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Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

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Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#41

Post by gxqoz »

gxqoz wrote: post #38

Very much agree that Pocket has gotten worse as I've used it over the years. It's so bad I've mostly moved to the much better Readwise ( https://readwise.io/ ). I'd be fully over if they actually supported a decent export (see below). It's sad because I'm probably in the 99th percentile of Pocket users in terms of usage and am happily paying them for Premium. I can't remember a significant improvement to Pocket in 2…

By the way, I'm curious if there are any Pocket communities anywhere. Readwise, for instance, has an active Discord. I haven't been able to find anything for Pocket, which is perhaps telling.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#42

Post by gloryjulio »

xeromal wrote: post #35
gloryjulio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. How is that different from bookmarks?

One is a queue. Another is a directory. Pocket articles are more conceptually one-and-done. I don't have time to read this now, so I put on the queue to read tomorrow morning. Not, I found this cool article I plan to reread many times over several years.

But can't u just use one of the bookmark folder as a queue?

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#43

Post by xeromal »

gloryjulio wrote: post #42
xeromal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One is a queue. Another is a directory. Pocket articles are more conceptually one-and-done. I don't have time to read this now, so I put on the queue to read tomorrow morning. Not, I found this cool article I plan to reread many times over several years.

But can't u just use one of the bookmark folder as a queue?

Totally

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#44

Post by [deleted] »

xeromal wrote: post #35
gloryjulio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. How is that different from bookmarks?

One is a queue. Another is a directory. Pocket articles are more conceptually one-and-done. I don't have time to read this now, so I put on the queue to read tomorrow morning. Not, I found this cool article I plan to reread many times over several years.

[deleted]

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#46

Post by FollowingTheDao »

simonw wrote: post #9
zagrebian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base What is that? Do I need it?

Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…

As the island of your knowledge grows larger, the shores of your ignorance grow even faster.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#47

Post by gxqoz »

balder1991 wrote: post #18
cocodill wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by saving things for later you mean that a site copy is stored somewhere, so you could find it again years later?

The paid version does this. It keeps the text even if the original article was removed.

It says it does but in practice this is a "we will do our best." I've run into this with now paywalled articles I can't get to my highlights on.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#48

Post by gxqoz »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #14

Re: tags > It takes me 45 seconds just to scroll from the top of the list to the end on the Android app. There's the problem with over classification. Having had the same problem, I've reduced the tags to around 10 which is also a bit too much. Sometimes I think 3 should be enough: low, medium and high priority.

I've long had issues on Android where lists that should effectively be infinite scrolls instead have a cache of maybe 20 items and they just repeat as you scroll.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#49

Post by dredmorbius »

Original author here.

My six-year-old rant still mostly applies (there've been some improvements to tag editing, and there's now in-article search for the Android app), but Pocket still massively underdelivers, increasingly as one relies on it more.

Most recently, I found I had to revert to a six-month-old version of the app in order to have both paginated navigation and to be able to open the "web view" in app ... which is where occasionally useful things such as tag editors live. Thread here: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/110680672833582286>

That said ... I've largely given up on Pocket delivering what I would like to see, and if I can steer discussion here, I'd really like to know what Android-specific and/or e-ink tablet tools people have for managing large article repositories on device.

I'm familiar with Zotero and Calibre, though both are desktop only, as well as Wallabag.

Mendelay is a no-op given Elsevere's ownership.

Anything I don't yet know of?

My long-standing dream is to create KFC, Krell Functional Context, a document management tool that would include webfs and docfs components, inspired somewhat by Plan9OS and its P9.

More on that in another "dreddit" rant: https://web.archive.org/web/20200918215041/https://old.reddi...>

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#50

Post by dredmorbius »

CyanBird wrote: post #4

Instead of pocket I just have a personal discord server where I organize all the neat links that I find online, I write a short intro or header and some keywords Far easier to search and more instantly readable than pocket is

One fallback I've considered in all seriousness is simply an email address to which I submit articles, and access through a full-featured email tool such as mutt.

The main challenge there is that it's difficult to reorganise information once it's captured, but search tools, the ability to reply to threads, and the automatic capture of basic metadata (sender, subject, date) are useful.

Mutt specifically has a highly robust threading algorithm. I'm not sure what happens if this becomes rentrant, that is, a given child node might have multiple parents from different threads. Mutt as given presumes that any given parent reference (indicated through headers) is either parent to, or a child of, other referenced emails. I'm picturing a web rather than a tree.

Email is also extensible with regard to headers, and with mutt it's trivial to write hooks and tools to work with those.

And once email is stored in a standard format (say, maildir), there are other tools such as mh which can operate on the corpus at the shell level.

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