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"social feed" stuff on yakread
# forum
j
I've been kicking around some ideas for replicating the twitter/mastodon type of experience on yakread. (improving on yakread's current twitter/mastodon integrations.) This is an evolution of the ideas in https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/. - yakread could check the newsletters you subscribe to to see if they contain any links to twitter accounts/mastodon accounts/etc, and try to infer somehow which of those accounts are owned by the newsletter writer - yakread could basically auto-subscribe you to any social media accounts that are owned by people whose newsletters you already subscribe to. if I subscribe to your newsletter with yakread, then I automatically get your tweets too. - maybe social posts should live in a dedicated tab, so the tabs could be e.g. "Curated", "Social", "Recent", "Discover." Instead of the current method of creating "recent posts on Twitter" posts and interleaving them in your Curated feed. Realistically I don't think most newsletters actually have links to their owners' twitter or mastodon accounts, let alone their reddit or HN accounts. It might be more interesting to also make some kind of similar, publisher-facing set of features: - yakread lets you connect your social accounts (which it already does, at least for twitter and mastodon) - yakread aggregates all your social posts into a twitter-esque profile page, where each post links to the external platform on which it was originally posted. - that profile page includes an email signup form. anyone who subscribes gets signed up for yakread + you/your newsletter. The daily emails include a section for social posts (and you can click through to read more) - you get access to the emails of anyone who subscribes to you. the subscribe form would be clear that you're subscribing to the person's social posts and their newsletter if they have one, so e.g. if you write on substack, you can import the emails to your list manually. similar to 1-click subs on the sample
- the profile page could be backed by an RSS feed, and you can attach your own domain. even if you don't use a custom domain, yakread could let you set up a redirect if you want to move to some other social-post-aggregator
Taking a step back: whether or not this would be worth doing at all is related to #1087765472839221349. If lots-of-short-form-posts-that-spread-virally is the way it has to be, then maybe something like this would be worth doing. However I would like it a lot if discovery could happen without forcing writers (me, specifically) to leave the newsletter/blog post form factor. I suppose it just comes down to "what tools does your target audience use to read/consume content, and how does discovery work with those tools." If everyone used yakread and similar algorithmically-driven reading apps, I guess it does seem unnecessary to have short-form post stuff just for discovery. When people read/like/subscribe to stuff, that gives signal to the algorithm(s) and should be good enough. Maybe short-form posts are more necessary when you have a non-algorithmic system. People need a low-friction way to share stuff. If liking a post/your other implicit signals like simply clicking on and reading the post aren't getting picked up by an algorithm, then the next easiest way to share something is to have some kind of short-form-post system where you can share a link really easily and have it possibly get spread through the network. in summary: this feels unnecessary for yakread. If people are already using yakread, then we can leave discussion to small, separate, unaggregated groups and not try to use those discussion groups to drive discovery. the algorithm's good enough. And on the publisher side... I mean, if you're already getting someone to put in their email address to subscribe, then mission accomplished; just have them sign up to your newsletter
(yakread is "youtube for reading")
in regard to the 99%+ of the population that isn't using yakread, I wonder about how helpful it would be to try to engage with short-form-post systems, or if sticking within the newsletter ecosystem is good enough. e.g. a thought exercise--if I decided that I wanted to try to get my ideas out there more without just relying on yakread users getting introduced to TFOS: what would I do? Twitter definitely isn't looking like a great time investment. Honestly I guess in my case, Hacker News is probably the place that has the most overlap with my target audience, so perhaps writing posts with HN in mind would be the way to go. Substack Notes is interesting in this regard because unlike twitter or mastodon, it's a short-form-posts system centered around newsletters. Substack users are newsletter people, and on top of that I'm sure the UI will be designed to drive newsletter subs. It honestly sounds pretty appealing! For me specifically, focusing on HN would probably still be a better use of time, but for a lot of other newsletter writers, Substack Notes might be really awesome. even if you don't want to host your newsletter on substack, you can just move your subs over to some other platform
This way of thinking--"where is your audience"--makes the idea of having a critical mass of yakread users appealing from the writer's perspective. I like the idea of being able to say "my target audience uses yakread (or similar algorithmic reading apps), so I'll just focus on writing good stuff, and maybe drop in an ad or two to kickstart it"
of course there's the danger that you have to focus on shallow things in order to please the algorithm (like youtubers making funny faces on their thumbnails), but that's how it already works on HN, Twitter, etc. I think Yakread would be an improvement even if it isn't perfect in terms of letting people focus on just writing good stuff. especially if there's a handful of algorithmic reading apps, so there isn't one dominant algorithm whose quirks you have to learn (we discussed this somewhere else on this forum...)
random semi-related thought: it's interesting that as much as people are all argh-argh-argh about algorithmic amplification on twitter and facebook, those platforms are/were primarily social-network driven, with the algorithm bolted on afterward. not like youtube or tiktok where the algorithm is the central thing. I wonder if problems around content moderation are actually the worst in that situation, where you have a hybrid social network + algorithmically driven system. With a pure algorithmic system maybe it's easier to shape the system without worrying about stepping on people's toes. This post intentionally left vague; I haven't finished thinking through it.
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