personalized Search, and we don't have to steal your data because you willingly give it to us' - Google

I tried to make onboarding as frictionless as possible so this makes me happy to hear!

And that's a really interesting idea regarding search. Would love to see the HN thread/article you mentioned to get a better understanding of the concept. As of now, Unearth's only focus was on active content resurfacing, but I've seen many Redditors mention the wish to search their saves as well so I think I'll look more into this.

Appreciate the ideas, keep them coming.

I believe this is the HN article you're referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160572

Curious if you've thought about this as a browser extension where it injects what you've saved into the main reddit feed. For example, one saved item per refresh. So you naturally rediscover and engage with items you've saved in the past, with a decent algorithm to help prevent any fatigue from seeing the same item too many times.

canada_dry also brought up the idea of a browser extension (for privacy's sake). I think that paired with your idea of inserting saved content into the main feed is very enticing.

I would need to figure out how injection would work for saved comments, do you have any ideas? I'm definitely going to save this idea so thank you!

awesome, not sure how I'd handle comments since this approach would aim to be as seamless as possible. Maybe when they click into the thread you use the UI to remind them of the other saved items they have using the right sidebar for example, but I don't like how it tries to grab attention from the core experience. They could also always click the browser extension similar to Pocket, but I imagine this action would be used less compared to things naturally appearing on the pages that they browse. You'll have to find ways to train the user to use that behavior regularly, perhaps again similar to pocket when they click "save" the browser extension shows a little popover so they see it saved in the extension, can tag it etc., and know their other content/saved comments live there

Wow, that's really neat! I sometimes hesitate to save something because I think "when would I really come back to this?" But this would probably get me to save more things that I find interesting.

Thanks! I've been hesitant to show it off thinking not many people would find it useful but you've given me hope :)

Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions.

Playing devils advocate, I'd really prefer this kind of functionality as a separate browser add-on - i.e. unlinked to my reddit signon.

For privacy you needn't require the reddit ID of your users. Simply that they want to save something from reddit to their tryunearth.com account.

I appreciate you raising this concern, I honestly never thought about that.

> Simply that they want to save something from reddit to their tryunearth.com account

When you say that, I envision the extension overriding or extending Reddit's save button functionality by making an API call to the unearth backend. Is that kinda what you had in mind?

Exactly. Have an initial import functionality in onboarding, where the user could somehow import their currently saved content. Thereafter you could have an extension that implements a 'save to unearth' button cleanly into reddit's UI.

This is a great idea. Rediscoverability is a big problem, especially with the growing popularity of personal knowledge systems (Notion, Roam, etc), which have been discussed a lot on HN.

I take a ton of notes on Notion, but I worry that I'll never see most of them again. Maybe part of the value is just in writing the notes in the first place...?

Kudos for solving out this problem for Reddit!

Just a heads up: on mobile (Android Q) clicking on 'Get started using Reddit' gives me an 'No apps can perform this action' error from the OS. I have the reddit app installed, so most likely the link tries to open the app (instead of opening the link within the browser) and fails.

Thanks for the heads up, will debug and push a fix tomorrow.

> I'm calling it Unearth...

Why not call it Digg?

hehe I see what you did there ;)

Awesome, this but for twitter likes + retweets (I don't use reddit enough)

This is a great idea. I need this for HN also.

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