Show HN: Webletters – discover and review blogs and newsletters

by kftlife • 5 years ago

8 5 5 years ago

kftlife2• 5 years ago

Hi HN!

We started Webletters to solve a problem: how do we find quality publishers and writers on the Internet?

We love to read. Sites like Hackernews are great for surfacing individual links and stories, but it's hard to find consistently awesome sources beyond word-of-mouth and what's currently popular. Ratings and reviews are our solution: by aggregating comments in one place, we have a more reliable signal on which bloggers and writers are worth following.

At Webletters, we're compiling online newsletters and blogs so that you can review, share, and discover your favorites. The quality of our database is driven by the users. Please contribute your favorites, and write them a review!

We would love your feedback!

jujodi• 5 years ago

I think there should be two ways to submit

1. Don't sign up, submission has to be reviewed 2. Sign up, submission doesn't have to be reviewed

michael_vo2• 5 years ago

Good luck. I wanted the same product when I was searching for newsletters and podcasts to subscribe to. I built a similar POC but never could find the hook that would get me to use the site daily/consistently. Commenting and social integration is an interesting way to get people to keep using the site.

I ended up with a fresh email inbox with 100s of newsletters and realized that it becomes a lot of junk. Only some of the daily articles are topically interesting to me and it becomes a game of subscribing and unsubscribing.

I think what I really want is to have individual articles rated and to only have those surface for me.

Another idea I had was to store every newsletter (which is usually just text and images) and then ppl can turn on a faucet to add/delete newsletters to their feed (fb style).

kftlife2• 5 years ago

Hey, thanks so much for the feedback!

We're also trying to find the "hook" that would make such a site more useful to newsletter readers.

For individual articles, do you find sites like Hacker News or Reddit good for that purpose? I think there are certain authors whose writing is consistently good, and those are the ones we're trying to identify -- curious what you think.

michael_vo2• 5 years ago

Hacker news is a biased crowdsourced recommendation system for individual articles. It skews towards the interests of a programmer from the bay area. There's probably 5 articles a day I enjoy reading from hacker news. There's a lot of misses too - how often do we click on a hacker news link and instantly close it?

I looked into scraping substack to find individual writers and highly rated ones (through subscriber counts). There's some good writers like Heated by Emily Atkin. Though - do I want to read climate change articles all the time? I found that for some newsletters I lost interest after some time or some topics didn't interest me.

Reddit is also a crowdsourced recommendation system with its subreddits. I find some subreddits good like r/dataisbeautiful. I found this subreddit through a referral from a friend.

People use twitter to ask for good newsletters as well.

Show HN: Webletters – discover and review blogs and newsletters

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