Hi friends,
In March, Scour scoured 276,710 posts from 2,872 sources, you gave lots of good suggestions, and we've got some new features that I hope you'll like. We also have quite a few new users, so welcome to everyone who recently signed up!
Also, I gave the first presentation about Scour and wrote a blog post about it called Building a fast website with the MASH stack in Rust.
Likes and Dislikes
The big feature this month is likes and dislikes. Next to each post in your feed you'll find the classic thumbs up and thumbs down buttons, which do what you might expect.
You can find all of your likes here and you can use that to save posts for later. Likes are also used to help recommend topics you might be interested in.
(Personally, I've found that I sometimes want to "love" a post, particularly when Scour finds me a gem that I'm especially glad to have found and might not have seen otherwise. If you'd also be interested in that, please let me know by upvoting that idea here: Extra-like reaction (❤️ / 💎).)
Everything is a Feed!
To go along with the Likes feature, you can now see Popular Posts from across Scour and you can see what specific users have liked as well. And, naturally, all of those are feeds you can subscribe to — just visit the Popular Posts or a user's Likes page and click the Subscribe link.
Show Feeds for a Post
Under each post in your feed, you can now find a Show Feeds link that shows which feeds that post appeared in. Feeds you are subscribed to appear first (so you can unsubscribe if you want), followed by others that you could subscribe to if you want more content from that source. Thanks to Vahe Hovannisyan for the suggestion!
UX Improvements and Bug Fixes
- New sign-up flow that should be clearer and easier for new users. Thanks Vahe for talking through your experience as you were signing up 🫣!
- You can now login with your email, in addition to with your username, which should help in case you forget your username. Thanks Allen for the idea!
- Scour now deduplicates feed subscriptions so you won't see different versions of HN Newest appearing for the RSS and Atom feeds. Thanks Vahe for the feedback!
- The UX for editing interests works better on mobile. Thanks to Cairin Michie for the feedback!
- You can get an RSS version of your personalized feed with posts sourced from all feeds across Scour by appending
?all_feeds=trueto your RSS link. Thanks Matt for the suggestion! - I fixed two bugs where posts wouldn't show up for users who hadn't subscribed to specific feeds, both in the RSS version of the feed and on the Search page. Thanks Dizzar and Joe for reporting these bug!
- The UX for unsubscribing to feeds is clearer (an X button rather than a switch). Thanks Vahe for the feedback!
Thanks again to everyone who submitted ideas, feedback, and bug reports! They help me figure out what to work on, so please try out these new features and let me know what else you'd like to see next!
Happy scouring! - Evan
P.S. Three posts I was especially happy to find through Scour this month were:
- Embedding-Based Retrieval for Airbnb Search from the Airbnb Tech Blog (4 points on Hacker News)
- Foundation Model for Personalized Recommendation from the Netflix Tech Blog (only 2 points on Hacker News, including mine)
- And I'm happy that I found Thorsten Ball's Joy & Curiosity newsletter. It always contains some interesting links.