https://tfos.co logo
Powered by
What if I rebuilt Yakread as a Hacker News client?
# forum
j
As I've been pondering #1095430452145299517 more deeply, I'm wondering: instead of just tweaking a few parts of yakread to make it amenable to hacker news users, what would it look like if I reimagined yakread from the ground up for that use case? Reiterating the background: this is interesting to me because the marketing channel I was banking on--paid newsletter ads--I think won't actually work for me, at least not yet. Hacker News as a primary marketing channel I think could work though (especially since unlike e.g. twitter, I'm actually pretty good at writing content for hacker news). I'm thinking about this also because the latest article I posted to hacker news actually got a handful of upvotes and resulted in 5-10 signups for yakread (https://tfos.co/p/rss-is-great-for-recommendations/, not exactly a high-effort post either). So HN's just on my mind. So I'm imagining a funnel that goes something like this (off the cuff, I'm coming up with the details as I write): 1. I write posts like the one linked above: catchy title (basically just make sure title includes "RSS"), topic is some interesting TFOS-related thing that's relevant to yakread, and there's a link to yakread after a few paragraphs. 2. people on HN read the article and click through to Yakread's landing page. 3. immediately on hitting the landing page, you get a feed of articles from HN. no need to sign in. 4. some features are gated behind account creation. 5. after user creates account, then they get the daily digest email, and maybe I focus more on paid subs and try to upsell people to that (sort of have a feeling that might be more effective with the HN crowd than ads, unless writers are interested in paying for RSS subscribers... I would wouldn't be, personally.) If this worked, I'd run with it for a while and eventually expand it to once again be marketed as more of a standalone thing rather than just a client for HN.
As for what the app might look like, some thoughts: The feed has the same basic structure as yakread's feed currently: you scroll till you see an article you want to read, you click, the article is displayed within yakread. At the bottom of the article there's a subscribe button (if the article has an RSS feed), and a comments button (which takes you to HN... or maybe it loads the comment threads inside yakread, but you go to HN if you want to write a comment) There's still some kind of ranking algorithm that learns from your reading history. No need for curated/recent/discover feeds--there's just one main feed. RSS feeds that you subscribe to get mixed into your main feed, as they do currently with the curated feed. There's a "Comments" tab that has a chronological feed of comments on articles you've submitted and replies to your comments. Maybe you can add domains that you want to watch, so if someone else submits an article from your website then the comments show up in your comments feed. (For this to work you have to put in your HN username) (^this comments thing would be extremely handy since the comment monitoring experience on plain HN sucks)
Differentiation from using plain HN: - it's geared to make you actually read the articles instead of just reading the comments (the latter is more tempting but makes you feel like you're wasting your time if you do it regularly) - it's personalized. shows you more long-tail stuff that didn't hit the front page and adapts to your interests - as mentioned above, has a comment notification/monitoring setup that isn't terrible i.e. this is stuff that might be good to mention on the landing page (if there even is a landing page? maybe there doesn't need to be much explanation if you just get dropped into the app immediately. maybe there's just an info box at the top or something that you can click off.)
On the term "rebuilt": none of the current stuff would go away, that'd be dumb. I'd just have a flag on the user account that says if you came from the HN-focused landing page, and if so it'd show you the HN-version of the app. A lot of the backend stuff (like RSS syncing) would be the same. On the other hand: maybe this should just be a new app 🤷
HN clients aren't a new concept; there's some listed here: https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154643 which I think is a good sign because it's a proven thing that people are definitely interested in. would be worth looking through some of those perhaps.
l
It does kinda sound like a new app, but I can understand wanting to not duplicate your own effort or split your time. Does sound like a good way to get back into reading HN again for me 😶
I am/was a huge fan of Octal on iOS, but UX-wise it wasn’t anything terribly special (or something a nice PWA couldn’t replicate). Yakread’s ability to aggregate other content would win me over pretty much instantly.
j
👌 keeping it as part of yakread probably would be best. I personally wouldn't use it as my main reading app unless it worked with all my other rss + newsletter subscriptions and pocket bookmarks anyway...
l
Yeah. For me at least, HN is a decent platform for discovery, but I’m 100% agreeing with feeling like I wasted time reading comments. Engaging with long-form newsletters that I purposefully subscribed to + a handful of algorithmic recommendations has felt much healthier.
(and for whatever it’s worth, Yakread did hit its mission with me of being my first choice for killing time)
j
> (and for whatever it’s worth, Yakread did hit its mission with me of being my first choice for killing time) Same for me! I just need a more effective funnel for getting people into it... perhaps another reason to try to merge the HN experience into what yakread has now rather than making a totally-ish separate thing, even if it is in the same app. I'm mulling over what this HN thing looks like as a generalized, non-HN-specific experience... and I think it's basically the tiktok-for-reading thing (i.e. drop people into an algorithmic discover feed immediately) + a comment reply feed. the HN-focused discover feed would basically be a way to bootstrap until yakread's native discover feed is good enough to take over. The comment reply feed is interesting. I've got these integrations for twitter and mastodon already, but it never occurred to me to just use those as a way to aggregate replies to your posts. I could modify those integrations so they fit with the HN-comment-feed-model-thing. your comments feed would include replies and retweets for your tweets. Maybe no need to even worry about the current integration method of inserting tweets from people you follow into your timeline.
> Engaging with long-form newsletters that I purposefully subscribed to + a handful of algorithmic recommendations has felt much healthier. I forgot about this momentarily when I was thinking of the differentiators to plain HN above--perhaps one of the main differentiators is actually that as you read you accumulate your own subscriptions to the articles you liked, so the feed would become personalized even if there was no algorithm. honestly given that it might work out well enough to just... add an RSS feed for the HN front page to your subscriptions if you came from hacker news?
currently thinking about how essential or not the comments thing is
it might be handy for retention... e.g. there are a few dedicated services that email you whenever someone replies to one of your HN comments. (I've used them at times but stopped because I really needed a "mute this thread" option). With regard to HN specifically the comment thing would be very useful imo, especially for myself if I'm gonna start writing stuff for HN again. I'm not sure if there are any other services where it'd really be needed? most other things actually have functioning reply notification systems. The benefit of aggregating it all into a single feed in yakread is imo quite marginal. the domain monitoring thing could be useful more generally though. e.g. I use warble.co to get an email alert whenever someone posts a link to one of my sites/articles on twitter. I'm sure there's an equivalent service for reddit. see also google alerts. However I doubt a large fraction of people would need it. even for the core HN-comment-replies thing... there's that internet law thing (don't remember the name) that says only like 10% of people comment, everyone else just reads. Current feeling is that a separate comments feed is nonessential; better to just focus on the article feed
in a roundabout way I think the conclusion of all this is that perhaps the tik-tok-for-reading article was the right way to go all along--makes the onboarding funnel way more effective. maybe if I went ahead and did that, paid newsletter ads would actually become an effective channel and no need to do anything specific for HN. Either way, for whatever marketing channels I end up using, if I do tiktok-for-reading, then it would totally make sense to incorporate the user's traffic source into the initial feed. and if I happen to focus on HN, then that means taking articles from HN
ugh, just when I think I'm at the point where I can finally just get a job, I think of a new way to spend the next three months
happens every time
I think a big part of my hesitation to switch to the tiktok thing was just that it felt like expanding to a broad audience too quickly when it'd be better to niche down first--however if I don't actually have a cost-effective way to reach and onboard people in that niche, but I do for the broad audience... then, well, there ya go I guess
it's tiktok time
2 Views
PreviousNext
Powered by