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Ask HN: How many websites, apps or notifications do you look at to “catch-up”?

70 points| asim | 2 years ago | reply

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?

102 comments

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[+] prepend|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ttul|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] lddemi|2 years ago|reply
Definitely recommend using Apollo with a little tuning for Reddit on mobile. Clean and clear of all their growth experiments
[+] orev|2 years ago|reply
Why do you need a replacement for Feedly? I’m posting this comment from it right now.
[+] acidburnNSA|2 years ago|reply
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/

[+] spronket_news|2 years ago|reply
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

[+] ROTMetro|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] LonelyWolfe|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] Brajeshwar|2 years ago|reply
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...

[+] zorr|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] Brajeshwar|2 years ago|reply
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

[+] ttul|2 years ago|reply
You are a productivity god.
[+] ttul|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] bunabhucan|2 years ago|reply
>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."

[+] _boffin_|2 years ago|reply
What processes are you automating?
[+] bilekas|2 years ago|reply
> 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?

[+] spronket_news|2 years ago|reply
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)

[+] barakplasma|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] sogen|2 years ago|reply
How does the Kindle to RSS service work?
[+] rcarmo|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] stiiv|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] turkeygizzard|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] lordnacho|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] Semonto|2 years ago|reply
What?

Awesome loving that.

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

[+] mrleinad|2 years ago|reply
Care to share the script code?
[+] bookofjoe|2 years ago|reply
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

[+] bennyp101|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] thdc|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] npilk|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jerrygoyal|2 years ago|reply
daily is a bit too much for me.. any way to get email on weekly basis
[+] subpixel|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] hasbot|2 years ago|reply
Really just two: /r/politics and /r/news.
[+] nickthegreek|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] nicwolff|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ElevenLathe|2 years ago|reply
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.

[+] pinguin3|2 years ago|reply
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.