Show HN: A better way to read blogs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A better way to read blogs

boredreading.com

103 pointskhet61 comments

Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie!

The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs.

My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this sustainability profitable. If this was yours, what bits would you charge for? Are there any features I could add to a "pro" subscription?

Appreciate any help and support!

Open articleView on HN

Show HN: A Google Reader-inspired RSS reader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35402979 - April 2023 (58 comments)

It's probably too soon for a follow-up Show HN unless there's something significantly different here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

I'd strongly suggest you demonstrate more value before you require auth. I looked at the front page and none of the 3 visible articles grabbed me. So I clicked on "blogs" to see if I found anything interesting there. That gave me the registration wall, so I bounced.

I'm sure that feels unfair given the work you've put in. But registration is a hassle that people don't go through unless they're expecting at least as much value or have built up a more significant relationship with the site. Especially these days, with endless popups asking for my email and registration walls, I'm strongly habituated to close the window when I see that.

In your case it looks like the marginal cost of serving more pages is very low, so I'd make as much as possible public and only require registration for features that need identity. I'd even try letting people vote on articles before registering, as for you that's valuable signal about article quality.

As to what I'd pay for, I'm already a NewsBlur subscriber, so I think there's a market for a personal front-end to blogs, the news, and the like. For me the valuable part is keeping track of the hundreds of niche authors I follow, plus knowing what I've read. The discovery component, which you've foregrounded here, isn't very valuable to me, but might make a nice freebie to draw people in.

The articles update every hour, so please check back again. The articles are from blogs that were deemed high quality, but even high quality blogs can churn out filler content. But in general, I think you'll always find one or two really interesting things to read at any given time, if not on the homepage, then on the blogs you follow.

> The articles update every hour, so please check back again.

Is that apparent to a user? You want ppl to stick around just a bit longer? Put a countdown clock to your master reset. Get it in their mind to come back and check again. Add just a touch of FOMO.

Similar thoughts here. I'm looking for AI-related reading, so I was really interested when I saw you have an #AI tag -- but when I clicked it, I got a registration wall, so I bounced.

I'd be happy to register if I used the service regularly, and to pay if it was really good, but asking me to register before I can even see if you have what I want -- a reliably good drip of AI news -- is a total turnoff.

It's funny, you (the user, and everyone else that commented about registering) say it's not worth your time registering, but if you look at it from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free, let alone pay for the service that cost months to build.

But you did and people don’t want to register. So do you want to iterate towards a model that works for you and your users? I think OC left really good feedback. I’ve been in your shoes before and I really can empathize with your situation deeply but I’d try to lose the defensiveness asap. It sucks when the model of the universe in your head gets dashed by reality at launch but I think not taking the feedback is a mistake.

I’d also challenge your line of reasoning about what constitutes a user for your service. I hear what you’re saying about ignoring bad (non-paying) users in the case of SaaS products etc. but this is literally a blogging aggregator without a network. Get the network going by reducing all the friction in the world and worry about the rest later. 6 man months is not a lot of time for a product. There’s a whole “free” internet just a click away.

The good news is it does seem like there is market for this and as OC pointed out there are ways to make iterations and improvements that could get people to sign up. Keep moving! Good luck!

The majority of users are not going to look at it from your perspective. The HN crowd is likely to be your highest intent audience, and your comment suggests they don't feel your product expresses enough of a value prop ahead of the registration wall. If you want this to grow organically, you're going to need to take a user-centered design perspective. It's not sufficient to say you yourself represent a user persona because you're biased by your desire to see a return on investment.

> it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free

Keep in mind that most products are not successful and thus, in theory, "not worth putting in all this effort".

The feedback from people saying that they bounced because of registration is a signal that you can choose to address or ignore. If _enough_ people bounce before they can see the value, then ignoring the signal means you're effectively giving up on this becoming viable. Another alternative, though, is to find more ways to demonstrate the value before registration is required to make sure you're not losing people too early in the sales funnel.

I feel like asking people to look at it from your perspective is not a great attitude in product management, which is more about figuring out the prospective customer's perspective and making sure you're offering something they want.

You know your work's worth, the users don't know yet. OP simply wants to know more about your product before willing to put in the time and effort for registering.

Whenever I share something that requires a login like reading a Twitter thread, my friends say they find the initial tweet interesting but they can't continue since they don't have/don't want to make an account. It adds friction with finding utility in a site. They need to be really motivated to continue using the website. Counterexample is TikTok: anyone can see a TikTok, no login required.

As another example, I was interested in Matter/Readwise reader apps. Matter has a very limited freemium version, Readwise doesn't. I tried Matter, I liked it, gave them my money. Maybe Readwise is better, who knows, but I didn't even give it a chance since I wasn't able to check if it's going to be useful for me.

Maybe I'm a cheapskate so I don't want to "screw" myself with paying for a month of Readwise and checking what it offers or maybe the freemium model really works better.

Registering is free though. People use their email to signup for newsletters all the time. So I feel like it's a fair ask to signup to read some really high quality curated articles with an unparalleled reading experience.

Yes, but a user has no inkling that they will have to sign up to keep reading. It feels dishonest and they pull a 'revenge-bail'. You don't get to decide if the articles are high quality or unparalleled reading experience -- let them make that determination.

I feel that in HN crowd it may be easier from registered to paying than from unregistered to registered. You know, tech privacy-aware crowd.

I also bounced after getting signup clicking #programming FYI.

Either make those 3-5 categories free or make them with like 24h refresh because so far I saw that your page has 5 not interesting articles and wants me to create an account.

This is too little to give you my precious email address or apple throwaway mailinator email.

From my perspective I still have a backlog of 200 items in my rss reader for today. It would be better for you to show slightly more value of what your product gives us. As from the comments it seems that it was interesting for a lot of people to at least try and open the page!

OK, but how do I know I'm getting "really high quality curated articles with an unparalleled reading experience"? I can't see what I'd be getting unless I sign up, hence the issue.

> Registering is free though.

In money, not in time.

> So I feel like it's a fair ask

You do. But a lot of the people you'd like to sign up don't. You can argue all you like here, but it's not going to change many minds. And it certainly won't change the mind of anybody who just sees your home page and bounces.

So given that you're not going to win the argument, what's your next step?

> Registering is free though.

Sure, but that's not the only thing that makes registration a high-friction event. For instance, any time I register for something, free or not, I am also aware that I'm probably getting my name on a marketing list (and probably sold to other lists) as well. So I'm not registering for anything unless there's already a very well-established value exchange for it.

You’re the one who is trying to grab user’s attention, not the other way around.

It is not the user's fault that the user experience you built was bad.

This part of your answer is suspicious:

> from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free

How does free registration benefit you? It's just more cost for you (time to deal with problems, money to store the login information, and additional load on your server). The only way your statement makes sense - and the only reason you'd care that much - is if you're planning to monetize the information.

Good luck, but it's too shady for me.

after enough times of trying to read something that came up on google or somewhere similar, being forced to create an account to read it, handing over my personal information, going back to try and read the article with an account, being told that i now have to download an app or pay a monthly subscription to read the article, then having to figure out how to delete the account that i didn't want to make, yeah, i'm not registering for shit anymore unless it's something i already use or have some kind of relationship with, or it's something special and i can tell it's going to provide more value to me than i provide to it.

the mainstream web is unfortunately a cesspit mostly made up of predatory sites that provide a barely useful service which is easy to live without, which only exist as a way to hoard peoples data or lock them into subscriptions in the hope that they'll forget they're paying it. if your site is different and you want people to actually care, you'll need to show them.

You are getting really good answers to that position. Hope you notice them.

For mine: the registration wall is the same as thousands of others which I dismiss just the same - because if I'm asked to register this early it's because my registration is the product - and not the alleged value that is used to scam me in. And that's from someone who has worked on plenty of marketing efforts. The request for registration is not a signal of quality. The content offered before that registration would be - and there isn't much of that. Your site may be high value and totally deserving of registration but the bar for my registration is much higher than that.

If you would like to have a successful startup, you really need to learn that you can't make it about your feelings.

Take a look at the B2C funnel here: https://www.alleywatch.com/2017/06/funnels-startups-primer/

That's not quite the right one for you, in that you have a freemium product where you could have a tier of unregistered users like Reddit does, but you get the idea.

The only users who are going to produce the sort of profits that you are hoping for with your months of work are going to go through a variety of stages. Unless you're running this like an influencer or an NPR pledge drive or something, none of those stages will involve them looking at it from your perspective. They're going to look at personal cost/benefit ratios for each step. Which, I'll remind you, is something you surely do for almost every purchase you make.

You can indulge your feelings of resentment here that "everyone else that commented about registering" aren't sufficiently respectful of your efforts. But given that you didn't show any respect for my effort in giving you free advice, you might be able to imagine how long you'll have to wait for people to come around on that. Or you could focus on meeting your users where they are and maximizing flow through your funnel.

It's up to you.

Especially true when you consider the website is called “bored reading”. Having to register for a service is even less appealing when you’re bored.

If you scroll aaall the way to the bottom there's a tiny link to https://boredreading.com/what-is/ that's really easy to miss. That mentions the ability to create your own personalized reading lists, which, in my mind, is the killer feature that compels signup.

But the lede is definitely buried. I'd suggest placing this at the top

edit: never mind, it's in the navbar also, I just missed it

I like the design of this site! The icons and typography are especially cool! There is a neat idea in here. I already use an RSS social reader (https://monocle.p3k.io/), but I can see this being a cool firehose to skim that I can curate. Do you offer RSS feeds of feeds on the site?

I would love if there was a "simple mode" that let you only see the titles, just like the HN homepage. There is a lot of information on the feed pages and I find it a bit overwhelming.

Also, it would be great if I didn't need an account to see the blogs, curators, and popular pages.

I wonder where you're getting all of the blogs from, whether it's just user suggestions or lots of personal favorites. Sounds like a bit of work but I'm glad that people are trying to do that sort of thing and helping others discover more articles!

I built the Hacker News Personal Blogs site a while ago, after people shared their blogs in an Ask HN post and then someone compiled those into an OPML file on GitHub (those that had Atom/RSS feeds): https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ The List Of Blogs page might be relevant to discover a few more blogs to add, if anything catches your eye. That site of mine is pretty basic and I just threw it together in a day or two because it felt possible, but I hope that your site actually goes somewhere in comparison!

Also, embedding the blogs inside of iframes is pretty cool, I wonder how common people preventing that with X-Frame-Options or frame-ancestors is. It was actually interesting to see posts from Substack and other sites being captured as screenshots instead, as a workaround.

This is neat, thanks. I was looking at your HN OPML file on GitHub [0] and noticed that the `xmlURL` and `htmlURL` attributes are the same for each entry; the `htmlURL` currently points to the feed rather than the site. Do you happen to have the original HTML URLs available? Would be nice to have both.

(Secondarily, I'm guessing some of the `type` attributes should probably be "atom" rather than "rss"?)

[0] https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob...

> I was looking at your HN OPML file on GitHub [0] and noticed that the `xmlURL` and `htmlURL` attributes are the same for each entry; the `htmlURL` currently points to the feed rather than the site. Do you happen to have the original HTML URLs available? Would be nice to have both. (Secondarily, I'm guessing some of the `type` attributes should probably be "atom" rather than "rss"?)

I'm just using the file that someone else made, but I guess they didn't really make the distinction between those URLs in the code, though it shouldn't be too hard to modify: https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob...

It is also true that there are both RSS, Atom and possibly other feed types mixed in there. What I did for my site was to crawl through all of those feeds and process them one by one: get all of the posts, do some ordering and grouping and output everything as RSS feeds in a consistent format.

For example, here's the top 100 user feeds for 2023: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/feed-top100.xml

Those have HTML links for each of the posts, though I'm afraid it's not exactly what you're asking for (the HTML URLs for the sites/feeds themselves), because I don't actually store that anywhere in my case, though the original feeds of the sites should have that information too.

Looks really nice, but asking me for an account after I click on a category is a huge turn off. Why do I need an account?

I also think this looks very nice. But I 100% agree, it's off-putting to ask for an account to view something that is clearly already filterable without personalization. It makes it difficult to browse and decide if I want an account. (Imagine if Reddit only let you view the front page without an account. I'd never have touched it!)

Your email for verifying email address fails on Fastmail's spam rules:

   X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0
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     RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001,
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Clicking the link the first time gave me a default nginx:

   502 Bad Gateway
   nginx/1.22.0 (Ubuntu)

The link worked the second time.

Interesting, but almost every click on the site requires an account (with an email). I would love to be able to assess it a bit more before creating an account.

Reading the posts doesn't require an account. Seems fair that other functionality (voting, reading list, custom blogs, etc.) would require an account.

Edit: I got an account. The "blogs" page is a mix of blogs you follow and default blogs. I guess that shouldn't really need an account to see the default blogs.

1. Donations 2. Sponsors for the topics. Mark those articles as Sponsored. Let companies only to post sponsored content. And promote them. Obviously you have to limit that seriously to make sure it is not going to take the whole feed.

I really love how it looks, and congrats on getting it live.

Immediate feedback:

- a page, obviously linked from a banner / menu which describes what this thing is, how it works and who it is for. It may be obvious(ish) to HN but don’t assume anyone else will know what you’re trying to do - more images. - some way of marking stuff read, otherwise you always get the same list - the “in app” reading is interesting, I don’t know how this affects any traffic to included links? You may run into friction if all the reading happens here on your app?

Very cool! Also the first time I've come across https://maxbittker.github.io/broider/ being used in the wild (for the border effect of the navbar).

This was previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553190 for anyone interested

Based on feedback here, sounds like you hit on something. I’d keep it free and open as long as possible to see if you can build up usage. This has no value until it does, so you’re locking people out too early with the required regulation stuff.

I'm not sure why, but the patterned background is making the text more difficult for me to focus on or read - I'd like to try this out but I'm struggling to even get through a sentence. Otherwise the design aesthetic is nice!

Really cool, can anyone contribute articles? I made a site recently focused on social bookmarking. https://huntergather.website/

The idea of social bookmarking is really cool. Thank you for sharing.

This looks great! I'll make sure to check it out regularly. It brings back memories of old Reddit, and like the old Reddit, it could really benefit from a mobile-friendly design. I'd love to be part of creating that!

Hmm, the background is way too distracting.

This is just the kind of thing I've been looking for! Between techemails, Researchgate, and tons of random compilations of people's own blogs; I've really been looking for something that empowers a distribution of people's best-found blog articles. Will be adding this to my Daily Firefox startup window, and contribute when I can - thanks for sharing!

This is really nice, I thought about doing something precisely like this, I'm guessing your are taking advantage of RSS?

It's like reddit but without comments?

Adding another data point here from someone who clicked away after hitting the registration wall. Free or not, it's just not something I want to do before getting a solid sense of the product's value. Let me explore your work for a while and then decide to sign up on my own.

Break up the vertical flow with some sort of visual anchors -- else it all becomes a blur for what's a too-long list. That's your chance at this stage to educate/sell to your user: tell them what the heck this site is.

Seems cool! I saved a link that looked interesting to me and bookmarked the top-level "About" page so I can spend some more time browsing around sometime soon.

Thanks for making something focused on reading & the small web. :)

So how are you embedding websites without an iframe? I'm guessing your acting as a proxy? How do you know not to proxy say amazon.com? whitelist? I see on some sites are screenshots.

Your background interacts poorly with Dark Reader. I know you're not to blame for that, but I'd imagine some number of your potential user base would be put off on that initially.

Well I went to the trouble of registering after clicking Discover only to find that there is no search function, no way of filtering other than a predefined set of "hash tags".

This looks great! How do blogs get into the "blogs" tab? I see the "suggest a blog" link... are they all hand-curated from there?

Yeah

FYI: Don't forget to try the keyboard shortcuts!

Nice! Reminds me of a very early version of Slashdot.

Nice. This reminds me of Digg, when it became popular. There were too many of them after Digg's success.

That's a nice way to bring attention to the many interesting blogs that exist.

Are you stealing peoples content or are the articles submitted to you?

Looks clean and nice. I really like the UI

Love the integrated reader, that is something Tildes and YOShInOn are really missing.

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