yakread subscriptions page
# forumj
Jacob O'Bryant
04/06/2023, 1:04 AMI just released the initial version of a new subscriptions page. there's a list of all your newsletters and rss feeds, and a search bar for adding new rss feeds (powered by feedly). stuff I'm planning to add:
- feed recommendations with different categories ("tech", "politics" etc)
- link to instructions for forwarding newsletters from gmail
- unsubscribe button for newsletters + feeds (it's complicated because of newsletters)
- eventually: tags, so you can organize your subscriptions by topic. on the home page there'll be some sort of control to let you pick a tag, which will limit your feed to only subscriptions with that tag
Jacob O'Bryant
04/06/2023, 1:05 AMimportantly for the business metrics, once the recommendations are done I'll be adding the search + recommendations to the onboarding flow, so people can subscribe to stuff easily without leaving the app
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 12:03 AMNow the subs page has a bunch of manually curated recommendations too
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 12:08 AMA super nice thing about having this RSS-based search and recommendations thing in the onboarding flow: when new users subscribe to rss feeds, the past 10-ish items get put in their feed immediately. so if you subscribe to 5 feeds in the onboarding flow, you've already got like 50 articles that yakread can populate your feed with. with email, even if you subscribe to a bunch, you usually have to wait at least a few days to get the next email
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 12:08 AMso crossing my fingers that this + the new landing page will make the whole onboarding flow a lot more effective
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joerter
04/08/2023, 11:28 PMThis is awesome Jacob! Nice work. I just subscribed to some new tech newsletters
j
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 11:28 PM🎉
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 11:29 PMThere are a couple other smaller improvements too, e.g. better styling for RSS + bookmarked articles, since RSS is now a more important part of the app
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joerter
04/08/2023, 11:34 PMNice! Newsletter unsubscribe sounds hard. How do you do that?
j
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 11:36 PMsome newsletters, especially those from mature providers like substack or mailchimp, include a List-Unsubscribe header which can be used to auto-unsubscribe. It has some unique address that you send an email to or something.
For everything else I just gotta hide the emails based on the From address. So the user will still be subscribed in the sense that their email will be on the mailing list, but they won't see any of the emails
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 11:39 PMthat's probably desirable even for ones that include the List-Unsubscribe header so that previous emails don't stick around in the feed.
An additional annoyance there is that I probably need to expose that state in the UI somehow. e.g. if you unsubscribe to a newsletter but then re-subscribe, what happens? I guess for ones that have List-Unsubscribe we can assume if you get another email that you resubscribed. Maybe each individual email has some state that we modify at the time of unsubscribe. e.g. an "archived" flag.
Maybe for newsletters without List-Unsubscribe, it's better to just tell the user they have to unsubscribe manually. 🤷
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 11:40 PMSo yeah, not hard implementation-wise, but deciding on the UX is hard
Jacob O'Bryant
04/08/2023, 11:40 PMcertainly more hard than unsubscribing from RSS ha ha
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joerter
04/09/2023, 1:21 PMAh so for newsletters without the header you basically have a hidden email, right? That’s clever!
j
Jacob O'Bryant
04/09/2023, 2:00 PMyou mean like a unique address used for subscribing to that newsletter? if so: no, I just mean I'd hide emails sent to the user's regular address, if the sender's address is on the user's "unsubscribe list"/block list
(if that's what you meant, than yes, that's what I'm planning to do!)
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