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Ask HN: How many websites, apps or notifications do you look at to “catch-up”?
70 points by asim on April 27, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 102 comments
Hey

I tend to look at 5-7 different websites, apps or notifications like 10 times a day. It's email, WhatsApp, hackernews, twitter, news, RSS feed, etc etc. It's sort of non stop. I was curious if anyone else ends up in this daily checkin hell or if you've found a way to summarise it?




For me it’s:

-HN many times a day (probably too much to be healthy as it’s my default “I’ve got 60 seconds to spare”)

-Reddit used to be many times a day but since they turned off compact mode on mobile it’s maybe once a day using old.Reddit.com on my phone and really not like how I have to zoom to read stuff

-gmail as workflow for personal chores and work GitHub/GitLab, maybe 5 times a day

-discord once or twice a day to catch up with friends (this replaced old WhatsApp and Facebook messenger groups going back many years and there was a switch maybe 5 years when everyone stopped commenting on stuff publicly and moved to private rooms)

-I used to use reader and Feedly to bring everything into RSS but don’t have a replacement for it but have a lazy longing to recreate and test out different things. So I’m missing out on specific blogs and might check them every few weeks. I think this is a gap but things do come through to HN.


I appreciate that HN has extremely high quality moderation. There is virtually no garbage content. I don’t know how this magic is achieved, but I am grateful.


I appreciate this too. Comically, I used it for many years before finally signing up so I could get voting and saving and whatnot.

I think it’s become more precious to me as one of the few remnants of what really excited me about the internet many years ago and is my last active community as all the others have fallen away - slashdot, kuro5hin, plastic, netslaves, fuckedcompany, digg, fark, Reddit and probably a few others I forget.


there is, if you're in the new section like some of us


Well, there will always be garbage on any site, the most important thing is not to let nonsense be the main focus of the site. If good threads top the front page most of the time I consider it a win.


Yup, whats I'm saying is that's because there's a small community that does through new and upvotes good content


Definitely recommend using Apollo with a little tuning for Reddit on mobile. Clean and clear of all their growth experiments


I like Apollo but I ended up having to install the official reddit app because most times if you google something on Mobile, it just doesn't open Apollo and tries to install the official one :/


They have an extension now for that reason, you enable it and automatically opens in Apollo (iirc the catch is to make sure the allow option is set to the reddit domain, not leaving it on "ask"). No more dealing with the purposefully downgraded mobile web page or the official reddit app.


This problem can be solved using the Apollo Safari extension.

In the Apollo app, click Settings -> General -> Open Reddit Links in Apollo.


Thanks. I tried it, but really don’t want a lot of apps as my phone doesn’t have much storage. And I like having a shared bookmark list for web sites. I appreciate simplicity and one less app means one less update schedule, one less UI, etc etc.

Reddit is exactly why the web was invented so using an app just makes me feel a little sad when one of the big benefits of html was that you wouldn’t need custom clients for everything.


The big problem with Apollo is it's so good that it makes me spend way more time on reddit. I've installed and removed it many times. I happily paid for Ultra the day he started offering it because I appreciate the work that went into making it that smooth and useful.


Just be careful about paying for the (one time fee) Pro Apollo at this point. Reddit just changed their API terms and that app may stop working soon-ish without a monthly subscription.


Reddit is cracking down on 3rd party clients. The experience will be degraded later this year.


Feeder is an okay replacement for Feedly on Android, and it's opensource.

https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder


Why do you need a replacement for Feedly? I’m posting this comment from it right now.


I love RSS for this. I go to one RSS aggregator that I self-host (trivial, via FreshRSS [1]) that has subscriptions to things like:

Fun: comics, pictures, APOD, some hobby reddit threads (fun fact: reddit presents pretty much anything including search queries as RSS if you append .rss)

Journals: professional journals in my field

Local: Neighborhood blogs, local news, utility company blog, local police crime notes, weather blogs, etc. (all have RSS feeds)

Industry: industry news from various podcasts, institutional blogs, regulator blogs, other subreddits reddits

Global news: RSS feeds from my local big city newspaper

Software news: Cloudflare status reports, release note blogs from my favorite softwares

Work: rss feeds from github on some work repos.

Then I come to HN and Twitter directly as well... (shame)

[1] https://www.freshrss.org/


I built a thing that splices HackerNews into an RSS Reader so you can see it all in the same place.

What's neat is it ingests the points from HackerNews, so you can splice the feeds together in a way that preserves the ranking of both feeds.

website: www.spronket.com tutorial video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug4ZqLro0-o

lmk if you have any questions or feature requests


I spent a couple of months trying to find podcasts, but they all seem to consume way to much time for value provided. Can you recommend any high value podcasts that don't just ramble about this weeks business press releases? I don't even care what fields, I used to love just the general consumption of what is going on in the world that the (now) dead internet used to provide.


I really love this podcast: https://wherewegonext.com/episodes


Oxide and Friends is BY FAR the best tech podcast you could ever listen to. Look it up.


Out of curiosity... Does anyone use the rss reader in MS Outlook? I know MS is supposed to pack a lot of features to catch as much audience as possible, but are there enough people still using it to this day?


RSS in your email client is a bad idea IMO.

I used thunderbird like that a lot but everytime I needed to read or send an email for something productive I'd see that there's a new post somewhere and I'd check it.


It was actually a pretty decent thing if you set up a dedicated account (I used to maintain rss2mail and https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap).

I still have archived posts in MIME format, complete with images, etc. Amazing for archival purposes.

The tricky thing is actually dealing with title-only feeds - these days apps like Reeder will fetch a readable version of posts automatically, and I never got around to implementing that in earnest.


I used it for a few years to access rss feeds from non-public internet routable jira servers. It was pretty nice to monitor new issues across lots of projects.


Almost none except for few selected apps such as the Health App, and some pre-defined phone numbers (it does not even ring). I love to work in batches -- I do submissions to HackerNews like twice a day or more when I'm waiting for a meeting, webinar, etc. I run through WhatsApp/Messages as a daily chores at few intervals. RSS feeds are once a day or less. I'm still stuck with Twitter more often than I should but I see that I'm weening away from it too.

If you are still trying to "summarize" and consume more faster and better and be on top, personally I believe, you are on the wrong quest. There are too many advices on the Internet already but ask yourself the right question first. Once you have some clarify, the answers are pretty simple.

There will always be someone/something better, faster, prettier, cuter, bigger/nicer car, better/nicer/more house, spouse/partner - ask yourself where you want to stop and reduce to a very few tiny sets of focus.

I think I'm being cheesy and philosophical and I'm not good with it but I hope you get the gist of what where I'm trying to point.

I have stopped "Catching up" quite a while back, ever since I kinda started realizing that I don't have to be amongst the first to know. I wrote about it in 2014 and also have directed many a people who came to me asking -- https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...


No notifications aside from Signal, some Matrix channels of my OSS project and my work Teams.

All the rest including WhatsApp has notifications disabled. Phone is on DnD most of the time.

I occasionally check HN Frontpage,a local news website and a few selected subreddits and that's about it.


You will like this. ;-)

I made it to re-direct to people, some of whom, gets angry that I don't do unscheduled Voice calls.

https://phone.wtf


I have no idea why phones don't have a "subtle then loud" default mode ? If I'm here, lighting the screen is enough. If I'm at the kitchen, ring, ok... I had this a decade ago on some modded Android and never again..


You are a productivity god.


More like an ADHD-sufferer that barely gets anything done


Okay, this is embarrassing but I feel the need to contribute as a catharsis.

LEISURE TIME

1. WSJ: the OpEd section is neocon trash, but the journalistic content is well sourced, objective, and interesting.

2. NYTimes: probably the highest quality journalism in the English-speaking world.

3. Economist: slower news cycle, more deeply analytical and intellectual than WSJ or NYT.

4. Bloomberg: nice in-depth stories about things WSJ would not put on their front page. Good data journalism.

5. YouTube: Lex Fridman interviews, machine learning channels, Minecraft hardcore play throughs, and whatever else the algorithm brings me.

6. Podcasts: Economist Intelligence, CBC The World At Six, PBS News Hour, Bloomberg Odd Lots, NYT The Daily, This Week in Virology, Practical AI, Last Week in AI (this is new to me and good)

WORK

1. Slack: managing my team and also connecting with a couple of industry groups.

2. Email: it pours in all day. I have a lot of Gmail filters and some custom scripting to automate things.

3. I’m working on automating every manual process in my job as CEO, even though it’s painful. The investment will be worthwhile.


>OpEd section

Chomsky was asked about what to read and mentioned the financial papers as a great source of foreign news because you can't succeed in business with a fake version of reality. He called out the WSJ by name but said the opinion section was "the funnies."


What processes are you automating?


> I’m working on automating every manual process in my job as CEO, even though it’s painful. The investment will be worthwhile.

Not to be funny but aren't you supposed to delegate what you don't need to be spending time doing as CEO?


Yeah that’s the classic assumption but the reality is Human Resources are expensive and as a tech CEO you really can automate a lot of stuff that perhaps a non-tech CEO would have to delegate to a person. It’s a hidden advantage (curse?) I suppose.


www.spronket.com/sharedConfig?shared-config=29270980

heh heh heh

(I added most of these into a feed reader and it works pretty well, although it didn't have time to grab all the podcasts)


I cram everything that has an RSS feed into https://kindle4rss.com/ where I can read the feeds daily as an ebook on my kindle (including HN Best). WhatsApp / Telegram cover my "real-time" needs. Most important for me is to have digital wellbeing limits configured for social media.

Recently stumbled upon https://github.com/piqoni/matcha which is a Go RSS reader with a GPT-3 option for summarizing certain RSS feeds.


How does the Kindle to RSS service work?


it's actually RSS to kindle epub, where each feed/folder becomes it's own chapter, and a cron job bundles it up into a daily auto-delivery.


Thanks, did some digging myself and just found Calibre too can retrieve and send them as epubs, but this service might be better since it doesn't need to have my computer turned on.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events, GitHub notifications, Stack Overflow and HN.


What you are looking for is called RSS. It is a magical technology of days long gone by, heralded as lost after Ganon^WGoogle killed Reader but which has lived on unnoticed.

Seriously now, I read HN via RSS. I used to get some Twitter stuff via RSS, but now just moved to Mastodon, tagged everyone I care about in a list, and trivially generated an RSS feed out of that.

I have _long_ been looking for a way to summarize trending topics (and ChatGPT ain’t it, since it gets confused with a few hundred items), but right now I just check my feeds once a day (or so) and rely on iOS notification summaries (three a day) to keep tabs on personal chatter.

If you’re overwhelmed by notifications and multiple sites, you’re paying attention to too much noise. Just cut down and move on.


Twice a day:

- HN for what's interesting - Reuters (domestic) for what's news - Email for what's personal

I very rarely post. I'm pretty happy with this info diet.


Via RSS, I visit this little aggregated news page: https://plaintruthpoems.com/rss/JDsNewsFeeds.php


Nice! I need to set something up like this.


Based on this website: https://feedcourt.bendonnelly.com/ GitHub repo here: https://github.com/bendybendy/feedcourt


I run GPT on a cronjob to summarize my twitter timeline for me. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it catches a lot


What are the mechanics of doing that? How do you tell it what page to open, how far to scroll, what exactly you want to hear about, and how do you plug that into the model and get a result?


I shared the code in a comment below (https://github.com/purpleladydragons/ai-sanity) but

- scraping is relatively dumb and straightforward. I use playwright to login and just scroll my timeline for the first 100 tweets. I run the thing every 3 hours right now, but definitely could tweak the number of tweets vs frequency

- I only care about AI tweets really on my timeline, so filtering to that is pretty straightforward just passing it to GPT

- I included the prompts in the link. Definitely far from perfect, but it works well enough. It does surprisingly suck sometimes, like I've noticed that it doesn't always pick up on tweets about LangchainAI despite AI being in the name etc


What?

Awesome loving that.

Will keep this workflow in mind when personal gpt models are out.


Care to share the script code?


Sure thing - but just FYI I really only care about AI tweets in my timeline, so YMMV if you want it to summarize your timeline in general. I tried a generic "summarize my timeline" approach before and it didn't work well. Filtering to within a certain topic seems to really help

https://github.com/purpleladydragons/ai-sanity


I look at the following sites once a day in this order:

Google News

Guardian

Wall Street Journal

Washington Post

New York Times

Charlottesville Daily Progress

Core77

SwissMiss

NEW SAVANNA https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/

Kottke

reddit interesting as fuck

I tweet about 10x/day but never look at my tweetstream of peeps I follow: it's write-only for me

I post to HN about 10x/day and look at the front page 3-5 times/day

I post YouTube videos (Shorts, almost always featuring my cat) about 5-10/day but never watch others' YouTube videos

I post to my blog 3-5 times/day (since 2004)

I check email (and reply promptly) 2-3x/day

I have no RSS feed

I have 0 notifications on any/all devices

I average an hour/day reading a dead tree version of a book


I have 4 main sites in Livemarks on my browser:

- BBC News

- Ars Tech

- HN

- (local newspaper for my area)

I don't really checkin - more just click on the dropdown to see if there is anything interesting randomly throughout the day.

My wife looks at a lot of news sites, so I figure she will fill me in on anything else - I have breaking news alerts on for BBC on my phone, but I've found recently it's more just standard news than "breaking"

The only notifications I have on for my phone are BBC breaking news and whatsapp. (And Teams during work hours). Everything else can wait until I want to look.


Same here, I may browse various places periodically in search of an interesting article/content but I don't aim to be informed of every current event.

I may research topics individually if I want to "catch-up" (learn) about something that someone else has brought to my attention.


Shameless plug: I built myself a little web app to send email summaries of top stories on Reddit, HN, and the latest from RSS feeds: www.bulletyn.co

I still go on Reddit and HN throughout the day, but it's cut down a bit since I have these digests to review at designated times (for me it's 7am and 3pm). It's made a big difference to convert 'active' scrolling with 'passive' review of something in my inbox with a finite amount of links.


daily is a bit too much for me.. any way to get email on weekly basis


I pay for YouTube, have subscriptions to things I care about, and aggressively reject bad recommendations.

It’s not perfect but a scan of YouTube catches me up.


Really just two: /r/politics and /r/news.


Why is this downvoted? You might not think these are good sources, but they are this person's valid answer to the Ask HN question. We shouldn't be using downvotes like that.


Potentially people reading it as trolling. It made me chuckle.


I read the print version of the NY Times (in digital replica form, on an iPod Touch three inches from my +8 myopic eye) before I'm even out of bed.

Daily political news each AM: Heather Cox Richardson (via Facebook) for historical context, and https://www.electoral-vote.com for tactical analysis.

And I'll scan my RSS feeds.

Once I get "to work" (I'm still mostly remote) if nothing's on fire I scan HN and open a bunch of tabs that I'll work through in idle moments during the day.

At or after lunch I'll check nytimes.com to see if anything really big happened in the real world.

Late in the day I'll usually check nymag.com for gossipy pop culture and local NYC news and reviews, and TV recaps.


For personal stuff, just Discord (one server with my hometown friends, another with friends from another city) and email (which in turn contains the latest stuff from various RSS feeds/podcasts via rss2email)."

Work is mostly the same except we use Slack instead of Discord. My work inbox is mostly useless with the number of internal lists I'm on, but I make an effort to scan that for stuff that I might actually need to read or respond to. Then I respond to any red pips in Slack -- I'm in enough channels and threads that I just have to leave most channels "white" most of the time, and the "Unreads" and the "Threads" views are mostly useless.


All of it is entertainment. Only email is serious, so I block everything during work hours. On dns level, router level and on app level, so it’s to much work to unblock. Then I usually decide to fet away from computer, because long hours sitting are bad for posture. While not perfect, it’s how we naturally deal with most of the world, we ignore it. Like how we only see 10% of what are our eyes see, at most. Some apps to install: self control (mac), leech block (ffox), etc. You can also decide computer is only for work, and block everything at so many levels it’s to much work to unblock.


For business it's: twitter(https://www.twitter.com), linkedin((https://www.linkedin.com), heap(https://www.heap.io/), and zigpoll (https://www.zigpoll.com/)

For life it's: HN, reddit, WSJ, NYTimes

It does help to pause the loop for as long as possible though. I think the frequency of checking increases linearly with anxiety.


this site is the biggest culprit for me. My friends even ask "But what is that orange-grey site you are always on?"


I am developing a smart RSS reader that ingests roughly 1000 articles a day and selects roughly 300 to show me. The current classification workhorse works on a miniLM embedding which is also used for clustering (unlike every other document clustering system i’ve seen, this one really works)

The performance of the classifier is limited by the fickleness of my judgements, I am thinking about making it into a bookmark manager, an image classifier, something that can sort through 5000 search results, and a workflow engine.


I have this exact problem! About a year ago I built https://fetcher.page which fetches updates for me every 10 minutes or so, filters the ones I've already seen, and then notifies me of new updates.

It's not perfect, but at least I thought reopen 5 websites like 50 times a day.

I rebranded it as a social listening platform a couple months ago, but one can still use it for its initial purpose. Let me know if you find this useful, can grant free access.


I have a Feedbin account to sync RSS between my devices. I use NetNewsWire to view those RSS feeds.

I have an RSS feed that captures hackernews posts that make it to the front page, a couple RSS feeds to some YouTube channels that I follow (I don't have a YouTube account) and an RSS feed to some specific niche subreddits.

Finally, I have a personal libreddit instance that I use to browse the "front page" of Reddit (without an account) to see if there's any news that I might have missed.


In my personal life...

I look at Inoreader to catch up on my RSS feeds during the week and I will star items I'd like to read more about later. If I'm lucky I get to look at the starred items once a week. Almost everything I'm interested in has an RSS feed. Hackernews goes into the feed reader as well.

I keep my personal email open and glance at it a few times a day to make sure there's nothing super important. I also clean up my email about once a week.


How do you manage Hacker News on your Inoreader feed?


https://hnrss.org/frontpage

This https://hnrss.github.io/ has more options if you don't just want front page stuff.


I've built a once a day news digest to try and eliminate some of the doom scrolling and non-stop attention seeking.

Other than that HN, Reddit, and recently Artifact. Though Artifact's algorithm encourages doom scrolling.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131


- HN

- Reddit via libreddit.nl

- But for the last few days it has been almost only Bluesky because it’s new and fresh

I don’t have notifications enabled, so just check whenever I feel like it, but without the goal to catch-up necessarily. That’s too much pressure for me, I become too anxious.

RSS feeds didn’t work for me, I tried multiple time over the past 15 years but find myself accumulating links without reading. It’s often too much of an effort, so I just ignore.


I have a "Daily" tab folder that I start my day with it. It contains HN / Bookface, several subreddits, and NYT, local news, and Ars Technica.

Over time, I started to remove subreddits that are no longer relevant to me (e.g. location I moved away from). Nowadays, typically spend 30 minutes or so reading news and discussions.


If HN's your problem, check out the noprocrast feature in your profile to force yourself to take a break.


Hello! I usually look at all my apps that have notifications turned on which Are usually

-Gmail, For work ofc -Youtube, Some Creators come out with videos daily -TikTok, Not usually but sometimes I will check on the app - And lastly i check on discord for any of my work colleagues trying to message me


- Hacker news probably once or twice a day

- Reddit probably once a day before going to bed (should kill it really)

- Whatsapp 2-3 times during work hours, turn notifications on after

- Slack / Email during work hours once every 30 minutes or so

- Deleted twitter the moment it got sold.. so that one is gone


Reducing my amount of doom scrolling, it's only these:

- HN Best, so it's only 2-3 new items a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35682630

- Kottke.org

- Daringfireball


I stuffed all the sites I was checking multiple times per day into progscrape.com. I try to avoid visiting the sites directly and prefer to refresh one site which avoids getting into the "thrill of the hunt" for new news.


Email and RSS. They don't produce any notifications.

WhatsApp creates silent notifications free of vibration and popups for chats with individuals. Nothing for group chats.

Social media apps (like Instagram and Twitter) have 5 min/day timers.


Surprised I haven't seen Techmeme in anyone's daily habits yet. I check the site multiple times a day to get caught up on relevant tech news. By far the most frequent website I visit.


Too many.

From the top of my head: HN, Twitter, imgur, LI, WhatsApp.

All via web, no apps, no notfications.

I tried blocking most of the sites via /etc/hosts but what is a sudo password against my FOMO...


1 app, no websites, ~100 notifications per day.

Self-hosted RSS Feed that broadcasts to my personal Telegram channel (MyNews). One and only source of "news" I consume.


Daily/several times a day: HN, Twitter, Reddit, text messages (various platforms)

Work days this includes Github, Slack, Asana.

Not daily but a few times a week: E-mail, RSS, Discord

Rarely: Voicemails


- HN a few times a day, just the first page

- I have a scraper that emails me new headlines regularly for subreddits and a handful of websites.


Early AM 1. Drudgereport (I like the format) 2. HN 3. WP, NYT, WSJ

RSS, HN throughout the day

Reddit is a distraction for me

I’ll lurk on Twitter later in the day, but not engage


HN, Twitter, sidebar.io, emergentmind.com or Ben's Bites. Trying to not spend too many hours catching up every day...


TIL way too many people here are relying on Reddit as a source for news and political discussion


Hacker News and four other folders via RSS amongst many I just browse whenever.


1. RSS reader. If they don't have RSS feed, I'll make one in PHP.


Reading (daily): Google News, HN, the Ground News blindspot feed. WSJ, NYT, various RSS on Feedly. Reading (occasional): Techmeme, Techdirt, Metafilter, Memeorandum. More RSS on Feedly.

Podcasts (Daily or as often as they come out, while exercising): NPR News Now, Risky Business, WSJ Minute Briefing, The Dallas Morning News, Cyber Security headlines, Politico Playbook, SANS Internet Stormcenter, AWS Morning Brief. Podcasts (Occasional): Economist Intelligence, Control Loop (OT cybersecurity), FT News Briefing, Ones and Tooze, lots of others on road trips.

YouTube is for entertainment.


- Reddit

- Discord (mostly a single server)

- a video game website

- a car website

- HN (weekdays)

- 3 emails (not including work)

Less common:

- Facebook/Messenger


probably going to get lost in the comments, but I built a website for this!

www.spronket.com


I had the same issue so I started using RSS reader. I really liked yarr(https://github.com/mzfr/yarr) so I started maintain a clone(with extra features) of the original.

I browse HN/lobste.rs, twitter lists, dev blogs, newspapers, everything via RSS feeds.


None. All disabled


Between 2 and 4.


Too many.


Telegram, to find the stories the mainstream media avoids until it's no longer avoidable. Basically gives me the news months in advance, without all the bs. Remember when all the mainstream media wrote it was safe and effective, made you immune, and prevented spread? The real experts were blocked and banned from most places but Telegram, so that's where they went. And only lately has the mainstream media started to write about it. Remember when all the mainstream media wrote that the war would last only a few weeks? Remember when they wrote Russia was losing? Remember when they wrote, and still write, that the economy is only seeing a temporary setback, and will bounce back, even though banks are crashing? Yeah, no thanks, I prefer the truth rather than propaganda.


> Remember when they wrote Russia was losing?

In what Telegram channel is Russia not losing?


That's the one topic you chose to pick from my list? Well, my point was simply that mainstream media, from more or less day one of the war, have written why Russia is close to losing the war. Yet they're still in Ukraine. We rarely, if ever, hear how Ukraine is losing the war, yet the premise is more or less the same.




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