Hacker News Reader

Comment by sawaruna | Hacker News Reader

Not totally sure why, but I've been enjoying newsletters (though none of the paid via Substack) a lot more lately. The constant flow of news via HN, Twitter, etc. results in a kind of information overload and it's quite easy to just scroll on to the next item. While newsletters are essentially just 'more information', perhaps there's something about a curated set of information that (presumably) has some more thought put into it than the click of a retweet button that makes it more appealing to more completely ingest and engage with.

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I guess my problem with email newsletters is that they show up in my email client, alongside other emails from real people. I really don’t want them there.

I think I would like newsletters if I had a separate system just for them. Not just a different inbox within my email client, but a different program altogether, so they occupy a different headspace.

I’ve used https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/ a bit and I think it’s a great service, but the resulting feeds feel distinctly “non-native,” like the feeling of running a Windows program in Mac or Linux with Wine.

I’ve not tried it, but check out https://stoopinbox.com

Stoop is awesome! Would definitely recommend.

Am I understanding it right that there’s only mobile clients for stoop? No web client? I don’t want to read newsletters on my phone :/.

There seems to be a web client in beta. Top right of their homepage, the "login" link. You might have to create an account on another device but you certainly seem to be able to use it from the web.

Stratechery offers an RSS feed for subscribers; I subscribe to both because I normally feel the way you do, but I find I read the email more.

Check it out

Take a tour of HEY

https://youtu.be/UCeYTysLyGI

I wrote https://autosnoozer.com to solve this problem for myself. Give it a try. It helps me batch process my emails (including daily and weekly newsletters)

I built a service that allows you to read newsletters and RSS feeds on your Kindle: https://omreader.co

> I think I would like newsletters if I had a separate system just for them.

You've basically described a RSS aggregator.

Yes, the problem is most of these newsletters aren't available as RSS feeds. That's why I brought up Kill the Newsletter.

Newsblur (saas or self hosted) gives each user a random email address to which they can forward emails and have them presented as different sets of feeds depending on sender - so you can read these with the refs of your feeds.

Inoreader does this too.

All substack newsletters have an RSS feed. And many mailchimp ones do too - for this you need to go the page where old versions are archived and look for the “Subscribe” link.

Like rss subscriptions

I just use a dedicated email address for newsletters. Easy as a separate iOS Mail account, read from the mail app.

Works well and I sort of find it calming having an email address that only gets (so far anyway) a handful of emails a day, that I signed up for. The only problem is it doesn't save your reading place in the email if you navigate to read another email.

For people who use Gmail, you can drag the newsletter out of your Primary tab and into Forums (or any other tab you create), which makes future editions of the newsletter appear there instead of going into your Primary email.

That's exactly the reason that newsletters are effective, though. Objectively, the format is terrible (email is like trying to design for the web in the early 00's when each browser supported an overlapping subset of features), but email grants immediate, unfettered access to you, unmediated by social networks or websites where the author doesn't have total control over your experience.

I agree, over the last week I've left my phone in my bedroom most of the day, removed my apps like brave, telegram and WhatsApp from the home screen. Just the phone, calculator and signal.

So much better, now the added step of opening an app drawer and looking for an app or searching allows me to disengage with all the constant reading.

I've subscribed to a few newsletters and leave to until the end of the day before bed or schedule some time and leave them unread.

Internet is a great tool, as long as it doesn't takeover.

Why remove telegram but keep signal? Just curious.

Telegram is where I speak to a few close friends (groups - plenty of gifs) and my developers and VAs are on it who I talk to daily.

Not many people use SMS these days (not within my circle anyway) and anything that comes through SMS is crucial I.e my CRM goes down or there's a bug I get an SMS, which is fine.

Also, I turn all notifications off on my mobile. This puts the powers back in my hands.

Edit, notifications for SMS and phone are on, everything else, off.

The curated model works well if you trust the editor. Eventually it turns into a newspaper

Until they regress because of SEO people trying to game the system.

I’m an SEO person, and true SEO is about providing value and helping the searcher. Not about gaming it. Google does a great job at removing the black hats, and a pretty good job at removing the grey hats, but it’s not perfect.

If google was really good at removing then Pinterest and Quora would have been downranked/removed from the index.

And then there is this spam site called AnalyticsVidhya whenever I search for stuff related to machine learning.

Gaming SEO still works, so I have to maintain my own blocklist of websites that automatically hides the biggest offenders from my results.

Undoubtedly true. Doesn’t change the fact that true SEO is about helping the searcher resolve their query. Google is evil, but they have the best search algorithm in town.

There are already plenty of newsletters that consist of basically SEO spam. I don't think that's a problem, as long as I can identify and sign up for the good ones.

Wouldn’t people just unsubscribe?

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