While we were developing Reddit, we always used to run into people who’d recognize us and come up to say hi. “Oh, wow,” they’d say to us. “I can’t tell you how much your site has killed my productivity. I check it a hundred times every day.” At first, we just laughed these comments off. But after a while, I begun to find them increasingly disturbing. We’d set out to make something people want — but what if they didn’t want to want it?
Last year I actually dumped HN and reddit and instead read a weekly digest someone from the coding subreddit created[1]. It was very well curated. Unfortunately, he abandoned it after several weeks.
I am planning on writing up a "Tell HN" post tomorrow, but with the topic so close I figure I would mention it here. I'm working on a weekly newsletter that will allow users to quickly get the best articles on HN each week. I've been wanting to do something newsletter related and thought this would be a great chance plus after seeing Lim's Hacker Monthly I was sold that alternative formats work for the great content on HN.
Thanks for sharing that site. I was checking out the ten issues he published and they looked promising. I won't be relying 100% on just votes, as I think a lot of articles get skewed (which, by social nature, makes sense for HN), but maybe a happy middle ground compared to foldl.org so that I can keep it going.
I'm the guy from foldl. Thanks for your kind words. I do still want something like foldl, but I don't have time to create it - I got started because I wanted to read less, not more!
I don't think that you can produce a good newsletter/digest just relying on total up/downvotes. I hoped to find time to apply machine learning to the problem, but never have.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/everythinggood
While we were developing Reddit, we always used to run into people who’d recognize us and come up to say hi. “Oh, wow,” they’d say to us. “I can’t tell you how much your site has killed my productivity. I check it a hundred times every day.” At first, we just laughed these comments off. But after a while, I begun to find them increasingly disturbing. We’d set out to make something people want — but what if they didn’t want to want it?
Last year I actually dumped HN and reddit and instead read a weekly digest someone from the coding subreddit created[1]. It was very well curated. Unfortunately, he abandoned it after several weeks.
1: http://www.foldl.org/