Show HN: Don't forget useful Hacker News articles, retain by ReRead'ing later | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Don't forget useful Hacker News articles, retain by ReRead'ing later

rereadit.co

55 pointsavlok38 comments

A couple of years ago I built something similar, combining RSS, HN and Twitter streams into a single feed where I could save things for later. I thought it was useful so I added a way for it to learn my habits and reorganize items in my stream by importance.

All that effort to solve information overload, and you know what? I never went back to read the articles I saved for later. And the length of the list just kept growing. Filtering down to just the interesting stuff still left too much interesting stuff for me to make it through. Eventually I had to declare "saved item" bankruptcy and delete all the data.

What I leaned was: No amount of technology is going to fix my behavior towards information consumption. Only mindfulness and a change of habits can make a real difference. Without that, these tools just add to the information overload problem.

This functionality exists - Click the up-arrow to the left of the article, it will log it in saved-stories and you can reread it later. Added bonus is that you +1 the article so others know you found it worthwhile.

Its for more than Hacker News articles though

There's an internet beyond HN?

We did something similar (to help with memory retention) and using spaced repetition a while ago: http://memstash.co

Whenever I see websites like this, I always ask myself questions like "How much does it cost?" and "How does it make money?" and "Who's running this site?".

The fact that none of this information is shown scares the heck out of me. It's a shame - I like the concept.

Yeah, I should make that more clear. We built it for the Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon (and won a free trip to Paris as a result). It's on Heroku and I pay about $40/mo to keep the site up and running for people to use for free. SMS is currently disabled to keep costs low.

I built this for personal use & wanted to share for others to use. It's extremely cheap to maintain so I don't need to charge for it.

I guess "reading" would need to be defined here. Sometimes I look at the headline of an article and decide "this 'might' be useful later"....then I add to Pocket with some appropriate tags, with no immediate intention of reading.

EDIT: if it's an article with important enough information in it that I'll likely need. While I'm reading it, I'm usually taking notes in nvAlt that I can reference in the future in a way that's indexed/organized for me to find.

>Isn't this the same as bookmarking?

>No, because when you bookmark you have to remember to go back to your list of bookmarks to re-read the article

I have a folder on my bookmark bar titled "Articles". When I don't have time to read an interesting article I see, I add it to that folder. When I'm bored and can't find anything to read, I open that folder.

I'd argue that most people's pain point isn't lack of remembering they have articles saved to read.

It looks like the point of this web app is to encourage you to re-read articles, rather than read them for the first time.

Actually, that's exactly the problem that I have.

I don't have a habit of checking in on my Pocket account, so I often end up Pocketing things that I want to read later, forgetting about them altogether, and then finding them weeks after they're no longer relevant or useful.

I've got a "Other Bookmarks" folder on my Chrome Bookmarks bar that backs up what you're saying.

I always add things there to read later, and then I forget, and then I spend my time cleaning it out of crap that's no longer useful or relevant.

  > I often end up Pocketing things that I want to read later, 
  > forgetting about them altogether, and then finding them 
  > weeks after they're no longer relevant or useful.

Interesting. I seem to recall that the Getting Things Done time-management technique uses this very approach to help weed out unnecessary work (reading). The idea is that if the article is safely bookmarked, there's no longer any worry that we might loose track of something important yet (as you experienced) most of what gets bookmarked can be safely discarded without reading at all, saving time. So in the GTD context this "bug" is a "feature".

Pocket (which used to be called readitlater) is a superior option in my opinion http://getpocket.com/ it has a desktop app, ipad, iphone, android, chrome extension ... and integrates with a shitload of apps (Newsblur, feedly etc etc). It also very beautifully designed. I use it every day, and have done so since it was first released.

It seems this provides a slightly different service. It creates email reminders to remind you to go back to an article. I don't think Pocket has that functionality.

I agree. I just tag articles I throw in there, and when I need to reference something, I look for the appropriate article that I saved off.

Except one is a bookmarking service that allows you to tag, it and the other is a reminder service... rereadit.co talks about this on the front page. Bookmarks you have to remember to go back and read it. This notifies you even if you forget to go to the bookmark.

I use pocket as well and it's great for marking articles to read later. I built ReRead so I would be reminded (by email) of articles that I should read again at a later date

Love the idea. Love it so much that I bought the domain reread.co a while back with the intent to create something very similar!

Neat! I was just thinking of building something like this!! I'm eagerly awaiting the chrome extension. When I was thinking of doing this, I thought the extension should have tagging as a form of organizing things to read later. I was really thinking of it as bookmarking + reminders. Let me know if you need some help!

I created this to save important HN posts, which I define as link that made it to the top 3. You can access only the latest 20 entries though, but past links are in my postgres database :-). And there is RSS feed too. http://www.tophnnews.com

... I just open more tabs and leave them open until I deal with them. SessionBuddy helps if you're using chrome.

Besides, the next day you might find that the articles you wanted to read weren't as useful as you thought.

Finally, someone paying attention to this. Browser extension should be high priority!

Correct. Copy, New Tab, Paste, Add Email, ... Too many steps. However this is a start.

First thing I thought was a Chrome extension that you can click and it'll take the current tab url, and either popup a little window asking you when to remind, or you can set a default reminder time in the options.

Timecapsule.io (http://timecapsule.io/) works exactly like this. It was built for the exact same reason, although I think the purpose and problem was maybe worded a little more clearly here.

*disclaimer - I built timecapsule.io

I really want to check this out but... seriously? only signup with twitter?

I've added this to the list. Thanks for the feedback :)

I had a similar idea I called Readminder. It would be a mobile app with push notifications setup for the time you want to read that particular article, similar to the way Mailbox does it for email.

Why only URLs ? Replace it with a textfield (140 Chars) and it is a reminder for everything. Auto-Conntect with Calendersoftware would be nice too.

I second this. I have about 70 unread emails in my personal inbox. 64 of those are emails I sent to myself, text, urls, just subject lines, etc...

Great idea. Will add to the list :)

Wait, there are useful ones?

So its like instapaper or Apple's reading list with a timer?

What about dead URLs? Is there a cache option?

Good idea. I'll add to my list :)

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