Show HN: A better way to read blogs (opens in new tab)

> The articles update every hour, so please check back again.

Is that apparent to a user? You want ppl to stick around just a bit longer? Put a countdown clock to your master reset. Get it in their mind to come back and check again. Add just a touch of FOMO.

But you did and people don’t want to register. So do you want to iterate towards a model that works for you and your users? I think OC left really good feedback. I’ve been in your shoes before and I really can empathize with your situation deeply but I’d try to lose the defensiveness asap. It sucks when the model of the universe in your head gets dashed by reality at launch but I think not taking the feedback is a mistake.

I’d also challenge your line of reasoning about what constitutes a user for your service. I hear what you’re saying about ignoring bad (non-paying) users in the case of SaaS products etc. but this is literally a blogging aggregator without a network. Get the network going by reducing all the friction in the world and worry about the rest later. 6 man months is not a lot of time for a product. There’s a whole “free” internet just a click away.

The good news is it does seem like there is market for this and as OC pointed out there are ways to make iterations and improvements that could get people to sign up. Keep moving! Good luck!

> it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free

Keep in mind that most products are not successful and thus, in theory, "not worth putting in all this effort".

The feedback from people saying that they bounced because of registration is a signal that you can choose to address or ignore. If _enough_ people bounce before they can see the value, then ignoring the signal means you're effectively giving up on this becoming viable. Another alternative, though, is to find more ways to demonstrate the value before registration is required to make sure you're not losing people too early in the sales funnel.

I feel like asking people to look at it from your perspective is not a great attitude in product management, which is more about figuring out the prospective customer's perspective and making sure you're offering something they want.

Whenever I share something that requires a login like reading a Twitter thread, my friends say they find the initial tweet interesting but they can't continue since they don't have/don't want to make an account. It adds friction with finding utility in a site. They need to be really motivated to continue using the website. Counterexample is TikTok: anyone can see a TikTok, no login required.

As another example, I was interested in Matter/Readwise reader apps. Matter has a very limited freemium version, Readwise doesn't. I tried Matter, I liked it, gave them my money. Maybe Readwise is better, who knows, but I didn't even give it a chance since I wasn't able to check if it's going to be useful for me.

Maybe I'm a cheapskate so I don't want to "screw" myself with paying for a month of Readwise and checking what it offers or maybe the freemium model really works better.

The majority of users are not going to look at it from your perspective. The HN crowd is likely to be your highest intent audience, and your comment suggests they don't feel your product expresses enough of a value prop ahead of the registration wall. If you want this to grow organically, you're going to need to take a user-centered design perspective. It's not sufficient to say you yourself represent a user persona because you're biased by your desire to see a return on investment.

This part of your answer is suspicious:

> from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free

How does free registration benefit you? It's just more cost for you (time to deal with problems, money to store the login information, and additional load on your server). The only way your statement makes sense - and the only reason you'd care that much - is if you're planning to monetize the information.

Good luck, but it's too shady for me.

If you would like to have a successful startup, you really need to learn that you can't make it about your feelings.

Take a look at the B2C funnel here: https://www.alleywatch.com/2017/06/funnels-startups-primer/

That's not quite the right one for you, in that you have a freemium product where you could have a tier of unregistered users like Reddit does, but you get the idea.

The only users who are going to produce the sort of profits that you are hoping for with your months of work are going to go through a variety of stages. Unless you're running this like an influencer or an NPR pledge drive or something, none of those stages will involve them looking at it from your perspective. They're going to look at personal cost/benefit ratios for each step. Which, I'll remind you, is something you surely do for almost every purchase you make.

You can indulge your feelings of resentment here that "everyone else that commented about registering" aren't sufficiently respectful of your efforts. But given that you didn't show any respect for my effort in giving you free advice, you might be able to imagine how long you'll have to wait for people to come around on that. Or you could focus on meeting your users where they are and maximizing flow through your funnel.

It's up to you.

after enough times of trying to read something that came up on google or somewhere similar, being forced to create an account to read it, handing over my personal information, going back to try and read the article with an account, being told that i now have to download an app or pay a monthly subscription to read the article, then having to figure out how to delete the account that i didn't want to make, yeah, i'm not registering for shit anymore unless it's something i already use or have some kind of relationship with, or it's something special and i can tell it's going to provide more value to me than i provide to it.

the mainstream web is unfortunately a cesspit mostly made up of predatory sites that provide a barely useful service which is easy to live without, which only exist as a way to hoard peoples data or lock them into subscriptions in the hope that they'll forget they're paying it. if your site is different and you want people to actually care, you'll need to show them.

You know your work's worth, the users don't know yet. OP simply wants to know more about your product before willing to put in the time and effort for registering.

You’re the one who is trying to grab user’s attention, not the other way around.

It is not the user's fault that the user experience you built was bad.

You are getting really good answers to that position. Hope you notice them.

For mine: the registration wall is the same as thousands of others which I dismiss just the same - because if I'm asked to register this early it's because my registration is the product - and not the alleged value that is used to scam me in. And that's from someone who has worked on plenty of marketing efforts. The request for registration is not a signal of quality. The content offered before that registration would be - and there isn't much of that. Your site may be high value and totally deserving of registration but the bar for my registration is much higher than that.

> I was looking at your HN OPML file on GitHub [0] and noticed that the `xmlURL` and `htmlURL` attributes are the same for each entry; the `htmlURL` currently points to the feed rather than the site. Do you happen to have the original HTML URLs available? Would be nice to have both. (Secondarily, I'm guessing some of the `type` attributes should probably be "atom" rather than "rss"?)

I'm just using the file that someone else made, but I guess they didn't really make the distinction between those URLs in the code, though it shouldn't be too hard to modify: https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs/blob...

It is also true that there are both RSS, Atom and possibly other feed types mixed in there. What I did for my site was to crawl through all of those feeds and process them one by one: get all of the posts, do some ordering and grouping and output everything as RSS feeds in a consistent format.

For example, here's the top 100 user feeds for 2023: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/feed-top100.xml

Those have HTML links for each of the posts, though I'm afraid it's not exactly what you're asking for (the HTML URLs for the sites/feeds themselves), because I don't actually store that anywhere in my case, though the original feeds of the sites should have that information too.