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!<p>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.<p>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?<p>Appreciate any help and support!
Related:<p><i>Show HN: A Google Reader-inspired RSS reader</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35402979">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35402979</a> - April 2023 (58 comments)<p>It's probably too soon for a follow-up Show HN unless there's something significantly different here - see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html</a>.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 (<a href="https://monocle.p3k.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://monocle.p3k.io/</a>), 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?<p>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.<p>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!<p>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): <a href="https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/</a> 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!<p>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.
Your email for verifying email address fails on Fastmail's spam rules:<p><pre><code> X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0
X-Spam-known-sender: no ("Email failed DMARC policy for domain")
X-Spam-sender-reputation: 500 (none)
X-Spam-score: 5.2
X-Spam-hits: BAYES_20 -0.001, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.249, ME_HAS_VSSU 0.001,
ME_QUARANTINE 5, ME_SC_NH -0.001, ME_SENDERREP_NEUTRAL 0.001,
RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001,
UNPARSEABLE_RELAY 0.001, LANGUAGES unknown, BAYES_USED user,
SA_VERSION 3.4.6
X-Spam-source: IP='143.55.232.5', Host='pc232-5.mailgun.net', Country='US',
FromHeader='biz', MailFrom='org'
X-Spam-charsets: plain='utf-8'
</code></pre>
Clicking the link the first time gave me a default nginx:<p><pre><code> 502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.22.0 (Ubuntu)
</code></pre>
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.
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.<p>Immediate feedback:<p>- 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 <a href="https://maxbittker.github.io/broider/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://maxbittker.github.io/broider/</a> being used in the wild (for the border effect of the navbar).<p>This was previously discussed in <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553190">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553190</a> 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. <a href="https://huntergather.website/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://huntergather.website/</a>
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!
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!
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.<p>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".