Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 161 posts

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

#101

Post by montagg »

mcpackieh wrote: post #100

> The fact that I can't even say, not even approximately, how much material I've archived, is a profound signifier of the design failures and lack of consideration of use-cases. The folks at Pocket seem to have given absolutely no thought to how people might use their product, or benefit by self-directed use. (And it's not as if they've not heard: I've shared this complaint with them multiple times over the past two…

Projecting mine, just replace “engineers” with “designers” and “designers” with “product managers.”

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

#102

Post by laurent123456 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #51
nvr219 wrote: post #34

I use Joplin for this

What benefits does this offer, and what's your use case This Joplin? https://joplinapp.org/ > Please note that I'm specifically trying to capture online content --- full articles with references, URIs, etc. Not simply take notes.

Joplin has a web clipper, so it can be used as "read it later" tool

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

#103

Post by mcpackieh »

montagg wrote: post #101
mcpackieh wrote: post #100

> The fact that I can't even say, not even approximately, how much material I've archived, is a profound signifier of the design failures and lack of consideration of use-cases. The folks at Pocket seem to have given absolutely no thought to how people might use their product, or benefit by self-directed use. (And it's not as if they've not heard: I've shared this complaint with them multiple times over the past two…

Projecting mine, just replace “engineers” with “designers” and “designers” with “product managers.”

Heh yeah, I guess it might even go all the way to the top.

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

#104

Post by saltymimir »

tra3 wrote: post #77
yawnxyz wrote: post #74

I have a tiny service I put on Vercel that takes a bookmarklet I click on any page, get the URL, scrape the content I send to it through my browser, then save that to Airtable. I just realized I have like 12,000+ links I've saved (many of them from HN over the years), and Airtable is great for tagging, searching, etc!

Can you share the service? Or share how you scrape the content? There's https://readability-bot.vercel.app that is based on Firefox's reader mode, but it doesn't work very well.

Here's a bookmarklet I've been using to submit HTML page data to a webhook endpoint: https://gist.github.com/theAJFM/c15535c0b7a994b126f41e127466...

It extracts the page's title, the url, and even prompts you to give it some tags if you need some.

You still need to host your own webhook to save it, but that too should be straightforward. Just use firefox's readability.js to strip the bloat elements and save it in your database. You could save it into Airtable like what OP's been doing, or even save it as a file in your cloud storage.

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

#105

Post by ortusdux »

I'm a big fan of Waldenpond.press

One a month they algorithmically select articles from your Pocket feed, have them printed and bound into a paperback book, and then ship them to you.

It's $10-14/mo, depending on if you want 1, 2, or 4 hrs of content. You can tag items as 'wpmustprint' and they will be in your next edition.

They use a url shortener to preserve links, and images, diagrams, and formatting are excellent.

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

#106

Post by phendrenad2 »

A lot of things are like this. Like the Microsoft Edge developers apparently tested the case where you open dozens of tabs, but I often have open hundreds of tabs, all neatly stored in tab groups. Hey, I thought the unification of the tabs and bookmarks concept was cool! Until I tried it. It mostly works, until you try to rearrange the tabs, and then the scrollbar just jumps a random distance after a 500ms delay. Useless.

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

#107

Post by pointlessone »

I used to use Pocket. Like OP I had an extensive collection and experimented most of the described issues.

For me the solution was to migrate to DEVONthink. It supports WebArchives for saving whole pages but also a few other formats that can preserve only content. Its search is great. It also has an iOS app. It’s web clip browser extension can save the page as you see it (most of the time) so can save pages behind a paywall or login.

I don’t think there are apps for other platforms so probably not a solution for the OP.

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

#108

Post by sofia_bytes »

Using pocket on its own is definitely not the way to go. I've got a rather convoluted setup chaining together different apps.

Pocket is my default save - anything that looks remotely interesting gets sent there for me to browser at my leisure. If something I read looks like I'll want to revisit it, and I save the page to zotero, which is where most of the note-taking, tagging, and organisation takes place. Lastly I export my notes to LogSeq, which has zotero integration, so they can form part of my knowledge graph.

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

#109

Post by diarrhea »

dredmorbius wrote: post #49

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 ... w…

Zotero has an iOS app that is rather good.

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

#110

Post by bmulholland »

dredmorbius wrote: post #49

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 ... w…

Looks like no one has mentioned Readwise Reader (https://readwise.io/read), which I use and is a great experience.
Post reply on HN