Show HN: PaperDelivery – fetch articles from your Twitter feed | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PaperDelivery – fetch articles from your Twitter feed

paperdelivery.co

49 pointslonesword28 comments

Creator here. PaperDelivery grew out of my frustration with Twitter. I found myself relying on Twitter to follow a particular research community, but realized that I do not care about the actual tweets/threads - all I wanted was the link to the underlying paper/article. I also did not like how often I got sucked into reading an opinion thread (often political), and I walk away (30 minutes later) thinking "do people really believe those things?". All I really want out of Twitter is some sort of personalized hacker news, and this is my attempt at creating it.

There was an iOS app called Nuzzel that was my daily go to for Twitter news articles. It was also giving context for the stories such as comments made by folks retweeting it, which were actually very useful as a TL/DR and also because they would highlight some important aspect of these.

And there is also FlipBoard which you can link to your Twitter feed.

Is your aim somewhat different, I.e produce an “offline” way to read that doesn’t involve endless scrolling?

> Is your aim somewhat different, I.e produce an “offline” way to read that doesn’t involve endless scrolling?

Not having to see the actual tweets was the goal. The problem with connecting my Twitter feed to Flipboard e.t.c is that I'd get exposed to every careless tweet/thread/flame war. The hypothesis with PaperDelivery is that the external links that appear on my twitter feed has less frivolous content since it's not limited to 280 characters.

>There was an iOS app called Nuzzel that was my daily go to for Twitter news articles. It was also giving context for the stories such as comments made by folks retweeting it,

Ah I didn't know about Nuzzel - sounds useful if it can fetch just the links. According to a different comment, mailbrew.com too seems to be able to do this.

Twitter purchased and killed Nuzzel in May. It was great before that.

That really resonated with me. I basically stopped using Twitter because of the reasons you outlined here. This tool, however, might make Twitter useful again for me!

I propose that HN "charge" users 10 reputation points for a submission that links to twitter, and 1 rep point for linking to twitter in a comment.

This is not a punishment. Your comment doesn't get any grayer or dead-er. It's an incentive to deep link when possible.

If you can find a better link, we'd appreciate that. If you can't, then pay the fee, or quote the tweet. Oftentimes the important part of the linked tweet is just some other link; please post that directly.

The policy should be rescinded if twitter ever resurrects their non-javascript frontend (and pigs fly, etc).

Should be the same for any site that nags users (i.e. harasses) with lock-in features or censors. If HN was truly the most virtuous social media we would hurry up and get to the final E of embrace extend extinguish to the EEEers.

Hugged to death? The site is not loading anymore, at least for me.

Yup, looks like that. The whole thing (flask + rabbitMQ + sqlite3) was a on a t2.micro.

Love this project. I will pay good money to get this as a mobile app for iOS.

Great idea! Was using it without realizing how new the product is.

What happened to it? The website/service seems to be down?

Nice. One minor thing: After you sign up, it tells you to check back in a while. Not sure people will remember that for long enough for there to be something there when they check back. Maybe something like "check back in a while or enable RSS" would work. With "enable RSS" being underlined and clickable.

Thanks, that's a nice suggestion!

I've made this change :)

It could be better to add a long load indicator that says "Delivering your latest articles" or something with a nice animation while you fetch the latest few articles, then repopulating the viewport with the articles. Once users leave the page, they'll forget they ever signed up.

Hi, thanks for the feedback! Yeah the front-end is pretty bare-bones right now :)

News websites are asking if I'm a robot instead of showing the headlines.Is it common? https://postimg.cc/47xNhT1g

Unfortunately yes. They see too many requests from paperdelivery.co and block requests originating from that domain - they only want the google bot to crawl their site :) I think I have two options:

1. Respect their decision to not allow PaperDelivery to fetch that page.

2. Use a set of proxies and headless browsers or outright impersonate the Google bot to trick the news websites into allowing PaperDelivery to fetch that page.

This is a cool project. Some months ago I also started consuming feeds in an async way by creating a daily personal newsletter with all my favorite creators and news sources (using mailbrew.com). I’m spending a lot less time doom scrolling because of this.

Would be great if this works for Lists too, instead of the home feed.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, support for twitter lists is a planned feature.

I just manually add the best ones to my custom RSS feed for reading - https://reading.ashishb.net

Well, my goal was to use Twitter without using it. Yes, having my cake and eating it too :)

What is the logic behind coloring the text in readability view?

To make it easier to read. Jumping from one line to another is where we lose which line we were on.

See https://github.com/corollari/waspline-reader for more details

Interesting, did you follow Twitter's recent acquisition of Scroll? They might be moving into this space themselves.

Nuzzel reincarnated?. I was a heavy user of it and really miss it.

Site appears to be losing the battle with the Hug Of Death...

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